Women Guerrilla Fighters of the Mexican Dirty War

Foreground: Our film and photo crew's insignia. Background: Lourdes Quiñones at left, Gladys López at right. Photograph courtesy of Mirada Documental.

…the 2011 conference of female ex-guerrilla insurgents of the Mexican Dirty War. From the afternoon of July 15th through the evening of July 17th, eleven ex-guerrilleras participated in over 20 hours of both classroom-style discussions (mesas de trabajo) and one-on-one interviews (testimonios) about their experiences in the guerrilla insurgency of the 1970s. Did female guerrilla fighters play a unique role within the insurgency, or did they share the same responsibilities as their male comrades? What was the government’s objective in torturing captured dissidents? Did the sexual and gender revolutions (which were occurring at nearly the same time around the globe) influence the social structure or political agenda of the guerrilla?

Marisol Cabrera and Mirada Documental

Typical setup for both testimonios and mesas de trabajo: Professor Gomez seated in front of the speaker and the film crew positioned behind. Photograph courtesy of Mirada Documental.

Each mesa de trabajo ended with a filmed, all-group discussion. These video recordings, conference photos, and additional tapings of every testimonio, were all made possible by Mirada Documental, a documentary film crew headed up by UAEM student Marisol Cabrera (UAEM is the Autonomous University of Mexico City ).

Documentary filmmaker Marisol Cabrera and me.

Marisol visited Haverford last spring to attend a screening of her documentary Casa Libertad; and the guerrilla fighters’ conference was officially kicked off with a private screening of this same film: a close look at the experiences of one political activist who was incarcerated in Mexico following her nonviolent participation in the 1968 student movement.

Takeover! Professor Gomez and I try to relieve the camera crew so that they can say a few words on film. At least one of them kept working though because this photograph is courtesy of Mirada Documental.

The Women Are Here!

Ex-guerrilla fighter Yolanda Casas embraces the head of the film crew, Marisol Cabrera. Photograph courtesy of Mirada Documental.

La Casa's conference room awaiting the women's arrival. Photograph courtesy of Mirada Documental.

The conference was scheduled to begin at 2PM, and the women – who had flown into the capital from all different parts of Mexico – began arriving at around noon. It was two hours of hugs, cheek kisses, chatter, and noises of happy recognition. Although some of the women, in groups of twos or threes, live quite close to each other and maintain frequent contact, others had not seen one another in months. All eleven had been held as political prisoners (and thus in the same section) of Santa Martha Acatitla prison in the 1970s.  Living at close quarters for a period of several years and sharing their devotion to the guerrilla in common had clearly drawn the women into a very close camaraderie that stands to this today.

Who They Are and Why They Joined

The women are mostly in their sixties. That means they were roughly my age or even younger when they joined the guerrilla. Most have children, many have grandchildren. My first impression of the ex-guerrilleras was a group of very friendly, family-oriented ladies.

Left to right: Ex-guerrilla fighters Alma Gómez, Elia Hernández, and Yolanda Casas at the conference's first mesa de trabajo. Photograph courtesy of Mirada Documental.

All eleven were taken into custody for politically-motivated reasons by the Mexican government during the 1970s. They were transferred between clandestine and official prisons (disappeared), tortured, and released in the late 1970s, at which point many went into exile. Ten of the eleven were guerrilla insurgents, some of whom received training in North Korea. Gladys López, the only participant who was not a trained insurgent, worked as a messenger on behalf of the anti-government movement. Most were members of the guerrilla group Movimiento de Acción Revolucionaria (the MAR, or Revolutionary Action Movement), but some fought on behalf of the Lacandones and the FUZ (Frene Urbano Zapatista).

Almost all of the women described their entrance into the guerrilla movement as a nearly inevitable development in their moral and political maturation. They remember being swept up into a struggle to protect their country’s and their family’s future. The government-perpetrated massacres of 1968 and 1971 were pivotal in convincing many of the women that joining the guerrilla was the right choice, indeed, seemingly the only choice in the face of such terrible government crimes. A great deal of them had fathers and/or brothers who participated in the anti-government movement, and thus some were exposed to the political ideals of the struggle from a very young age. A few of the women say they had very little political consciousness prior to encountering the movement in student circles or other education-related forums. Elia Hernández, for example, did not identify with the movement until after she became a teacher and began to meet politically conscious people in education.

Elia Hernández during her imprisonment at Santa Martha Acatitla in the late 1970s.

Ex-guerrilla fighter Elia Hernández and I at the conference. Photograph courtesy of Mirada Documental.

Many thanks to Elia for recently giving me permission to share her photo and parts of her personal history on this blog.

Privacy

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.