State espionage in Plinio Avila’s visual art, text only

Against the [Surveillance] Image and Mexican Perfection:
State Espionage 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]

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.

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.

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.”

Image caption: [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.]

Image caption: [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?]

Image caption: [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.

The ear award desk is complete with a set of headphones, a rotary phone, and a Directorate document—one of the many real life archival documents reproduced for the exhibit. The Federal Security Directorate collection in Mexico’s National Archive has been a key source for much of Mexican historiography of the 1950s-1970s, as well as for human rights organizations and truth commissions.[15] The surveillance documents in that collection have been at the center of political contention since their declassification in 2001, resulting in legislation and archival policies that have obstructed the access to the files.[16] The fluctuating access conditions to the files were a challenge for the creation of this exhibit. Ávila recalls that the photographs of arrested student leaders curated for the exhibit were redacted up until the opening of the museum. [17]

Besides the Federal Security Directorate installation, Ávila explores the history of the 1968 student demonstration at Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco in two other films. In 2 de octubre no se borra (‘The 2nd of October cannot be erased,’ 4’22’’), directed by Ávila and Emilio Chapela, a handheld shot zooms in on Humberto Márquez, who mops the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, the site of the student massacre, with what looks like a Mexican flag. In Violencia Perpetua (‘Perpetual violence,’ 4’33’’), Ávila tells a different story of the massacre. A piece that looks like an archeological ruin of Tlatelolco is at the center of the frame, against a black background, to be shattered by a bullet. It bursts into pieces that land among other archeological debris, all for the sequence to be repeated with a different archeological piece.

In the case of both films, the real-life film production contexts might be more telling of the politics than the videos themselves. Four minutes into the mopping in 2 de octubre no se olvida, Humberto Márquez is seen hurriedly picking up his mop and bucket and exiting the plaza—the artists could see security guards walking towards them as they filmed. Despite their right to record in public space, they felt compelled to end it early to avoid further surveillance and confrontation.

In the case of Violencia perpetua, Ávila worked with a technician who would shoot the sculptures on film. Curiously, that technician turned out to be former military.

“When he sat down and I started to tell him out loud about the project, I had a moment of realization. ‘Oh, you’re from the military… and I’m criticizing the military in all of this…’ and he responded, ‘No worries, but you do need to understand that military youth at the time were also fighting for a better country.’ Meaning that there were idealistic and patriotic youth on both sides, all committed to dying for their country. The student leaders and the soldiers.”[18]

For Ávila, this political contestation, this instance of the two sides of a coin, is the theme with which Humberto Márquez’s art would have concerned itself.

Fundación Humberto Márquez // Humberto Márquez Foundation

That all of the artworks discussed in this essay officially belong to Fundación Humberto Márquez rather than to Plinio Ávila’s personal portfolio invites us to question the history of surveillance within Mexican society.

This art intervention, which serves as a critique of Mexican art historiography, began as a thought experiment for Ávila.

“I began to ask myself, if I had lived in my father’s generation, if he and I had been friends and I had still been an artist—what kind of artist would I have been?”

Ávila argues that, chronologically, he would have been right at the middle between the age of Mexican muralism and contemporary art, which is a contentious moment which, in Eurocentric accounts, recognizes no vanguard art in the country. In more Mexico-centric accounts of art in that period, the works of David Alfaro Siqueiros, collectives such as Grupo Proceso Pentágono and Grupo SUMA emerge as clear vanguards. However, Ávila points to Mexico’s hermetic cultural and financial markets as factors for these groups of artists’ relative lack of recognition in Eurocentric histories of the vanguard. In such a context, Humberto Márquez serves as the missing link between both moments and both worlds: his work serves as a bridge because it survives the eras of insularity and censorship through his self-imposed exile.

The admission of Humberto Márquez as a fiction (or rather a parafiction,[19] as Carrie Lambert-Beatty proposes) is a rare exception, a spoiler of sorts (approved by the artist) as he considers that the true “a-ha” moment, the point of it all, is that he did not exist.

“When you have a historical moment that survives, it is because it was relevant. Creating something now and pretending it is a legacy thanks to its relevance is a strategy. In truth, at the time when Humberto would have been alive, this art could not have existed. Partly because it employs contemporary strategies, and also because of censorship. He would have been killed over his government critique.”

If history is telling, Humberto Márquez would have been a person of interest alongside many other culture and arts industry workers photographed and followed in the Federal Security Directorate’s records. But he did not exist.

“And that is the very point. That is the aha moment for the spectator that makes you reflect about the importance of what never was allowed to happen.”[20]

The role of images is at the center of Plinio Ávila’s art on politics and surveillance, especially as he works with redactions of historical records and the ‘illustration’ of a now-distant period to be memorialized in an educational museum. In an interview, he shares a personal theory:

“[In the days and years following the Tlatelolco massacre], the lack of images forbade closure, which in turn generated further political action. Nowadays, if there is a murder and you get to see the body, it is still a tragedy, but it joins the saturation of images to which we are now desensitized.”

Ávila authored an essay in 2021, ‘Contra la imagen’ (‘Against the image’) where he puts political art in Mexico in conversation with the work of Susan Sontag, Pascal Quignard, and Joan Fontcuberta.

“Images have become counterproductive to their own objectives. More than reinforcing memory, generating conscience or igniting action, images now manipulate, desensitize and numb. And this problem, which is not new, is irremediably intensified until what I perceive as a return to the non-image. I wonder if it is possible that certain events become more powerful in collective conscience precisely because of their lack of imagery.”[21]

Ávila’s work strives to leverage the power of images to create memory of past tragedy among the new generations that learn about it as history, not as a current event. At the same time, he remains wary of the overuse of images as present tragedies continue to unfold:

“On the face of future tragedies, images should limit themselves to their function as evidence and stay away from curiosity. New forms of communication, conscience, and memory must arise for new perceptions. The absence of images may have a greater impact. Suspended frustration will incite more to the actions that images aim to provoke, explain, or foreclose. Art will have to distance itself to shock and approach older painting if it really intends to achieve political action.”

Historical research in surveillance studies is key, yes, for the historiography of different periods. Who would the persons of interest be if not the main agents of change, the political leaders at the center of contestations of power? Moreover, studying surveillance practices around the world gives us a purview into the ethos of the regimes that enabled them. Every training manual, recording, every surveillance report tells a story of the individual values, collective moral panics, and national interests hidden in institutional secrecy. In the case of Mexican surveillance, the documents and testimonials we have of the Tlatelolco massacre serve as a reminder of the times when communism was at the center of these visions—even, and especially as it fed both utopias and moral panics.

The same themes can be found in the Directorate’s counterpart in the United States. The CIA’s declassified documents from fall 1968 describe student protests as “a classic example of the Communists’ ability to divert a peaceful demonstration into a major riot.” So the guiding logic of their analyses of the October 2nd massacre was the question: were Communist groups behind the events of that fateful day?[22]

Avila’s 1968 memorial art came into existence in time for the 50th anniversary of the massacre in 2018. At that time, the country grappled with a new wave of state espionage. Just like the Federal Security Directorate’s intelligence operations in the 60s, this most recent wave was enabled by global flows of surveillance technology, as Mexico became one of the first countries where it was proven that the NSO Group’s Pegasus malware was deployed against dissidents. In a memorial site against state surveillance and repression, it feels like a missed opportunity, acknowledged by Ávila, that the stories told pertain to the past when they could be so relevant to the present. Perhaps this is a future area of work for Humberto Márquez’s grand-nephew.

In conclusion, Plinio Ávila’s art production points at a gap in Mexican art historiography created by market dynamics and a heavy environment of state surveillance and repression in the 1960s. In the epicenter of the most tragic massacre in contemporary Mexico, his work points to new forms of communication that teach new generations about the significance of both what happened and what did not, as well as the surveillance regimes that cut off lives, art, and political possibilities. In the context of the rise of global surveillance, the 1968 call “Ni perdón ni olvido,” “never forgive and never forget,” takes on new meaning.

Notes

Acknowledgements: This essay was written with thanks to Plinio Ávila for granting me an interview at his Mexico City studio, after a long day of print-making, and to investigative journalist Susana Zavala, who took a day off work to bring me to Plinio’s exhibit at the 1968 memorial during my dissertation fieldwork. Gary Kafer provided key feedback and editing for the publication of this review.

1. Aguayo, Sergio. La Charola: Una Historia de Los Servicios de Inteligencia En México. Grijalbo, 2001. P. 36.

2. Avila, P. “BIO HM.” Fundación Humberto Márquez. https://www.fundacionmarquez.com/copy-of-bio-1

3. Agee, Philip. Inside the company: CIA Diary. Stonehill Publishing Company, 1975.

4. Pensado, Jaime M., and Enrique C. Ochoa, eds. México Beyond 1968: Revolutionaries, Radicals, and Repression During the Global Sixties and Subversive Seventies. University of Arizona Press, 2018. p. 3.

5. Aguayo, Sergio. La Charola: Una Historia de Los Servicios de Inteligencia En México. Grijalbo, 2001. P. 68.

6. My interview with the artist, May 23, 2023, Mexico City.
7. “Así es la Dirección Federal de Seguridad” film, dir. Alfonso Cabrera Morales, 1981-1982. The film is available online on El Universal newspaper’s YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USr-CFgmRtc

8. Pensado, Jaime, and Enrique Ochoa. México Beyond 1968:Revolutionaries, Radicals, and Repression During the Global Sixties and Subversive Seventies. The University of Arizona Press, 2018, p. 8-9.

9. Keller, Renata. Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution. Cambridge Studies in US Foreign Relations. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 26.

10. Interview with Plinio Ávila. May 23rd, 2023, Mexico City.

11. Ibid.

12. One such example is the Federal Security Directorate’s file on Fidencio Benítez Ramírez, a member of the Peasants’ Justice Brigade. His reports note Maoist propaganda among his books, as well as an underlined shooting manual. His card also includes a brief field note: “He said he works as a construction worker, but he does not speak like one.” AGN DFS Ficheros, Exp 100-10-1-73, H54, L44. Available on Archivos de la represión https://archivo.archivosdelarepresion.org/?page=files&directory=Ficheros
/PDLP_militantes/Benitez_Ramirez_Fidencio

13. AGN, DFS, box A20 27/103, exp. 5-33-53, L. 2.

14. Pensado, Jaime M. Rebel Mexico: Student unrest and authoritarian political culture during the long sixties. Stanford University Press, 2013, p. 11.

15. Márgara Millán’s review essay published in Jump Cut 61, “Visualities and the City: feminizing public spaces through art and media in post 1968 Mexico City,” mentions this archival collection as a documentary source of the espionage that feminist marches faced in 1968.

16. Padilla, Tanalís, and Louise E. Walker. "In the archives: history and politics." Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 19.1 (2013): 3.

17. Interview with the artist, May 23, 2023, Mexico City.

18. Ibid.

19. Lambert-Beatty, C. “Make Believe: Parafiction or Implausibility,” October, Vol. 129 (Summer, 2009), p. 51-84.

20. Ibid.

21. Avila, P. Contra la imagen. 2021.

22. CIA Weekly Summary, Students Stage Major Disorder in Mexico, August 2, 1968, Secret. Available online at the George Washington University NSA Archive at https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB10/docs/doc17.pdf. White House memorandum, Mexican Riots - Extent of Communist Involvement (CIA memorandum, October 5, 1968 and FBI cable, October 5, 1968 attached), October 5, 1968, Secret, Rostow to LBJ. Available online at https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB10/docs/doc18.pdf . Also see Doyle, K. “Tlatelolco Massacre: Declassified U.S. Documents on Mexico and the Events of 1968.” https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB10/nsaebb10.htm