Chapter7 Killing Machine How Mexican and US States of Exception Turned Revolutionaries and Migrants into Bare Life, 1969–1996

The Bones and the Excludable

In responding to a question from literary scholar Patricia Saunders about the limits of historical knowledge, representation, and archives in reconstructing the story of the Zong—an eighteenth-century British slave ship—poet NourbeSe Philip remarked, “I want the bones . . . ‘give me the bones’ I say to the silence that is so often what history presents to us . . . the bones actually ground you.”16 The bones, Philip seems to imply, offer the possibility of materially remembering individuals in history that populate archives more as spectres than as clearly identifiable historical agents, or, in the case of the Zong, solely as commodities, as measurable units of valuable goods and capital “lost” at sea, harnessed in the service of calculating insurance claims brought forth by the slave ship’s owners. If the archive is—in the entirety of the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, of American slave plantation regimes, of the persistent legacies of racial capitalism and the continuity of post-emancipation slavery configurations that went by other names across the Americas—a “death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body, an inventory of property,” to quote Saidiya Hartman, can the bones help in the writing of disappeared or undocumented histories?17 Can the bones help historians, in following Philip’s orders, “defend the dead?”18

In a different time, in a different place, Tita Radilla has answered in the affirmative. The daughter of Rosendo Radilla, a campesino community leader detained and disappeared by Mexican soldiers in the southern state of Guerrero in August 1974, Radilla and her family have waged a decades-long struggle seeking to locate the remains of her father.19 When interviewed in July 2008 during the forensic excavation of a former military base in Atoyac de Álvarez, Guerrero in a search for clandestine graves, she remarked: “they say the bones talk . . . the bones will tell us what happened to them. . . . I know my father was at the military base.”20 The bones talk; give us the bones. For Radilla and the hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans who lived through the disappearance of loved ones during the region’s “long Cold War,”21 finding the bones may lessen or disrupt the anguish and uncertainty that torture the survivors long after the enforced disappearance. The brutal suspension of time, the continuing terror enacted with the disappearance of a loved one, might end, and the mourning begin. Yet, as Radilla notes in the same interview, she wants more, perhaps something akin to Hartman’s desire: “I want to say more than this. I want to do more than recount the violence that deposited these traces in the archive.”22 Tita Radilla wants justice.23 And she wants to defend the hundreds, possibly thousands, of other disappeared Mexican dead.

“The entire border is a carpet of human remains,” César Ortigoza told journalist Aura Bogado in late 2018. Ortigoza, a migrant who entered the US in 1989, helped create a group called Los Armadillos that combs the most inaccessible parts of the US–Mexico borderlands searching for lost migrants: alive and dead. César is a committed volunteer who balances his full-time job as a maintenance man with his weekend searches, accompanied by more than a dozen other members of Los Armadillos. The organization has a prominent presence on Facebook, helping to connect with the concerned family members of migrants who haven’t received news of their loved ones. Family members like Eliseo Cárdenas Sánchez, who stumbled upon a photograph of his father’s identification card next to a small pile of bones on Facebook. His father had disappeared in 2008 after trying to cross the border. Most recently, Los Armadillos found remains in Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, including a tiny spinal column. “The bones,” Ortigoza said, “the bones were so small.”24

State of Exception in 1970s Guerrero

In 1960s and 1970s Guerrero, the long-ruling authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) unleashed a killing machine. A constellation of military, paramilitary, and police agents carried out enforced disappearances as a way to terrorize an insurgent rural population into submission and to pre-emptively defuse any additional rebellious leanings in a region rich with living legacies of peasant resistance and struggle. To “annihilate”—the term used by a 2006 report presented by the office of the Special Prosecutor for Social and Political Movements of the Past (Fiscalía Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Políticos del Pasado, or FEMOSPP)—two separate peasant guerrilla movements, soldiers, police, and death squads tortured, raped, jailed, and/or disappeared thousands of guerrerenses beginning in the late 1960s up to the early 1980s. These practices of state terror represented neither random outbursts of military violence in the context of a communally backed peasant revolution nor the work of a few rotten state “apples.” Rather, practices like enforced disappearance demonstrated a systemic application ordered by the PRI civilian leadership and implemented by state security forces to annihilate armed movements supported by dozens of peasant communities and urban barrios located mostly in coastal Guerrero.

That high level of popular support proved problematic for both PRI politicians and military officials, as it transformed entire communities into potential enemies of the Mexican state. The region thus became a counterinsurgent “zone of lawlessness” that combined state terrorism with socio-economic development and state institution building to drain popular support from the guerrillas.25 That state agents tortured and disappeared actual and potential guerrillas, terrorized actual and potential guerrilla-supporting communities, suggests that the Mexican state was interested in the eradication of both actualized and potential instances of revolution against its oligarchic rule. State terror aimed to contain and prevent revolutionary challenges. To disappear individuals also meant the disappearance of resistance, utopias, and communal networks; of insurgent pasts, presents and futures.

In Guerrero these insurgent memories and utopias consistently fuelled popular movements and resistance. Rosendo Radilla, in his corrido “El Guerrillero,” succinctly summarized how the 1960s unfolded in the southern state: “Señores, I am a campesino / from the state of Guerrero / they took away my rights and turned me into a guerrilla.”26 Throughout the decade, “civic insurgencies” challenged violent cacique (boss) political and economic domination at the local and regional levels.27 These sorts of movements demanded, in general, an actually existing pluralistic political democracy (in contrast to the one-party authoritarian rule of the PRI) and social and economic justice. In 1960–1961, a broad, multi-class civic movement succeeded in deposing a corrupt and violent governor using massive protest marches, constant petitioning of Congress, and the occupation of public spaces—not before soldiers massacred more than twenty protestors in December 1960. A subsequent electoral effort to organize an opposition political party and run candidates for municipal and state-level positions ended in accusations of PRI-led fraud and yet another massacre. The bloody suppression of an electoral movement that called for “the democratization of the political system of the ejido [communal landholding], municipality, district, state, and nation”28 led one of its leaders—schoolteacher and future guerrilla Genaro Vázquez—to the conclusion that “the electoral path does not solve [working-class and campesino] problems and the secret, universal vote is a bourgeois trick.”29

In the years that followed during the governorship of Raymundo Abarca Alarcón (1963–1969)—a former military doctor closely aligned with local caciques and key national political figures—agrarian conflicts and political protests intensified.30 The state legislature passed laws in 1965 that effectively criminalized any political activity and dissent that threatened to provoke “social dissolution.”31 State police or military forces attacked entire peasant communities for supporting opposition political parties or protecting local forestry resources from politically connected caciques,32 assassinated campesino leaders who organized rural unions independent of PRI control,33 imprisoned state university students who led a strike against the governor-aligned university rector,34 and massacred more than thirty-five copra farmers in Acapulco in August 1967 when they tried to seize their union headquarters from corrupt leaders.35 Months before, in the small coastal city of Atoyac de Álvarez, another massacre occurred when state police forces opened fire on a group of parents protesting an unpopular school principal. A communist rural schoolteacher named Lucio Cabañas barely survived that attack and fled to the mountains.36

After a decade of massacres, two socialist peasant guerrilla movements led by Vázquez and Cabañas emerged in the late 1960s: an armed revolutionary response to the PRI’s use of outright violence and coercion to smash popular movements that had organized and acted within the political and legal confines of the 1917 Constitution. Such practices of state terror helped transform students, rural schoolteachers, campesinas, campesinos, military deserters, veterans of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, and rural communities into revolutionary subjects seeking the radical transformation of Mexican society. Indeed, they sought a new revolution. They fought until late 1974, when soldiers defeated the last remnants of the Cabañas-led Party of the Poor (PDLP) (a number of smaller revolutionary organizations would keep fighting until the late 1970s; PDLP survivors would regroup and resurface during the 1980s). To accomplish this military victory, the civilian leadership of the PRI had responded by turning the region into a counterinsurgent “state of siege” where military power gradually became sovereign power able to determine who could live and who had to die.37

“Packages” and the Language of Bare Life in the Archives

In offering a longer periodization of the Mexican government’s use of state terror after 1940, historian Gladys McCormick identifies three distinct periods: 1946–1962, 1962–1968, and 1968–1982.38 While the last period proved most violent and prolonged—and when the systematic practice of enforced disappearance begins, according to human rights groups and the FEMOSPP report—the previous two provide evidence of PRI experimentation with different forms of repression and terror mainly in the countryside and provincial cities. Such forms included attempts to co-opt dissident leaders or the application of targeted violence—threats, surveillance, kidnapping, imprisonment, torture and/or assassination—as a way to disarticulate protest movements from the top down. The Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS, a political police force created in 1947 with the help of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation “as an instrument for controlling the population”) and the Mexican military played key roles in this process of violence calibration—roles that only expanded in the 1960s and 1970s.39

Beginning in late 1967, violence calibration became counterinsurgency in Guerrero, with public and private facets. In its public manifestation, PRI officials and military/political intelligence worked to depoliticize revolutionary armed struggle by publicly framing military and police operations as anti-crime “War on Drugs” campaigns against “bandits” and “cattle-rustlers.” In this public construction of a criminal subject, historian Camilo Vicente argues, the apolitical delinquent erased the dissident.40 From 1967 to 1970, military doctors and even barbers embedded within small military units travelled into the highlands to wage “social labour” campaigns that included free medical care and vaccinations, intending to win hearts and minds. The general who recommended these campaigns argued that the “vaccine of the [1910] Mexican Revolution best inoculates against the viruses of Communism and Clergy spread by bad Mexicans who sought to infect the consciousness of the poor masses.”41 Five hundred soldiers “dressed as doctors,” as the PDLP mocked them in a May 1969 communique, collected information on the whereabouts of the guerrillas while providing the sort of medical care that campesinos in the region had long demanded.42

As the armed actions of the guerrillas gradually assumed offensive dimensions at the end of 1969—mostly in the form of police ambushes, kidnappings of hated local caciques, and bank “expropriations”—the military responded by inaugurating the practice of enforced disappearance. Soldiers detained and disappeared schoolteacher Epifanio Avilés Rojas in May 1969, who was accused of participating in a guerrilla bank “expropriation” in Mexico City.43 Months later in October, another modality of violence emerged, according to a government spy: soldiers from the 48th Infantry Battalion executed two campesinos in extrajudicial fashion “after their detainment in the town of Huehuetán.”44 In subsequent military campaigns, Operation Friendship (1970) and Operation Spider Web (1971), soldiers used torture, rape, and disappearances as a way to gather intelligence and discipline “restive” communities—all publicly presented as counter-narcotics operations.45

In the years that led to the final military defeat of the PDLP in December 1974, the PRI maintained and expanded the public, criminalizing dimension of counterinsurgency.46 “Social labour” turned into sustained economic development and state investment during the presidency of Luis Echeverría (1970–1976)—a subtle admission that something was indeed rotten in the southern state.47 As a local politician bravely told the president, “for the federal government to support and help the state of Guerrero, we need many Lucios.”48 At the same time, the private terroristic aspect of counterinsurgency also expanded in response to guerrilla military actions that civilian and military officials interpreted as a growing insurgent threat. Thousands of soldiers poured into the state.49 Nominally, the target remained the same: rural and urban communities located in coastal and central Guerrero, particularly in the municipality of Atoyac de Álvarez.

A key turning point occurred in the summer of 1972 when PDLP guerrillas ambushed two military convoys. Fully recognizing the group as a popularly supported guerrilla force in secret military and DFS documents, officers developed operations that aimed to militarily annihilate the guerrillas by isolating them from their peasant base of support.50 To achieve that separation, the military (with state police serving as auxiliaries) used tactics that “tortured entire highland communities”: the forced re-concentration of rural hamlets in municipal capitals, arrest and imprisonment of entire barrios, the violent persecution of entire families related to Cabañas and captured guerrillas, public torture and executions of individuals in front of their communities, controlling and restricting the availability of foods and medicines in municipalities believed to support the guerrillas, the pillaging of campesino homes and individuals, forcing campesinos to work as snitches (madrinas) against their own communities and families, and the broader establishment of a regional state of siege that prevented farmers from working on their coffee and maize plots.51 Yet, despite such tactics, popular support for the guerrillas continued to grow. By November 1973, in the midst of Operation Firefly, a new term first appeared in military correspondence, one whose usage would become both ubiquitous and systematic for the next year: the package.52

Dated November 22, 1973, encrypted message #17136 describes a series of planned military manoeuvres based “on information provided by packages.”53 Rather than list the names of captured individuals—in this case mostly likely Raúl Morales Loeza (disappeared) and Pedro Adame Ramírez (detained and tortured)—high-ranking military officers reporting to superiors in Mexico City from late 1973 to early 1975 consistently used “package” to denote captured individuals believed to possess intelligence on the guerrillas. The “revision of packages” likely meant interrogation and torture;54 “injured packages” referred to hurt individuals detained by soldiers;55 individuals coerced into identifying guerrilla supporters at military checkpoints became “identifier packages;”56 “archived packages” were individuals imprisoned, put away somewhere within a labyrinthine network of clandestine jails and torture centres.57 By August 1974, officials expanded the term to describe suspected individuals not yet in military custody: “based on information provided by packages, we are organizing an ambush to intercept packages attempting to flee the region.”58 Anyone and everyone living in coastal Guerrero could be and become a “package.” More than anything, it was this terrorizing of an entire civilian population that enabled military and police forces to identify, encircle, isolate, persecute and annihilate the PDLP by the end of 1974. In this biopolitical calculation, some had to die for the majority to live.

What did these “packages” suffer? After detainment, torture: severe beatings, the rape and sexual assault of women, electrocution, hanging men by their testicles, the insertion of water hoses in the anus that filled victims with water prior to physical assault. Torturers also used psychological methods, threating to disappear the victims by throwing them into the Pacific Ocean or in one of Guerrero’s many cave complexes.59 Some testimonies recalled how torturers used children to force their parents to talk by placing guns to their heads.60 This systematic violence occurred in secret prisons located on military bases in Guerrero or Mexico City and in police “safe houses” in Acapulco. Sometimes the torture occurred on basketball courts in highland communities, in front of the entire population.61 Charred bodies that began to appear on the outskirts of Acapulco in early 1974 demonstrated another sadistic form of public torture: forcing detainees to drink gasoline before setting them on fire.62 After imprisonment and torture, some victims managed to survive, released by their military or police captors and bearing profound physical and psychological marks that would afflict them for the rest of their lives. Estela Arroyo “said her father ‘came out of jail, but he came out dead.’”63 Others never came out.

How many did soldiers and police disappear? A final FEMOSPP investigation and report, amid much controversy, lists nearly 800 from the mid-1960s to 1982, with more than 600 cases of enforced disappearance occurring in Guerrero. The Association of Relatives of the Disappeared and Victims of Human Rights Violations (AFADEM), a courageous group co-led by Tita Radilla that traces its origins to the mid-1970s and has collected many testimonies, presents a higher number at 1,300 nationally. Gustavo Tarín, a police enforcer and torturer during the 1970s based in Guerrero, testified in 2002 against his former military commander and estimated fifteen hundred disappearances in the southern state alone.64 These estimates—based on an incomplete, curated “archive of terror” hesitantly provided by a hostile state and the brave testimonies of victims and survivors willing to risk death to become part of the “archives of pain”—are most likely conservative. How many cases have not been reported?65 How many of the victims were buried in unmarked, clandestine graves, like the bodies of two PDLP guerrillas discovered in 2014 by investigators working for the Guerrero Truth Commission (Comisión de la Verdad del Estado de Guerrero, or COMVERDAD)?66 How many of the disappeared were thrown into the Pacific Ocean from airplanes and helicopters during an estimated thirty “death flights?” Where are the “black lists” that recorded the names of the disappeared, according to survivors, Tarín, and the Air Force officers who piloted the “death flights”—death flights that actually increased in number after the defeat of the guerrillas in 1974 and continued until the late 1970s?67 A photograph of Marcelo Juárez Serafín, a fifteen-year-old guerrilla captured by soldiers after the killing of Cabañas on December 2, 1974, represents perhaps the only known photographic evidence of a victim of enforced disappearance in Guerrero.68 We don’t have the bones, “for their graveyard is the ocean.”69

In the absence of bones, we are left with military documents that describe the detainment and “revision” of “packages”—like the documents dated August 25, 1974 that refer to the capture of Rosendo Radilla and six other “packages” at different military checkpoints.70 We are left with the testimonies of people like Rosendo’s son, Rosendo Radilla Martínez, who as a young child watched soldiers violently take his father off the bus they were riding. He remembers his father asking the soldiers why they were taking him. And he remembers their response: for writing corridos (ballads) about the guerrillas. “That’s a crime?” his father retorted. “No, but you’re fucked anyway.”71

By Way of Conclusion: Bare Life in a Desert of Bones

More than 7,000 migrants have disappeared trying to cross the most dangerous parts of the US–Mexico border since the late 1990s. Sometimes their bodies are recovered: 2,771 in southern Arizona alone between 2000 and 2014. And these are conservative estimates. Scholars like Jason de León, Roxanne Doty, Reece Jones, and Corey Johnson, who use Agamben’s work to help understand this level of border death and suffering in “spaces of exception,” point to the federal policy of “Prevention through Deterrence” (PTD).72 Implemented in the mid-1990s after federal officials deemed successful local Immigration and Naturalization Service efforts in deterring “unauthorized border crossings” in major urban centres (the building of walls in transnational cities like El Paso and San Diego), PTD would strategically use “the natural environment . . . as the foundation for border policy.” Forcing migrants to attempt their crossings away from major urban centres, through dangerous and inhospitable natural environments such as the Sonoran Desert, became official policy; indeed, policy makers weaponized extreme environments as a way to deter migrants—or to render them invisible—knowing the dangerous and potential deadly consequences. As de León argues, “one way for the government to measure the efficacy of PTD is via a migrant body count.”73 Culpability for migrant deaths was displaced onto the natural environment while those same deaths allegedly served as a deterrence to potential migrants—the expression of bare life in the desert, in a space of exception, in a zone of lawlessness. Indeed, the Border Patrol still uses the death of migrants attempting to cross the border as an indicator of the success of their policies.74 Within this necropolitical matrix, the bodies of migrants and asylum seekers who survive the desert are caged in private detention prisons, generating value and profits for both the companies and their shareholders.75

How many more died or disappeared in the decades prior to PTD? And why? During the late 1970s, a journalist from the Arizona Daily Star talked to migrants captured by the Border Patrol while trying to cross into Arizona. “The trail up here is littered with the bones of Mexicans,” they told him.76 During the mid-1970s, white vigilantes terrorized migrants trying to cross through the California–Mexico border, shooting them from the flatbeds of their trucks; “dozens of bodies were found in shallow graves” in the San Diego area.77 By the late 1970s, migrants encountered snipers and the KKK’s “Border Watch” patrols—led by a 27-year-old David Duke—who wore shirts that read “White Power.” One Border Patrol agent told a reporter that his colleagues gave the KKK the “red carpet” treatment when they arrived in the San Ysidro borderlands, even encouraging them to capture migrants. Historian Greg Grandin recounts that Border Patrol agents reported “finding pitfall traps, modelled on the punji traps Vietnamese would set for US soldiers, in the swampy Tijuana estuary, an area of the border vigilantes started calling Little Nam.”78 If the California–Mexico wall did not keep out migrants—parts of which were made from helicopter landing pads used previously in Vietnam—the pitfall traps in “Little Nam” stood guard.

Decades later, a new generation of paramilitary border vigilantes shaped by another cycle of US imperial adventures would bring their faraway wars to the border and migrants. In the mid-2000s, Minutemen reported seeing “Middle Eastern guys with beards” and finding “Arabic–English dictionaries in the sand.” One of these vigilantes drew a parallel with another instance of settler colonialism—one that has exported border wall, policing and counterinsurgency technologies to the US and Mexico for decades—when he remarked, “this is our Gaza.”79

The type of violence recounted in this chapter suggests that states of exception, far from constituting temporary anomalies within state projects of sovereignty that claim the mantle of democracy, represent the rule. “Conflict and the state of exception,” Gareth Williams argues for Mexico, “reveal how society functions.”80 I extend that argument to the US today. In particular, the practice of enforced disappearance reveals the core of sovereign power. The body of the disappeared, as political theorist Banu Bargu argues, “becomes the surface upon which sovereignty imprints its mark—a mark written with an ink that erases itself as well as the surface out of existence.”81 How then can we interrupt and abolish the material and cultural processes that render certain communities and individuals as “Being-outside, and yet belonging?”82 I think about my role in this, as the son of undocumented Mexican migrants who crossed the border multiple times from the 1970s to the early 1990s, braving terrible suffering and violence. What is my/our responsibility in writing these histories? In her work on the afterlives and ongoing impact of slavery on Black diasporic communities, literary scholar Christina Sharpe provocatively asks, “what does it mean to defend the dead?”83

Those who search for the bones and the disappeared lead the way. “The dead will bring us along,” said María de la Luz López Castruita, mother of Irma Claribel, disappeared in 2008 in the northern Mexican city of Torreón.84 These peace workers courageously invite us to reimagine and work toward the actualization of justice and peace in the face of hostile state power. For surviving relatives of disappeared persons in Mexico since the 1970s, defending the dead means recovering both the physical remains of their loved ones and their memory. It means organizing hunger strikes, searching for clandestine graves in dangerous locations, pressuring recalcitrant and hostile political/police authorities and risking their lives.85 It means organizing and pressuring state authorities to end the legal and political impunity enjoyed by those who staff and run the killing machines. The courageous testimony and praxis of the surviving victims of these killing machines go beyond Agamben and his political pessimism by asserting that the possibility of justice depends on the active, dangerous recovery of disappeared persons and their historical memory. At the very least, finding a loved one disrupts the prolonged, punishing uncertainty that afflicts the surviving long after the act of disappearance. As Tita Radilla told me, “We want the truth no matter how painful.”86

Justice, in other words, requires defending the dead. And without justice, as Black Lives Matter protestors most recently affirmed in radical fashion throughout dozens of US cities in 2020, there can be no peace. Against the “sovereign politics of erasure” that work to ensure that these histories remain silenced and the disappeared remain disappeared, we need the memories, we need the bones, we need the names, we need the clandestine graves, we need to defend the dead.87 The very condition of possibility for peace depends on remembering, on memory. Facing two “Visceraless” states for “which bodies are not a matter of care but a matter of extraction,” as Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza argues, we write to remember and to testify.88 We cannot and will not forget.

Notes

I deeply appreciate the incisive, generous suggestions and feedback provided by Yasmin Saikia, Chad Haines, and the rest of the participants at the “Peace with the Other” conference. Thank you also to my colleague Tracy Fessenden for her generous commentary on an earlier version of this chapter.

1. 1 Laura Castellanos, México armado, 1943–1981 (Mexico City: Era, 2007); Felipe Fierro Santiago, El último disparo: versiones de la guerrilla de los setentas (Atoyac de Álvarez, Guerrero: Colección ATL, 2006); Andrés Becerril, “Isabel Ayala, la niña que decidió seguir a Cabañas,” Excélsior, July 6, 2011; Margena de la O, “Víctimas de la Guerra Sucia que el Estado convierte en victimarios,” La Silla Rota, February 10, 2019; and conversations with historian Adela Cedillo (University of Houston).

2. 2 See, among others, Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan: Immediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political (New York: Telos, 2007); Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 236–52; Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (New York: Picador, 2007); Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (New York: Picador, 2003); and Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. My interpretation is also heavily influenced by Gareth Williams’s original, critical analysis of twentieth-century Mexican history and state formation as a permanent “state of exception.” See Gareth Williams, The Mexican Exception: Sovereignty, Police and Democracy (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011). Historian Claudia E. G. Rangel Lozano puts forward a similar convincing argument, using Agamben’s theories on sovereignty. See Claudia E. G. Rangel Lozano, “La voz de los sobrevivientes: las carceles clandestinas en México, una radiografía (1969–1979),” in México en los setenta: ¿Guerra sucia o terrorismo de Estado? Hacia una política de la memoria, edited by Claudia E. G. Rangel Lozano and Evangelina Sánchez Serrano (Guerrero: Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero, 2015), 51–77.

3. 3 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

4. 4 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 4.

5. 5 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 123, 176.

6. 6 Agamben, State of Exception, 86. For a convincing counter to Agamben’s analysis of Guantánamo, see Derek Gregory, “Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the State of Exception,” Geografiska Annaler/Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography 88, no. 4 (2006): 405–27.

7. 7 Carlos Montemayor, La guerrilla recurrente (Mexico City: Random House Mondadori, 2007), 68. In April 2001, a human rights organization (AFADEM) reported the existence of a clandestine grave behind a house in coastal Guerrero that the Mexican military occupied from 1972 to 1974. Two weeks later, without providing notice, agents from the federal Attorney General’s office excavated the grave and removed at least twenty-six skeletal remains.

8. 8 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 13.

9. 9 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 14. “Zone of protection” refers to the imprisonment of 300,000 Filipino civilians in camps during the US war of colonial conquest in the Philippines after the 1898 Spanish-American War—a forerunner of the “strategic hamlet.” See Andrea Pitzer, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps (New York: Little, Brown, 2017).

10. 10 Pitzer, One Long Night, 23; and Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 241.

11. 11 In using the term “killing machine,” I do not mean to suggest totalizing, exclusively murderous states of exception—both 1970s Guerrero and 1990s Arizona–Mexico included certain biopolitical calculations. In Guerrero, this calculation proved more explicit: to riff off Michel Foucault, in order for most to live, some had to die. In the desert borderlands, the biopolitical motivations of US capital (the need for cheap, exploitable, expendable labour) clashes with the necropolitical police actions that include the destruction of water supplies left by humanitarian organizations for migrants. For a history of this clash, see Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Migra! A History of the US Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

12. 12 Charles Bowden, Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future (New York: Aperture, 1998).

13. 13 “Number of Disappeared in Mexico Rise to over 73,000,” Associated Press, July 13, 2020; Ed Pilkington, “‘These Are His People’: Inside the Elite Border Patrol Unit Trump Sent to Portland,” The Guardian, July 27, 2020.

14. 14 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 24.

15. 15 Jason de León, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 3, 84.

16. 16 Patricia Saunders, “Defending the Dead, Confronting the Archive: A Conversation with M. NourbeSe Philip,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 68–69. The Zong is specifically remembered for the actions of its captain in November 1781 and the ensuing legal case. After navigational mistakes and the lack of potable drinking water sickened some of the slaves, the captain drowned nearly 150 slaves to ensure that the ship owners could claim lost “cargo” and collect insurance money.

17. 17 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1–14, at 2.

18. 18 M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 25.

19. 19 Radilla, interview with the author, May 16, 2007.

20. 20 Gerardo Torres, “Mexico Looks for ‘Dirty War’ Graves on Army Base,” Reuters, July 8, 2008.

21. 21 Greg Grandin, “Living in Revolutionary Time: Coming to Terms with the Violence of Latin America’s Long Cold War,” in A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence During Latin America’s Long Cold War, edited by Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–44.

22. 22 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 2.

23. 23 Torres, “Mexico Looks for ‘Dirty War’ Graves;” Gloria Leticia Díaz, “Tita y la guerra sucia,” Proceso, December 14, 2011.

24. 24 Aura Bogado, “Lost on the Border: A Decade Later, a Man Finds His Father’s Remains on Facebook,” Reveal News (August 23, 2018).

25. 25 Williams, The Mexican Exception, 176–77.

26. 26 Andrea Radilla Martínez, Voces Acalladas (Vidas truncadas): perfil biografíco de Rosendo Radilla Pachecho (Mexico City: Nueva Visión, 2007).

27. 27 See, in this regard, Tanalís Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of Pax Priísta, 1940–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Robert Alegre, Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico: Gender, Class, and Memory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014); Jaime Pensado, Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture During the Long 1960s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); Enrique Condés Lara, Represión y rebelión en México (1959–1985), 2 vols. (Mexico City: BUAP/Miguel Angel Porrúa, 2007); Wil Pansters, Politics and Power in Puebla: The Political History of a Mexican State, 1937–1987 (Amsterdam: Cedla Edita, 1995); and Alexander Aviña, Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

28. 28 Archivo General de la Nación [hereafter AGN], Direccíon Federal de Seguridad [hereafter DFS] 100-10-16-2-62, file 1, 9.

29. 29 Francisco Gómezjara, “El proceso político de Jenaro Vázquez Rojas hacia la guerrilla campesina,” Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales 88 (April–June 1977): 111–14.

30. 30 For a more detailed recap of this period, see Aviña, Specters of Revolution, 92–105.

31. 31 Rangel Lozano, “La voz de los sobrevivientes,” 58–59.

32. 32 AGN, Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional [hereafter SDN], 74/299/388–390; AGN, SDN, 81/244/29, 168; AGN, DFS 63-3-67, file 25, 169.

33. 33 AGN, DFS 11-136-66, file 14, 70–71, 103–105; AGN, Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales [hereafter DGIPS], 500/5/53–55.

34. 34 AGN, DFS 100-10-1-66, file 22, 170–171, 218–219; 226–228; 247–248; AGN, DGIPS, 500/5/166–170.

35. 35 AGN, DGIPS, 1488A/3/57–67, 98–100.

36. 36 AGN, DFS 100-10-1-67, file 24, 99–101.

37. 37 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 11, 30.

38. 38 Gladys McCormick, “The Last Door: Political Prisoners and the Use of Torture in Mexico’s Dirty War,” The Americas 74, no. 1 (2017): 59–61. I would argue for the singular importance of 1956–1961, years that witnessed intense worker, student, teacher and campesino mobilizations throughout the country. Internal military publications cite the “outbreak of subversion” in those years that necessitated better military training, improved armament and transportation, and counterinsurgency plans. Jorge Luis Sierra Guzmán, “Armed Forces and Counterinsurgency: Origins of the Dirty War (1965–1982),” in Challenging Authoritarianism in Mexico: Revolutionary Struggles and the Dirty War, 1964–1982, edited by Adela Cedillo and Fernando Calderón (New York: Routledge, 2012), 184–85.

39. 39 Aaron Navarro, Political Intelligence and the Creation of Modern Mexico, 1938–1954 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010), 183–85. See also Sergio Aguayo, La charola: Una historia sobre los servicios de inteligencia en México (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2001).

40. 40 Camilo Vicente, “Verdad de Estado y discursos de la contrainsurgencia,” Con-temporánea: Toda la historia del presente 4, no. 8 (July–December 2017). See also Camilo Vicente, Tiempo suspendido: una historia de la desaparición forzada en México, 1940–1980 (Mexico City: Bonilla Artigas, 2019).

41. 41 AGN, DGIPS 549/3/3–4.

42. 42 AGN, DGIPS 549/3.

43. 43 AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-70, file 2, 315. Police detained another guerrilla involved in the bank operation, Juan Galarza Antúnez, and tortured him to death.

44. 44 AGN, DGIPS 550/1.

45. 45 AGN, SDN 77/232/96; SDN 93/278/147–148, 154, 181–182; SDN 93/279/26–31, 40–50. For counter-narcotics explanations given to the press, see SDN 91/276/86.

46. 46 An infamous example of this public discursive counterinsurgency that sought political de-legitimization is President Echeverría’s fourth address to the nation in 1974, during which he referred to urban guerrillas as “terrorists,” as “slow learners,” and as the “products of broken homes” with an inclination “for drug use,” a “propensity for sexual promiscuity,” and a “high degree of feminine and masculine homosexuality.” Cámara de Diputados, Centro de Documentacíon, Información y Análisis, Informes presidenciales: Luis Echeverría ÁÁ (Mexico City: Congreso de la Unión, 2006), http://www.diputados.gob.mx/sedia/sia/re/RE-ISS-09-06-14.pdf, 179–81.

47. 47 AGN, SDN 93/279/26–31; SDN 98/292/19–21.

48. 48 Silvestre Hernández Fierro, interviewed in Fierro Santiago, El último disparo, 118–19.

49. 49 Estimates range from 5,000 to 25,000 troops. The largest figure would have constituted nearly a third of the entire Mexican army in the 1970s. Estimates for participating state police range in the thousands. Jorge Luis Sierra Guzmán, El enemigo interno: Contrainsurgencia y fuerzas armadas en México (Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana/Plaza y Valdés, 2003), 59–65.

50. 50 AGN, SDN 98/292/19–21.

51. 51 AGN DFS 100-10-16-4, file 5, 96–106; 140, 187–188; 313–318; DFS 100-10-16-4, file 6, 188–89; AGN, SDN 376/1253/49–53; SDN 80/238/31; SDN 36/100/21; Fiscalía Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Políticos del Pasado [FEMOSPP], Informe Histórico a la Sociedad Mexicana (Mexico City: FEMOSPP/Procuraduría General de la Nación, 2006), 592–655.

52. 52 AGN, SDN 97/288/5, 43. On the basis of my research in the SDN collection and on the FEMOSPP report, the first use of the term “package” appeared on November 22, 1973. Journalist and historian Juan Veledíaz located an earlier use of the term, however, in a military document dated May 2, 1971, during Operation Spider Web. Veledíaz, “Los militares de la ‘guerra sucia,’” Proceso, November 7 (pt. 1) and 8 (pt. 2), 2003 (an earlier installment of this report appeared in Proceso on September 1, 2002).

53. 53 AGN, SDN 97/288/43.

54. 54 AGN, SDN 100/299/503, 519, 639, 672–73, 680.

55. 55 AGN, SDN 100/299/503.

56. 56 FEMOSPP, Informe Histórico, 598.

57. 57 AGN, SDN 99/294/185–186, 208; 99/295/12.

58. 58 Military report, September 6, 1974, quoted in FEMOSPP, Informe Histórico, 597–98.

59. 59 Testimony of Maximiliano Nava Martínez, FEMOSPP, Informe Histórico, 621; Simón Hipólito, Guerrero, amnistía y represión (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1982), 139.

60. 60 FEMOSPP, Informe Histórico, 613–14.

61. 61 As occurred in the communities of El Quemado, Rio Santiago, Los Piloncillos, San Andrés de la Cruz, and Corrales de Rio Chiquito. See Aviña, “A War Against Poor People: Dirty Wars and Drug Wars in 1970s Mexico,” in México Beyond 1968: Revolutionaries, Radicals and Repression During the Global Sixties and Subversive Seventies, edited by Jaime Pensado and Enrique Ochoa (University of Arizona Press, 2018), 142–45.

62. 62 AGN, DGIPS 1067/3/18–19; FEMOSPP, Informe Histórico, 615.

63. 63 James F. Smith, “One Family Paid Dearly in ‘Dirty War,’” Los Angeles Times, December 11, 2001.

64. 64 Jorge Alejandro Medellín, “Muere militar implicado en la guerra sucia,” El Universal, July 8, 2005.

65. 65 I borrow the terms “archives of terror” and “archives of pain” from historian Kirsten Weld, in Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

66. 66 Comisión de la Verdad del Estado de Guerrero, Informe Final de Actividades (Chilpancingo, Guerrero: COMVERDAD, 2014), 52.

67. 67 FEMOSPP, Informe Histórico, 629, 649–50; Gloria Leticia Díaz, “La ‘foto del recuerdo’ y al mar,” Proceso, December 1, 2002.

68. 68 Comisión de la Verdad del Estado de Guerrero, 60; AGN, SDN 98/293/153. Radiogram #15596, sent from military zone commander General Eliseo Jimenez Ruiz to Secretary of National Defense General Hermenegildo Cuenca Díaz, reported the deaths of Cabañas and three guerrillas—including “Roberto,” the alias used by Juárez Serafín. This document contradicts the photograph of the young guerrilla, taken after the battle that he survived.

69. 69 Saunders, “Defending the Dead, Confronting the Archive,” 69.

70. 70 FEMOSPP, Informe Histórico, 606.

71. 71 Tita Radilla, interview with the author, Atoyac de Álvarez, May 16, 2007; “Publica la Secretaría de Gobernación la semblanza de Rosendo Radilla, el campesino desaparecido por el Ejército en 1974,” El Sur de Acapulco, February 24, 2013.

72. 72 de León, The Land of Open Graves; Roxanne Doty, “Bare Life: Border-Crossing Deaths and Spaces of Moral Alibis,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 4 (2011): 599–612; and Corey Johnson and Reece Jones, eds., Placing the Border in Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2016).

73. 73 de León, The Land of Open Graves, 30–37. This use of migrant deaths as an indicator of policy success was most recently revealed by documentary filmmakers who embedded with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Caitlin Dickerson, “A Rare Look Inside Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Draws Legal Threats,” New York Times, July 23, 2020.

74. 74 Caitlin Dickerson, “A Rare Look Inside Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Draws Legal Threats,” New York Times, July 23, 2020.

75. 75 Judith Perera Dingatantrige, “From Exclusion to State Violence: The Transformation of Noncitizen Detention in the United States and Its Implications in Arizona, 1891–present,” PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2018.

76. 76 Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), Arizona Project Records, 1976–1977 (C3885), folder 309, 51 (October 15, 1976), State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia, MO. Many thanks to historians Benjamin T. Smith and Jake Newbury for providing me with documents from this collection.

77. 77 Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019), 223.

78. 78 Grandin, The End of the Myth, 224.

79. 79 Grandin, The End of the Myth, 266; Todd Miller and Gabriel Schivone, “The Israel–Mexico Border,” NACLA 27 January 2014; and Jimmy Johnson and Linda Quiquivix, “Israel–Mexico: Military Cooperation to Crush Zapatistas Liberation Movement,” Electronic Intifada, May 21, 2013.

80. 80 Williams, The Mexican Exception, 4.

81. 81 Banu Bargu, “Sovereignty as Erasure: Rethinking Enforced Disappearances,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 23, no. 1 (2014): 35–75, at 63.

82. 82 Agamben, State of Exception, 35.

83. 83 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 10.

84. 84 Dawn Paley, Guerra neoliberal: desaparición y busqueda en el norte de México (Mexico City: Libertad bajo palabra, 2020), 170.

85. 85 For a history of these efforts in Mexico, see Evangelina Sánchez Serrano, “AFADEM: Desaparecidos: Presentación,” in Desaparición forzada y terrorismo de Estado en México: memorias de la repression de Atoyac, Guerrero durante la década de los setenta, edited by Andrea Radilla Martínez and Claudia E. G. Rangel Lozano (Mexico City/Chilpancingo, Guerrero: Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero/Plaza y Valdés, 2012), 177–210; and, Vicente, Tiempo suspendido.

86. 86 Radilla, interview with the author, May 16, 2007. Also quoted in Aviña, Specters of Revolution, 180.

87. 87 Bargu, “Sovereignty as Erasure,” 63.

88. 88 Cristina Rivera Garza, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2020), 168.