A stack of declassified documents in April revealed that the late Mexican president José López Portillo, who governed from 1976 to 1982, had been a CIA asset “for several years” before taking office.

The serendipitous discovery in the recently released documents, which pertained to an investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, contained a memo in which US intelligence official Bill Sturbitts disclosed this information to colleagues. According to the memo, he had been “an informant in a ‘joint US-Mexico wiretapping operation,’” and “secretly recorded calls on dozens of telephone lines in the Mexican capital.” However, the details of López Portillo’s collaboration with the CIA remain mostly a mystery.

While the circumstances of the revelation came as a surprise, the fact that the former president had ties to US intelligence agencies didn’t — at least not for those familiar with the history of US-Mexico relations during the Cold War. López Portillo is the fourth Mexican president to have confirmed CIA ties in a lineage that includes all three of his immediate predecessors — Adolfo López Mateos (1958–1964), Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964–1970), and Luis Echeverría (1970–76) — all of whom governed during the Cold War and belonged to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which held power uninterrupted for seventy-one years.

Over the past decade, several pathbreaking scholarly and nonacademic works in Spanish and English have used declassified government documents in both Mexican and US archives to clarify Mexico’s place in the Cold War. López Portillo’s exposure as a CIA operative punctures another hole in the long-established official narrative that downplays Mexico as a prominent regional actor and stakeholder in the global Cold War and its own dirty war against leftist dissenters.

Portillo’s Dirty War

Regarding López Portillo in particular, the power elite have generally downplayed his campaign against political dissent, when in fact the former president was a hawkish, iron-hearted Cold War warrior and a major human rights offender. Instead, the former president is mostly recognized for presiding over runaway inflation and ballooning foreign debt.

López Portillo belonged to a triumvirate of former presidents — all of whom also had connections to the CIA — who waged a “dirty war” against leftist political dissenters and armed revolutionary organizations between 1964 and 1982. Under these three presidents, the Mexican Armed Forces, the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (or DFS, the notorious secret police), and paramilitary groups committed egregious human rights violations. Agents and soldiers were left to their own devices to track down, torture, rape, and kidnap peasants and students, terrorize rural communities and wreak havoc on their crops, and perform extrajudicial executions and disappearances. Today many victims’ whereabouts remain unknown, though it’s likely that security forces dumped many bodies into mass graves or cast them into the Pacific Ocean from military aircraft in what were known as vuelos de la muerte (death flights).