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