Women Guerrilla Fighters of the Mexican Dirty War

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Ex-guerrilla fighter and political prisoner Lourdes "Lulu" Quiñones. Photograph courtesy of Mirada Documental.

Ex-guerrilla fighter and political prisoner Alma Gómez at lunch with fellow ex-political prisoners. Photograph courtesy of Mirada Documental.

I have not yet posted anything about the female ex-guerrilla fighters conference (i.e. the entire purpose of this trip) in part because there are privacy concerns associated with individual testimonies. Everyone who attended the conference generously shared parts of their personal histories that could have been, and oftentimes clearly were, difficult to revisit even at a distance of forty years. It is remarkable that under those circumstances any of the women would feel additionally comfortable enough to have their personal contributions published online. And yet, ex-guerrilla fighters Lourdes Quiñones and Yolanda Casas have agreed to just that, as has ex-political prisoner Gladys López, and ex-guerrilla fighter Alma Gómez has kindly given permission to share her photo.  Thus, I will discuss and upload photographs of these four women (except no discussion on Ms. Gómez), and describe all other conference-related activities in terms of generalized, consensus opinions.

Ex-guerrilla fighter and political prisoner Yolanda Casas. Photograph courtesy of Mirada Documental.

Memory and Identity

Yolanda Casas, photo taken during her imprisonment.

One of the original objectives of this event, an objective that I believe the conference met, was to bring into sharper focus an epoch of Mexican history that is surprisingly distant to many of my generation even though it was our parents’ generation that would have witnessed it. In the absence of a strong, collective memory of the 1970s guerrilla movement in Mexico, and especially given government efforts to suppress related information, the women who attended the conference have a difficult task cut out for them: to construct a memory that few others share, to try and add a narrative into Mexican history that a limited number of people can or are willing to attest to.

The task was to take several highly personal stories and to try to graft them into something as close to the truth as imperfect human memory will allow. Personal narratives, however, are shaped by the human need to construct an identity, and necessarily so. Pain in particular – an all too familiar sensation for many of these women – can influence the ways in which we remember or forget our past. For these reasons, it is not quite right to say that the primary goal of this conference was to discover a definitive, singluar “truth” on the question of “women and the Mexican Dirty War.”

Left to right, top to bottom: Ex-political prisoner Gladys López, ex-guerrilla fighter and political prisoner Yolanda Casas, our cameraman Fernando and me. Photograph courtesy of Mirada Documental.

The Truth

On the contrary, as long as individuals are uniquely defined by the specific time, place, and even body in which they live, it would seem that several real experiences of the same event are not merely possible, but in fact an unavoidable outcome. Without a doubt, comparing different accounts of the past can help a third party construct a coherent picture of what exactly happened – and this was one of the aims at the conference. But this process of comparison, and sort of “averaging,” should not necessarily cast doubt upon any individual’s testimony even if her account contradicts those of others. If one were to ask, “Did you experience sexism within the guerrilla movement?” Two women in very much the same circumstances might give quite different, but equally truthful, answers about what their personal experiences or understandings of the event entailed.

In Short

Thus, the conference aimed to discover the “truth” in all its convoluted and contradictory glory, i.e. in all its reality. And memory, a capacity highly influenced by the passage of time and identity development, was the best tool available to us. Although I could easily describe the conference as a great “success” in a very unimaginative, traditional sense – as an event that shed definitive light upon the actual circumstances of a certain period -I think it better to understand the conference as the much more complex success that it truly was.

At the very top of the photo you can see the man climbing up.

Mexico City’s Anthropology Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and Zoo are all located within walking distance of one another in a tree-covered area of the capital. Yesterday, Mexico City native Salvador Castañeda took me me to visit the Anthropology and Modern Art Museums, and then showed me around a bit of the Coyoacán district – an area near the university. Also, I learned the Mexican slang word órale, meaning “wow!”

Papantla dancers (or flyers) were performing outside the Anthropology Museum when we arrived. Four men in traditional costumes climbed to the top of a 90-foot pole, tied their feet to one end of a rope that was attached to the pole, and hung upside-down while they were spun in the air. A fifth stood at the top of the pole playing a drum. The performance is a pre-Hispanic tradition that originated when the indigenous Totonaca peoples wished to call upon their gods to send them rain. Skip to 0:50 in this video to see how it happens:

The Museum of Modern Art is relatively small, with no more than about 4 or 5 exhibit rooms, but the art rotates frequently. The Neomexicanismos exhibit seemed to hold the museum’s most “modern” or recent works, including:

A picture taken at the Zocalo metro stop in Mexico City by photographer Francisco Mata Rosas.

A close-up of a self portrait by highly regarded Mexican artist Julio Galán.

Las dos Fridas by Frida Kahlo at the Modern Art Museum.

Upstairs were some slightly older works by world renowned artists including Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Interestingly, I’ve heard a lot of skepticism about Frida Kahlo’s work here – the accusation that her art was not excellent enough to deserve the type of popular attention it has received or, if she is to receive that kind of attention, then many other lesser known artists ought to as well. Frida Kahlo hype certainly runs high in the States.

The anthropology museum, by contrast with the modern art one, was huge. After entering a main hall, the museum opens up into an outdoor plaza with exhibit buildings on all sides. In a park-like area outside one of these buildings, there is a pseudo-tropical forest area with reconstructed ruins.

Salvador in front of one of the pre-Hispanic building replicas.

It really did feel like a rainforest.

A bit of a drive from the two museums, Coyoacán is a young and lively neighborhood. There’s a central building that’s something like a “town hall,” a church, a park, a kiosk, many restaurants, and an indoor artisans’ market.

Coyoacán's town hall - or a space similar to a town hall anyway.

Salvador and the kiosk.

The glass wall of a restaurant next to the plaza showed me what a tourist I am.

Tuesday was my first truly touristy day. We took the Mexico City metro from Revolución, near La Casa, to the Tlatelolco stop a few blocks away from La Plaza de Las Tres Culturas. This plaza was the site of one of the defining moments of the Mexican Dirty War: the Tlatelolco massacre of October 2nd, 1968.

Professor Gómez and I in front of the Tlatelolco museum.

1968 was the year of Mexico’s first Olympic Games. It was also the year that citizen unrest, and especially student protests, reached new levels in Mexico City. Increasing economic stratification and political repression had angered many workers and university students. The policies of PRI president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz were coming under popular attack. In an attempt to hide his country’s divisions from the international community, Díaz Ordaz decided to take aggressive steps to silence protesters.

Tlatelolco is not located at the heart of Mexico City nor is it considered a particularly dangerous neighborhood. A cathedral sits on the plaza and apartment buildings line one side. Opposite the apartment towers, on the far side of the plaza, sit ancient Aztec ruins that have been excavated and opened to tourists. It came as a great shock to residents and peaceful protesters when, on October 2nd in the year of Mexico City’s Olympic Games, the Mexican military opened fire upon what had nearly always been a safe and relatively quiet section of the city.

Professor Gómez in front of the Aztec ruins. The ruins sit below the level of the plaza in an excavation site.

Professor Gómez and a gentleman who has lived at the Tlatelolco apartments long enough to remember the massacre - '68 wasn't that long ago.

Evidence uncovered since the massacre suggests the following story: the PRI regime wished to send a strong message to political dissidents that activism against the government would not be tolerated, and thus planned the Tlatelolco massacre meticulously. Paramilitary forces dressed as civilians and mingled with the crowd, only recognizable to one another by the white bandanas they wore on their hands and arms. When they received a signal, these forces started firing at the army, making it appear as though the protest had turned violent. The army, acting now in “self-defense,” charged the plaza, killing bystanders and protesters alike. The number of dead remains highly contested and it is likely that the Mexican government has suppressed evidence that might yield an answer. Although the massacre’s organizers placed cameras at several key points around the plaza prior to October 2nd, those tapes have never been released and it remains a mystery why the cameras were installed at all. Although the government has estimated 20-30 deaths, others have estimated hundreds. It is difficult to know. A large, beautiful museum located next to the plaza now commemorates the tragedy with film and photo displays of the period as well as artistic representations of how the massacre unfolded. A stone monument on the plaza also recognizes the dead of Tlatelolco.

This is the apartment balcony where student leaders would have stood to make their speeches for the rally of October 2nd, 1968. This is also a nice view of the cathedral from the apartment towers.

A view of the plaza from one of its adjoining apartment towers. The ruins sit in the grassy area on the far side, and the cathedral to the left. Out of the camera frame, but also to the left, sits the Tlatelolco museum.

Ex-guerrilla fighters Alma Gómez and Lourdes Quiñones await Astrid Hadad's performance at El Vicio.

Astrid Hadad performs at El Vicio in one of her famously showy costumes.

The guerrilla women arrived at La Casa de Los Amigos the afternoon of Friday, July 15th and immediately began filmed interviews and discussions about their experiences in the Mexican Dirty War. By the following evening, Saturday at 9PM, most conference participants were ready to relax and enjoy the company of their old friends in a more casual venue. That night, everyone piled into two vans that brought us across the city to El Vicio, or “The Vice,” a performance space and bar where highly acclaimed Mexican artist Astrid Hadad was scheduled to sing.

With about 50-60 chairs arranged around a small stage, El Vicio’s atmosphere was intimate, close, and – once the performance began and a stagehand starting piping fake smoke onto the stage at regular intervals – a bit hazy. A live band sat immediately in front of the audience to the right of the stage, and waitresses served guests at narrow tables in front of their seats.

Astrid Hadad is not just a singer, and neither is she ever referred to as strictly an actress or a comedian. She blends song, dance, satire, and showy costumes to produce a humorously outrageous critique of Mexico’s politics and its sexist culture. Far from being a popular icon or a mainstream figure, Hadad has garnered a following among audiences closer to Mexico’s political and cultural outskirts.

Astrid Hadad dancing and singing at El Vicio

Before Hadad took the stage, a comedian in a conservative, black dress and grey wig opened the show, admonishing audience members for their ‘liberal’ behaviors. To the increasing laughter of onlookers, she picked out individuals from the crowd, demanding to know why they were even attending a performance at a place like El Vicio. When Professor Gomez was called upon and explained her research about the Dirty War, the comedian declared the whole conflict una leyenda urbana or “urban legend” and the audience, including the guerrilla women, burst into laughter. Sadly, the woman’s parody of a conservative political view on the Dirty War all too closely resembles the Mexican government’s official line on the issue: that is, a refusal to acknowledge state violence committed during the period, a refusal that, in some sense, amounts to a denial that the conflict ever occurred.

Hadad’s show opened with a video recording of El Calcetín, a song that comically suggests Mexican machismo culture treats women like socks, or as objects to be disposed of once they’ve been worn out.

Her live performances included Altares de plata pura, in which she sings about the Spanish greed for silver, and the violence Europeans perpetrated against indigenous Latin Americans in order to obtain it. Her costume at first appears to be a temple of silver, but she opens it to reveal a bleeding heart and skeletons.

She also proposes a rethinking of Malinche, the young indigenous woman who served as the translator of Hernan Cortés and thus, according to the popular view, helped Europeans conquer Latin America. The song was titled Yo la mala, yo Malinche.

At the end of her performance, Hadad made a shout-out to the guerrilleras in the audience, and on the way home the women noted with glee that she had not said ex-guerrilleras, but rather referred to them as guerrilla fighters of the present.

The place we're going.

Tomorrow morning Professor Gomez and I will be on a plane to Mexico City, and by the following afternoon about a dozen female ex-guerrilla fighters will have joined us to spend three days talking (and hopefully writing) about their experiences fighting government forces in the Mexican Dirty War. Few Mexicans are aware of the role women played in the guerrilla insurgency of the 1970s. The Dirty War itself is little more than a vague memory to most Mexicans of my (the younger) generation – a memory they received secondhand and already blurred. The Mexican government has spent a great deal of time and effort ensuring that the Dirty War continues to recede into a distant, half-forgotten past. Those who survived the struggle and have attempted to share their experiences of the period have routinely been silenced by government authorities. Few first-hand accounts have escaped censorship, and women – a minority within this already marginalized group – have received little to no recognition for their role in the conflict.

This was one of the most helpful books written in English that I could find on Latin American female guerrilla fighters. Not surprisingly, it neglects the women of Mexico.

For that reason, I’ve spent the past several weeks sifting through texts on women insurgents in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Columbia, even a few female Vietnam War vet memoirs, as well as the testimonials of  Latin American women who lost male relatives in guerrilla resistance struggles – but I’ve encountered very little literature on the experiences of Mexican female guerrilla fighters themselves.That said, here is the abridged version of what we do know, the historical context that indicates there must be a story here, just waiting to be told:

The 1960s in Mexico

Although it is difficult to pinpoint an exact date or even the year in which the Mexican Dirty War truly began, this violent, internal struggle is generally recognized as a two-decade conflict, spanning the 1960s and the 1970s. During that period, Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI or “Institutional Revolutionary Party”) maintained control of the federal government through the successive presidencies of three politicians selected from its own ranks: Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Luis Echeverría, and José López Portillo. The reign of PRI politicians in the presidential office preceded Díaz Ordaz’s administration and continued after Portillo’s departure, but these three presidencies, together, are recognized as among the least democratic, most repressive periods of modern Mexican history and thus stand apart.

In the years leading up to and during Díaz Ordaz’s administration, economic policies that favored the ruling elite as

Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, president of Mexico when the Tlatelolco massacre occurred.

well as increasing censorship of political dissidents fueled popular discontent, provoking citizen strikes and demonstrations. In particular, a growing student movement organized several major protest marches and rallies in Mexian cities. By early October of 1968, just days before Mexico City was scheduled to host its first Olympic Games, the PRI regime decided that its country could not afford to appear unstable or divided  - nor did the president wish to appear unpopular –  in front of an international community that would undoubtedly have its eye trained on Mexico for the duration of the Olympic Games. And thus, on October 2nd, in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City, government forces opened fire on a crowd of peaceful protesters and onlookers, killing hundreds of Mexican citizens. Though initially devastating to the student movement, the Tlatelolco killings, as well as a second government massacre known as “Corpus Christi” that occurred on June 10th of 1971, inspired a new wave of anti-government fervor, galvanizing many to join the guerrilla insurgency that dogged the PRI regime through the 1970s.

The 1970s in Mexico

Mexico’s guerrilla insurgency began years before Tlatelolco, and even before Díaz Ordaz was elected president. But the struggle took on a new vigor and urgency following the two massacres: not only did the ranks of pre-existing groups increase, but also entirely new resistance troupes were formed and the insurgents expanded their activities into urban areas where they had rarely ventured before.

A line hung with photos of the desaparecidos of the Mexican Dirty War.

The events of the 1960s convinced many Mexican citizens that peaceful, democratic means of expressing their discontent had been closed to them, and thus most of the guerrilla fighters of the 1970s describe their participation in the insurgency as a last resort. Life as a guerrilla insurgent meant cutting one’s self off completely from one’s family and friends, and living clandestinely, likely nomadically. Capture by government paramilitary forces (forces created for the purpose of quashing the insurgency even though the Mexican administration publicly denied any insurgency was taking place) meant one of two scenarios: the first, and far preferable case, would see the insurgent incarcerated in an official prison, a prison that the press was permitted to visit and to which family members might have limited access. Torture occurred within these institutions, but the abuses permitted within official prison walls barely rivaled those committed against prisoners at clandestine camps. These camps, the second possible destination of any captured dissident (or suspected dissident), routinely tortured their inmates, even to the point of death. Torture was not practiced for the sole purpose of extracting information, but also for instilling terror. Lucky inmates were subsequently transferred to official institutions or even released, but many died during torture sessions or were assasinated immediately after their release from prison, their bodies quietly disposed of. When individuals were captured and sent to one of these institutions, they joined the ranks of the “disappeared;” no one in the victims’ community knew where they were being held, nor if they might ever return. The individuals who did not survive these camps remain the desaparecidos of the Mexican Dirty War.

The Women

We don’t know if women joined the guerrilla movement of the 1970s in order to support their male relatives, or to fight on behalf of their own goals and convictions. There is no comprehensive documentation that describes what it was like to be a woman in the guerrilla insurgency, what it was like to interact with male counterparts, what it was like to be a female political prisoner and victim of torture. Even less frequently discussed but no less important topics include: motherhood from within prison, relationships between guerrilla fighters, familial and cultural attitudes towards female guerrilla members, and the impact of women’s involvement in the armed struggle upon women’s status within Mexican politics and society. But we know that there were women who joined the guerrilla movement. We just want to know more.

Female political prisoners at Santa Martha Acatitla prison in the 1970s. Several of the women pictured will be attending the conference.