During the 1960s, the CIA station chief for Mexico, Winston Scott, cultivated sources of intelligence who justified their own hardline rise to power by reporting untrue stories of foreign, communist agitation, culminating in the military massacre of student demonstrators at Tlatelolco in 1968.
At the time of the massacre, the CIA leader forwarded untrue reports to Washington that the shootings had been instigated by Trotskyites, although the truth would come out much later that the killings had been deliberately planned as a military operation.
Biographer and columnist Jefferson Morley has posted documents online in support of his account at the NSA Archive of George Washington University.
The information offers a telling model for the way that so-called CIA intelligence and FBI investigations can work in alliance with hardline ambitions against genuine grassroots movements.
Substitute ‘terrorists’ for ‘communists’ in today’s so-called intelligence lingo, and you have a formula for history repeating itself.
Meanwhile, those who live North of the Rio Grande may consider this story before preaching to Mexicans to ‘fix their own problems’ before they come looking for work.
I’m reminded of what Marta Benavides said when she came to Austin. We don’t need you fix our problems in El Salvador, said the famed colleague of Archbishop Romero. We just ask that you take control of your own government. Excerpt from the NSA Archives:
The massacre at Tlatelolco, says historian Sergio Aguayo, parted “the waters of Mexican history. It accented the turbulence of those years, served to concentrate power in the intelligence services dominated by a small group of men, hard and uncontrolled.”
With Win Scott’s assistance, those men had entrenched themselves in power over the course of a decade, acting with impunity against an opposition that was, in Aguayo’s words, “weak but each time more bellicose and desperate to rebel against the apathy of an indifferent, if not complicitous, international community.” See LITEMPO: The CIA’s Eyes on Tlatelolco. CIA Spy Operations in Mexico. National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 204. Posted – October 18, 2006.
Texas Civil Rights Review 