Mexican Intelligence Digital Archives (MIDAS)

Tabbed

Description & Rationale

Archive of the internal records of the Dirección Federal de Seguridad, 1947–1989, held in the Archivo General de la Nación in México. The materials document surveillance, coersion and other nefarious activities of the agency during the 1950s through 80s, and include handwrittten and typescript reports by agency personnel and informers on surveillance of political activists, labor officials and organizers and others in Mexico during the period.

DFS preceded the Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional (CISEN), established in 1989, and traced its immediate origins as a government agency to the Departamento de Investigación Política y Social (1942). Its lineage also included the Oficina de Información Política (1938) and the Departamento Confidencial (1929). DFS files were transferred from CISEN to the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) in 2002, and as a result of the 2012 Ley Federal de Archivos defining the national archive as a source of public information, were made fully accessible. However, in 2015, citing national security concerns, the Mexican government imposed strict new limits on access to these archives.

The current project - named the Mexican Intelligence Digital Archives (MIDAS) (los Archivos del Autoritarismo Mexicano) - will make available scans, images, and photocopies of material from the archives that were taken by scholars that used them during the period in which the archive was open to the public at the AGN. These files are now being gathered by the faculty member, Paul Gillingham, at Northwestern University. Gillingham estimates that more than 300,000 documents have been gathered to date. These resources will be organized and added to MIDAS over time.

The collection will be hosted in cooperation with Northwestern University, El Colegio de México, and Artículo 19.

For more information and access to files, see: https://www.crl.edu/midas [1]

Reasons for consideration:

The materials uniquely and in great detail document five decades of surveillance and suppression of political and labor activists in Mexico by federal authorities during a particularly turbulent period. They offer insights into the methods and crimes of the DFS and the activities of the individuals and political groups under surveillance.

Author(s):

Dirección Federal de Seguridad

Publisher(s):

N/A

Source Format:

From Digital

Target Format:

Digital

Program:

GCI Latin America

Resource Types:

Archival materials

Government documents

Regions:

Latin America and Caribbean

Countries of Origin:

Mexico

Posted:

Mar 10, 2017 5:59pm

Updated:

Nov 12, 2018 3:07pm

Source Details

Major Languages:

Spanish

Holding Institutions:

Northwestern University

Source and Holdings Notes:

The University of Texas has some DFS files in paper form dating from 1970-1977 (see http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utlac/00200/lac-00200.html [2]) “Groups found in these reports include both local and national organizations. Found herein are reports on communist and socialist organizations such as the Partido Comunista Mexicano and the Movimiento Revolucionario del Magisterio, as well as labor unions like Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación.”

Physical Details:

Individual JPEG and PDF image file copies, produced by various researchers, of the 50,000 pages original documents,from a collection (4,223 boxes) of original paper files in the Archivo Generale Nacionale.

Existing Reformatted Materials:

JPEG and PDF files of selected files have been created by Paul Gillingham and other researchers in recent years and will be contributed to Northwestern University by those researchers for the project.

Intellectual Property Considerations:

The materials are documents created by personnel of a federal government agency. The researchers who produced the digital images of the documents will sign releases and will thereby retain no rights to those images.

Activity

Status	Current	Description
Flagged	no	The proposal is flagged for further research.
Vetted	no	The proposal has been examined and vetted.
Ballotted	no	The proposal is currently on a committee ballot.
Approved	yes	The proposal has been selected for reformatting. Reformatting efforts are pending.
Reformatted	no	The proposal has been reformatted and access information is now posted.
Inactive / Declined	no	No longer under consideration for reformatting.