Against the [surveillance] image and Mexican perfection —
state intelligence in Plinio Avila’s visual art
In Tlatelolco, the epicenter of Mexico City’s fatal suppression of the student movement in 1968, a memorial art installation tells the story of the surveillance paradigm that enabled the massacre. Humberto Márquez’s curation of surveillance documents and artifacts, propaganda films and tiger sculptures illustrates the ethos and practices of the Federal Security Directorate. This government office, which actually functioned as Mexico’s secret police, was established to follow “both friends and enemies of the regime, harass them and eliminate them.”[1] [open endnotes in new window]
Lists of student leaders under surveillance hang on the walls of Marquez’s exhibit. Their names were collected through the presence of orejas or ‘ears’, spies in disguise who infiltrated student meetings to gather intelligence. A memorial site, Memorial del 68, located in the same neighborhood, marks where the Mexican military, under presidential command, murdered many students during a demonstration ten days before the 1968 Summer Olympic Games were set to take place in Mexico.
Humberto Márquez’s own background uniquely positions him to understand the workings of the repression system he critiques through his art production. His biography on his art website reads:
“Humberto Márquez was born in Colotlán, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, in 1925. (...) He worked as an air maintenance manager and was called to form part of the Squadron 201 in 1945 to serve for the remainder of World War II. After returning, he deserted the Mexican army for what he later described in his journal as ‘ideological reasons’. (...) He designed maquettes for monuments for the Squadron 201, la Ruta de la Amistad (Route of Friendship) in Mexico City and the Polyforum Siqueiros where he was introduced to David Álfaro Siqueiros. He worked as Siqueiros’ assistant until the two had an irreparable argument and subsequent falling out. He then moved to Berlin where he worked for his remaining years as an architect. He died in obscurity in 2013.”[2]
This bio alludes to a righteous veteran turned political artist. His pride in having been on the right side of history in 1945 did not withstand the moral treason of military involvement in student repression. As he left the army, he took his understanding of the deep workings of Mexico’s military into the art world, and found a temporary home in one of the art forms best suited to tell political stories: muralism.
Interestingly, Humberto Márquez never existed.
Plinio Ávila (b. 1977), the artist behind fictional art figure Humberto Márquez, is a visual artist and art producer based in Mexico City. His work, spanning political, religious, and personal introspective themes, has been showcased in different museums and galleries in Mexico, Belgium, Chile, Scotland, and the United States. The website of Márquez’s Foundation, Fundación Humberto Márquez, lists Plinio Ávila as the grand-nephew tasked with repatriating Márquez’s art after his death in exile, and with reproducing Márquez’s sculptures based on the sketches that remained.
In 2018, Ávila was commissioned by Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco to create an exhibit on state surveillance for a memorial site set to open on the 50th anniversary of the 1968 student massacre. On the 2nd of October, 1968, around ten thousand students gathered in Tlatelolco to protest the increasing government repression of social movements. As the rally took place, the military attacked students with lethal force, and later further detained and held survivors at the military station Campo Marte. Many of the demonstrators remain missing. To date, the number of victims of the Tlatelolco massacre is unknown, and there is no conclusive account of the events that took place that day. However, its mark on Mexican society was so profound that it inspired a new protest slogan that is still in use today: “Ni perdón ni olvido”—“never forgive and never forget.” CIA whistleblower Philip Agee would discuss the Tlatelolco massacre as the breaking point for his intelligence career, no longer able to morally justify his work in quelling the opposition in different dictatorships in Latin America.[3]
This noteworthy moment of protest and government repression can be understood through the lens of what scholars call the Mexican Dirty War: an era between the 1960s and 1970s, following the Mexican Miracle of the 1940s, when Mexico’s economy developed at the expense of peasants and industrialized workers. At this time, “a series of popular, intellectual, artistic, and revolutionary movements sought to directly challenge the uneven capitalist growth and state repression that characterized Mexico’s ‘economic miracle." [4] The Federal Security Directorate, an intelligence agency and secret police established under Mexico’s Secretary of Interior in 1946, played a key role in infiltrating, surveilling, and subduing social groups deemed as subversive, replicating the anti-communist discourse of the United States.
Thanks to the release of a number of Federal Security Directorate files through Mexico’s National Archive in 2002, historians and human rights defenders have gained a more detailed understanding of the surveillance tactics that the Directorate deployed against dissident groups. In rural settings, dissident files would often rely on local informants attending meetings, transcribed public documents, and local police reports from searches and from dissident “confessions” while under detention. In Mexico City, the site where student repression culminated in the Tlatelolco massacre, the Directorate deployed the same tactics, as well as others enabled by mediation: phone wiretaps, with at least one hundred and seventeen tapped telephones in Mexico City by 1965,[5] and postal mail searches.
Why memorialize the Federal Security Directorate at a site where victims and their families would gather fifty years at the site of unspeakable abuse?
“They specifically wanted, I suppose, though the word sounds bad in the jargon of art, to illustrate that period of the Federal Security Directorate. They were the ones to show me the video featuring the tiger, the offices, the trainings.”[6]
For Ávila, the negative connotations of such an illustration run deeper than an appeal to jargon might indicate, as this essay will discuss when reviewing his writings and stance on political imagery.
Bengal tiger motif in the 1968 memorial exhibit.
The videos to which Ávila alludes correspond to a series of documentaries and institutional films commissioned by the Federal Security Directorate itself, from 1948 to 1981, to highlight the history, techniques, and investigative capabilities fostered in their agents, secret spies of sorts. One of the films opens with the Directorate’s banner featuring a tiger, followed by scenes of a real-life Bengal tiger roaming the Directorate’s offices. The voiceover, a reading by Commander Pedro Bello García, states:
“The tiger is a powerful animal that does not shy away from danger. It attacks from the front, prefers to act in silence, and manages to observe what others don’t. It is intuitive and intelligent, fast and self-confident, cautious and astute: it is not arrogant as the lion is, nor does it injure for pleasure as the leopard does. That is how the Federal Security Directorate’s agent should be.”[7]
This institutional fixation with the tiger as a moral example for agents is represented in the exhibit through figurines placed on desks and TVs.
The videos commissioned by the Federal Security Directorate tell the story of the making of an agent, highlighting the resources at their disposal for investigations. The films start at the psychometric evaluation of new agents as they begin their training, and then move on to each piece of the institutional puzzle: key equipment acquisitions, departments, and different techniques employed. They also make a case for their political significance: the Directorate agents are described as companions to Mexican President Adolfo López Portillo, as well as to Henry Kissinger and President Nixon on their visits to Mexico. The agents are also shown in “clandestine operations” as they gather news stories and “global intelligence” on persons of interest throughout the continent, following political events in countries such as Cuba, Chile, and other “countries with ideologies that differ from those held by Mexico.”
These institutional films evoke many of the themes presented in other depictions, historic and fictional, of Cold War policing and the rise of the modern and contemporary surveillance states. Technoscientific progress at the service of the nation, typical for societies of control, is created in the exhibit through imagery of cameras and recorders, laboratories, and technical training. In Mexico, political repression and surveillance during these years also increased because of collaboration with the United States, “not as a pawn of the imperialist North, but as a key global actor of the era.”[8] During the Cold War, the CIA’s Mexico City station became one of the most extensive programs of the Agency, operating wiretaps, infiltration, photography, and other forms of surveillance while disseminating anticommunist propaganda.[9]
El Mexicano Perfecto // The Perfect Mexican
Inspired by the historical artifacts of the Directorate, Plinio Ávila envisioned a concept for the 1968 memorial.
“I proposed, then, to create two videos: one about what the government expects from you, and one about what will happen if you do not act accordingly. There is a series of short films, the Coronet Films, commissioned by the United States government. They are educational, about why you should say no to communism, how you can be a good member of society. They’re in black and white, and I was inspired by that aesthetic. It’s a tiresome rhythm, unlike the pace we use for film today. It’s longer, slower, heavier –you are not meant to watch the whole thing, but rather to recognize the paternalistic voice in it, like a politician from the 60s.”[10]
El Mexicano Perfecto consists of two different films directed by Plinio Ávila and Iván Ávila Dueñas. The first film, Hoy joven, mañana adulto (‘Young today, an adult tomorrow,’ 9’22’’), is an instructional video featuring two college-age students going through their day at home as they get ready and study, with a voiceover description of the gendered duties they are expected to fulfill in society. In an interview, Ávila told me that the film is about “Father government, sexist and invasive.[11] The narrator is a third character in the film, which Ávila compares to a politician intruding in one’s kitchen.
This third character hovers over the two students throughout the film, a surveillant eye in the same room as they get dressed and go through their daily activities. His role is one of a moral evaluator, nodding his approval when the young man does his own tie and completes his homework. The first five minutes of the film are paced to run slowly, narrated by the third character’s monotone speech on duty, an uneventful build up to the main conflict in the film.
At 5’35’’, the characters are portrayed enjoying leisure time in their living room. As the young woman leaves the room, the camera pans to the young man, who quickly grabs pornographic magazines from under the couch cushion. Perhaps he thinks he is not being watched, but he is wrong. The third character breaks the fourth wall to denounce the “pernicious and destructive threat that is fed not by our self-centered impulses, but rather by our highest urges to satisfy our desire for the well-being of those we love.”
In the last portion of the film, the third character admonishes the young students and makes them throw away their pornography and political books such as Mao Tse-Tung’s Four Essays on Philosophy. In speaking to the audience, he calls students to reject the “false apostles” of communism found in modern colleges that promise “highways to progress and justice,” reminding students that there are no shortcuts to success. The conflict resolves with the youth listening, all order restored. The final shots in the film consist of close-ups to the prim and proper details about each character: the clean and recently shined shoes, the ironed shirt, the tidy nails.
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| [Hoy joven, mañana adulto. 6’05’]’. A young woman looks into the oven in her kitchen to grab a hidden book on communism. | [Hoy joven, mañana adulto. 6’23’’]. A college student reads a book by Mao Tse Tung. |
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[Hoy joven, mañana adulto. 7’50’’]. The narrator makes the young protagonists throw their forbidden literature into a trashbin in the kitchen, including a book on Mao Tse Tung, and pornographic magazines.] |
The second film, Introducción a los principios básicos de inteligencia y la elaboración de expedients (Introduction to basic intelligence principles and file creation,’ 15’53’’) reenacts a person of interest’s activities throughout a day with a voiceover that serves as a surveillance record of the character’s actions. Ávila’s character appears to be a subject in an educational material for spies in training. This video is based on the idea of the School of the Americas, a former military institute funded by the United States government to build surveillance and combat skills in Latin American military and politicians. Ávila attributes the aesthetic inspiration to Jorgen Leth’s The Perfect Human (1968), where a character goes through his day against a white background, with a voiceover describing his actions and feelings.
The film starts in the person of interest’s bedroom as he awakens. The narrator clarifies that this level of detail will never be available in intelligence reports as they will be primarily comprised of field notes, photographs and films, reports, testimonies, and audio tapes to be interpreted by intelligence agents. Is this an allusion to privacy rights, or a condemnation of the limited resources and capabilities for surveillance? The script goes through the ways intelligence interpretation and integration work will take place, using the character’s actions as an instructive example.
Throughout the film, he is described as a depressed and demotivated man, single, without purpose. At 8’00’’, the film portrays the character rehearsing a speech and then sitting down at his desk. The narrator ultimately finds hints that tie him to subversive groups in a series of close-up shots of his books, interspersed with stills from intelligence documents, an allusion to real-life intelligence files mentioning communist books found in police searches.[12] As the film ends with the end of the character’s day back in the bedroom, the audience is reminded that the intelligence report created throughout his day at home, read together with files from other government bodies, will be enough to “neutralize his criminal activity.”
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| [Introducción a los principios básicos de inteligencia y la elaboración de expedientes. 11’40’’]. The protagonist, el Señor Pérez, is surveilled at home. The voiceover explains the deductive methodology that places him as a “hypothetical enemy,” susceptible to coercion, and with demonstrated ties to the communist literature movement. | [Introducción a los principios básicos de inteligencia y la elaboración de expedientes. 7’55’’]. The protagonist, el Señor Pérez, is portrayed as he reads and prepares talking points. Is he a teacher? Is he preparing a protest speech? |
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[Introducción a los principios básicos de inteligencia y la elaboración de expedientes. 8’50’’]. The camera zooms in on the protagonist’s books as the narrator mentions the inscription “IRMA” as a potential hint of his political affiliations. “Irma” is also a common women’s name in Spanish. |
In addition to the videos, the 1968 memorial exhibit by Plinio Ávila also features an artistic reconstruction of the cubicles and office space in the Federal Security Directorate where surveillance was enacted, processed, and reported. One of the cubicles features a 1960s-70s Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder, included in the exhibit with artistic license — though we do know from the remaining inventories that agents had access to a series of Sony, Ampex, Concord, Hitachi, Phillips, Peirce, and Uher recorders with different degrees of portability. [13]
On the same desk, a bronze statue in the shape of an ear indicates an award—an art piece to symbolize institutional recognition for spies who excelled in intelligence gathering. The oreja, ear in Spanish, is a cultural signifier for surveillance in Mexican culture. The Directorate relied on informants who infiltrated dissident groups to listen in on the meetings, named orejas for their listening capabilities.[14] It is fitting that an award to the best agent, if not a tiger, would be the sculpture of an ear.
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| The man reads the newspaper at his kitchen table; the narrator remarks on his financial discontent, given his reaction at the grocery prices on the newspaper ad. [“Introducción a los principios básicos de inteligencia y la elaboración de expedientes” 4’23’’] | As he eats breakfast, the narrator breaks down the details relevant to his profiling. “Eating a pastry is not relevant”. The film portrays it anyway. [“Introducción a los principios básicos de inteligencia y la elaboración de expedientes” 4’50’’] |
