This article by Jim Cason and David Brooks originally appeared in the October 1, 2026 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.
Washington and New York. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) provided funding to right-wing student groups in Mexico in the days leading up to the Tlatelolco student massacre, but 58 years later it continues to conceal details of its activities and refuses to release key documentation about that part of its history.
Altogether, the CIA ran at least five projects over two decades focused on controlling student leadership at Mexican universities, infiltrating and seeking to influence the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the National Federation of Technical Students, and student leaders at the National Polytechnic Institute, according to official documents released and analyzed by the National Security Archive, an independent research center in Washington.
“At best, the agency played an active role in the polarization of student politics at that time,” write Claire Dorfman and Arturo Jiménez-Bacardí, of the Archive, in a new assessment of declassified secret official documents of the U.S. government. “At worst, given the close relationship with Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, Miguel Nazar Haro, and the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), the agency played a more direct role in orchestrating the violence” at Tlatelolco.
The two researchers report that a partially declassified official history of CIA activities in Mexico, in three volumes and 539 pages, reveals support for right-wing student groups dating back to the 1950s. That history recounts how the agency “had a hand” in the ouster of UNAM rector Luis Garrido Díaz in 1952. A decade later, the CIA began providing funds to the Institute of Social and Economic Research (IISE) and the University Movement of Renewing Orientation (MURO), which at that time was identified as a group active in “influencing student politics.”
“The CIA used the IISE as a front organization to support the publication of anti-communist books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles, as well as to influence the PRI and support the right-wing student group MURO,” write Dorfman and Jiménez-Bacardí, summarizing part of the content of the CIA’s official history. “The IISE impressed the CIA station when it handed over the names of 3,000 Mexican communists.”
A recently declassified section of the official history of the CIA’s program in the country reveals that some within the U.S. government were having doubts about support for right-wing student groups in Mexico. In 1967, the U.S. ambassador in Mexico and even the agency’s own evaluation team questioned the support they provided to MURO in particular. “Considering the long-term cost of empowering violent radical instigators who have only served to polarize student politics, [CIA evaluation expert Kenneth] Millan recommended ending support for MURO,” the Archive reports based on the official documents.
Internal CIA assessments stated that MURO specialized in militant harassment operations with “200 shock elements [that] have campaigned vigorously against communist and pro-Castro groups at the National University (UNAM) and at the universities of Puebla and Guadalajara.” The CIA reported with satisfaction in 1965 that “MURO gains greater credit for the removal, in recent months, of communist rectors at the universities of Monterrey, Puebla, Guadalajara, and Morelia.”
CIA support for MURO continued into the 1970s. The CIA, working with the Mexican government through heads of the Federal Security Directorate, Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios and Miguel Nazar Haro, mobilized students to take part in a MURO demonstration in front of the Soviet embassy in Mexico in 1969.
Detention of students after the takeover of Ciudad Universitaria in 1968. Photo: Manuel Gutiérrez Paredes Collection. UNAM Historical Archive. Ref. MGP3101
Sponsorship of Nazar Haro
Recently declassified sections of the CIA history also offer details of the U.S. sponsorship of Nazar Haro, who was first recruited as a CIA asset by the then-director of the DFS, Gutiérrez Barrios, and it was at his request that the CIA subsidized that figure’s training at the International Police Academy in 1965.
Nazar Haro later headed a group of some 20 DFS agents who carried out intelligence work on the activities of the Communist Party, Cuban exiles, Trotskyists, and cultural groups of the Soviet bloc, according to this official history.
But the details of Nazar Haro’s involvement in clandestine operations against Mexican student groups in the period leading up to the night of Tlatelolco are still censored in the version of the official history released to date. “Nazar Haro rose through the ranks of the DFS to become director in 1978. His reputation as a brutal interrogator was matched by the extensive corruption and criminal activities within his intelligence service,” report Dorfman and Jiménez-Bacardí. He was later formally indicted by the United States for his involvement in a car-theft ring and was subsequently arrested for the forced disappearance of student leader Jesús Piedra Ibarra in 1975, but was not convicted.
On this anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre, the National Security Archive, which for decades has worked for the declassification of official U.S. documents, called for the CIA to issue an uncensored version of its history of activities in Mexico.
To read the documents and the report: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence-mexico/2026-10-01/cia-station-mexico-last-jfk-assassination-records.
Students detained after the rally in Tlatelolco, October 2, 1968. Photo: Manuel Gutiérrez Paredes Collection. UNAM Historical Archive. Ref. MGP3094
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