Two, Three, Many Dirty Wars: The Limits of Populism and Counterinsurgent Terror in 1960s and 1970s Rural Mexico

Scholars and activists tend to define the Mexican “Dirty War” as an asymmetrical conflict that pitted the unrestrained terror of the Mexican state committed against dissidents and rural/urban guerrillas.  The 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre usually marks the beginning the Dirty War, with its end posited during the mid-1970s.  Ironically, the Dirty War occurred during the presidential tenure of Luis Echeverría (1970-1976):  a self-described populist who massively increased social spending, articulated a revolutionary political discourse, posited himself as an international leader of non-aligned Third World nations, and provided asylum for South American radical exiles.  As such, how do we understand the coterminous existence of a Dirty War with populist state attempts to revitalize the Mexican Revolution?

This paper will address the question by broadening the historical scope usually associated with the Dirty War and redefining the “revolutionary populism” of the Echeverría regime as an exercise of modern counterinsurgency.  Using the rural state of Guerrero as a case study, my paper will chronicle a series of Dirty Wars that began in 1960 as citizens organized and mobilized to demand the redemption of their constitutional rights in the face of a ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that abandoned the progressive legacies of the 1910 Revolution.  When the PRI responded by unleashing a decade of massacres and everyday terror, vast sectors of Guerrero’s rural population experienced a prolonged process of popular radicalization that resulted in the formation of two separate peasant guerrilla insurgencies by 1968.  Echeverría’s populism subsequently arrived in Guerrero in counterinsurgent form—combining overwhelming state terror with uneven socio-economic reforms—attempting to sap popular support from the guerrilla organizations.  Echeverría’s Dirty War thus formed only one chapter in a longer historical process that pitted popular protest against PRI authoritarianism.