Surviving Mexico's Dirty War

Since the demise of its “perfect dictatorship,” Mexico has struggled to come to grips with the dark underside of the “Mexican miracle,” especially the brutal government suppression of dissident movements during the 1960s and 1970s. While much has been written about the Tlatelolco massacre, less is known of the government’s dirty war against leftist guerrilla movements. One has only to browse the endless list of desaparecidos attached to the draft report of the Fiscalía Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Políticos del Pasado leaked to the press in 2006 to realize the scope and intensity of repression during the Cold War. Thus, the translation of Alberto Ulloa Bornemann’s highly personal testimony, originally published in Mexico as Sendero de tinieblas (2004), is quite timely.Reminiscent of Jacobo Timerman’s searing account of his detention by the Argentine military (Preso sin nombre, celda sin número, 1981), Ulloa’s narrative chronicles in labyrinthine fashion the experiences that led to his arrest and imprisonment as a subversive. A young, restless, and naive civil servant of upper-middle-class background seduced by the siren song of Fidel and “el Che,” Ulloa leaves his family in 1967 to offer his services to the Cuban Revolution, only to be humiliated and expelled. Once back in Mexico, he joins “the Organization,” a clandestine movement consisting of remnants of the Ho Chi Minh peasant section of the Liga Comunista Espartaco. He works closely with the legendary guerrilla Lucio Cabañas, leader of the armed struggle of the Partido de los Pobres in the mountains of Guerrero. Arrested in 1974, Ulloa disappears into the bowels of Mexico’s security apparatus and suffers months of deprivation and torture in the notorious Campo Militar Número Uno. Only thanks to the influence of friends and relatives (his father makes a direct appeal to the secretary of the interior, Jesús Reyes Heroles) does he escape death. Ulloa is formally indicted on charges of criminal association and robbery and spends four years in the dismal and extremely violent “Black Palace” of Lecumberri, the Reclusorio Oriente, and the Santa Martha Acatitla Penitentiary. Ulloa is finally released as part of a general amnesty in 1978 and resumes civilian life as a successful bureaucrat in the Ministry of Planning and Budget and later in the Office of the Presidency.Ulloa offers a critical insider’s view of the armed left, which was thoroughly balkanized and riven by divisions regarding ideology, strategy, and leadership. Inside the clandestine movement, teachers, civil servants, academics, doctors, peasants, labor organizers, factory workers, and backcountry caciques coexisted uneasily. Radicals dismissed Ulloa, who frowned on assassinations and kidnappings, as a bourgeois revisionist. The author, a handsome, light-skinned city slicker, stood in awe of “real” workers and peasants, whom he sought to emulate during a miserable month in the mountains. Yet he notes the dark skin of his prison guards and dismisses the uncouth criminals he was jailed with as “lumpen.” Ulloa offers a fascinating portrait of Cabañas, a quixotic caudillo steeped in the lore of Zapatismo and the Wars of the Reform. We see Cabañas reading Jesuit self-help literature, mooning over Verónica Castro, singing a ballad to Che, and taking terrible security risks. Tired of the Mexico City doctors who failed to find a remedy for his debilitating migraines, Cabañas finally returned to Guerrero, only to be killed in combat in 1978.The author candidly portrays himself as a romantic who dreams of “an army of guerrilla fighters, like a swarm of bees, attacking the armed forces of reaction and imperialism at strategic points of the periphery of the great Mexican city, a military offensive similar to the Vietnamese Tet” (p. 55). The youthful revolutionary plasters his walls with images of Mao, devours reports of the Cuban revolution, devoutly studies China Reconstructs, and imposes his “dogmatism” on his wife Tere and his daughter Teresita, who is deprived of television, lectured at the dinner table about starving children, and forced to read “all sorts of bad Chinese and Russian literature that happened to fall into my hands” (p. 50). In prison, Ulloa suffers terrible pangs of fear and remorse, especially after the temporary kidnapping of his wife by security agents, and early on cracks under torture, betraying several of his compañeros. Effectively broken by his jailors, and ultimately (though he denies it) co-opted by the system, he maintains that “reality itself” convinced him of the futility of revolution. Maybe this is the only way Ulloa can make sense of his harrowing experience. Some 30 years after the repression, Mexicans are still struggling to comprehend their individual and collective roles in the dirty war. The utter failure of the Fiscalía Especial serves as a reminder that this has been a halting, painful process. Ably translated, and enhanced by an excellent introduction and glossary, Ulloa’s candid memoir is obligatory reading for anyone interested in the dark history of the Cold War in Latin America

Democracy · Dictatorship · Memoir · Political science · Politics · Spanish Civil War · History · Latin American Literature Studies · Law · Memory, violence, and history · Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America

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