Mexican Dirty War

Belligerents

Far-left groups

• Mexican Communist Party
• National Liberation Forces
• People's Guerrilla Group
• Party of the Poor
• 
• Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre
• Various other social and armed movements in the country

Casualties and losses Estimated at least 3,000 people disappeared and executed, 3,000 political prisoners, and 7,000 tortured

The Mexican Dirty War (Spanish: Guerra sucia) was the Mexican theater of the Cold War, an internal conflict from the 1960s to the 1980s between the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)-ruled government under the presidencies of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Luis Echeverría, and José López Portillo, which were backed by the U.S. government, and left-wing student and guerrilla groups. During the war, government forces carried out systematic torture, "probable extrajudicial executions", and an estimated 1,200 disappearances.

In the mid 1960s, the PRI underwent a shift where they began to resemble a police state. The start of Mexico's Dirty War was slow and varied on administration and from region to region. In 1965 the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS, Federal Ministry of Security) set up counterinsurgency units and sent military officers to the United States for training. Armed with weapons from Belgium, United States, and Israel, in the 1970s the Mexican government escalated use of violent tactics to silence and repress its citizens. From 1965 to 1982, DFS numbers rose from 120 agents to 1,008. In the 1960s and 1970s, Mexico was persuaded to be part of both Operation Intercept and Operation Condor, developed between 1975 and 1978, with the pretext to fight against the cultivation of opium and marijuana in the "Golden Triangle", particularly in Sinaloa. The operation, commanded by General José Hernández Toledo, was a flop with no major drug-lord captures, but with many abuses and acts of repression.

The judicial investigation into state crimes against political movements opened only at the end of the 71-year PRI regime and the accession to power in 2000 of Vicente Fox, who created the Special Prosecutor's Office for Social and Political Movements of the Past (FEMOSPP). Despite revealing much about the conflict's history, the FEMOSPP has been unable to finalize prosecutions against the Dirty War's main instigators.

In the early 1960s, former schoolteachers Genaro Vázquez Rojas and Lucio Cabañas created their own "armed rebellion" in Guerrero's mountains. Their rebellion group worked to counter other militant groups not aligned with their goals and committed robberies and kidnappings for ransom of rich people in their region of operation to finance their struggle. During clashes with Mexican government forces, both militias and the government used indiscriminate force, causing civilian collateral damage. In 1971, three major kidnappings of rich people produced "millions of pesos" through ransom for the rebels, who used the money to continue their fight against the government and rich, abusive landowners.

In March 2019, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador publicly released the archives of the defunct Federal Security Directorate, which contain a great amount of previously undisclosed information about the Dirty War and the political persecution by the PRI governments. López Obrador said, "We lived for decades under an authoritarian regime that limited freedoms and persecuted those who struggled for social change", and issued an official apology on behalf of the Mexican State to the victims of the repression. He also said judicial action would be taken against the surviving perpetrators of the repression, and promised that surviving victims would be able to claim compensation.