Eclipse of the Assassins

The murder of Manuel Buendía, a prominent Mexican columnist, dominated news coverage in the summer of 1984 and outraged many influential Mexico City journalists and intellectuals. Five years passed before the special prosecutor indicted José Antonio Zorrilla Pérez, former director of the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS), one of Mexico's intelligence agencies. However, many close observers of the case doubted that Buendía's assassination was the work of one midlevel public official. Among them were Russell H. Bartley and Sylvia Erickson Bartley, who embarked on a three-decade investigation into the journalist's death. The product of that research, Eclipse of the Assassins, suggests that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the DFS, and high-ranking Mexican politicians collaborated to murder Buendía.Bartley and Bartley offer the most comprehensive overview to date of the official investigation into Buendía's murder, which occupies roughly the first half of this 17-chapter book. In a style reminiscent of New Journalism, the authors figure as key protagonists whose findings propel the narrative—and the investigation—forward. They were both contributors to the Mexico City periodical unomásuno in the 1980s. As the official investigation unfolded, Russell Bartley wrote newspaper articles, corresponded with key informants, and recorded his private reactions in journal entries. The authors include some of these writings in the text, weaving their firsthand account into the summary of the investigation. The first half concludes with the verdict against Zorrilla Pérez, which many Mexican reporters argued obscured the involvement of higher-level officials, including Secretary of the Interior (1982–1988) Manuel Bartlett Díaz (p. 150).The second half of the book uncovers the authors' proposed motive for the Buendía assassination: his knowledge of Mexico's connection to the Iran-Contra affair. According to the authors, Buendía learned that the Mexican government was aiding the CIA in its proxy war against Nicaragua's leftist government. Specifically, the CIA used a Veracruz airfield to transport weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras, and at the same time the agency trained Contras on the ranch of Guadalajara Cartel kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero. Bartley and Bartley find confirmation for these claims in US court case files, which include statements by ex-CIA and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents asserting that such operations involved the knowing collaboration of Mexican politicians, the DFS, drug traffickers, and the CIA, among others. Using these testimonies, which come from the trial for the 1985 murder of undercover DEA agent Enrique Camarena, the authors hypothesize that the United States played a role in the Buendía and Camarena murders to prevent the so-called “Veracruz link” from surfacing (p. 195). The evidence for US involvement is compelling but, as Bartley and Bartley acknowledge, circumstantial (p. 394).By pulling on the proverbial thread of Buendía's murder, Bartley and Bartley unravel a larger story about the US-Mexican relationship, which they argue was defined by “a political culture of institutionalized collusion” (p. 403). The authors unearth new evidence of US intelligence assistance in Mexico's dirty war. According to their interviews with disaffected ex-CIA agent Lawrence Victor Harrison, CIA operatives helped identify leftist “dissidents” and reported directly to Mexican intelligence officers such as Miguel Nazar Haro, notorious for ordering tortures and disappearances (p. 314). While Bartley and Bartley emphasize that Mexican officials served US foreign policy objectives, they do not consider the domestic pressures that were arguably equally constitutive of Mexico's strategies. Thus, readers get little sense of the calculations that drove Mexican leaders to secretly support the Contras while publicly denouncing them. Nor do we see the conflicts that may have emerged internally from such Janus-faced policies.The authors also spend surprisingly little time examining Buendía himself, a complex figure who was immersed in the very power structures that he denounced. As a result, they tend to reify hagiographic accounts of the journalist, for example referring to him as “a fallen champion of the democratic ideals many of us still hold” (p. 13). The authors might have interrogated Buendía's notoriously close ties to the DFS, his primary informant base. More critical attention to Buendía's complex relationship with political power might reveal how Mexican journalists navigated the complex transborder intelligence networks that the authors so assiduously bring to light. Though Bartley and Bartley adeptly treat a rich body of evidence, at times even the informed reader may find it difficult to keep the various actors straight. A glossary of names is helpful, but a map detailing the connections that united them would have been a welcome visual aid. Finally, the inclusion of minutiae, such as the street address of an informant, occasionally slows the narrative's momentum and contributes to the book's already substantial length.Nonetheless, Eclipse of the Assassins offers important insights into Mexico's dirty war and the US-Mexican relationship during the late Cold War. Accessibly written, the book will appeal not only to historians of Mexico but also to a popular audience interested in the antecedents to the war on drugs. Indeed, Buendía's assassination foreshadowed the rampant violence that journalists now face in Mexico. Most, if not all, of these murders remain uninvestigated and unpunished. By examining Buendía's murder, Bartley and Bartley have uncovered a chilling transborder history of government collusion to silence criticism and subvert dissidents. One can only imagine what an investigation into Mexico's other murdered journalists would reveal

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