By: Jacinto Rodríguez Munguía and Susana Zavala / Quinto Elemento Lab exclusively for AM Guanajuato
Second of two parts
The golden years of DFS fall in very identifiable moments: the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. The emergence of guerrilla movements after the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968 allowed the national CIA to operate freely in a national territory marked by darkness and illegality.
Preservation of the “homeland” and the need to confront alleged communist conspiracies endangering the Mexican political system were the pretext for the DFS to destroy those who challenged the PRI regime with arms.
The agency’s covert operations reached a turning point in the early 1980s when two high-profile murders were committed involving the DFS structure, as had already been the case in the nascent drug trafficking business: the execution of influential columnist Manuel Buendía (May 30, 1984) and the torture and murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena (February 9, 1985).
A document from this latter period, previously unpublished and preserved by Fifth Element Laboratoryreveals a very detailed x-ray of the former DFS and its entire infrastructure and logistics on 29 pages.
The group of spoiled boys from Nazar Haro unexpectedly appear there in a prominent place. C-047 is hierarchically directly subordinate to the Director of DFS and his advisors.
The document, drawn up in June 1984, shows the operational foundations of this espionage apparatus. Task Force C-047 had outlived its founder, who left the DFS in 1982.
José Antonio Zorrilla Pérez, then director of the political police, endorsed the report, whose purpose was to ask for a larger budget for 1985, without knowing that shortly afterwards he would suffer the consequences of the torture and murder of Enrique Camarena, in in which his agents would play a prominent role.
The disintegration accelerated on May 30, 1984, when Rafael Moro Ávila, grandnephew of a former president and one of the most prominent elements of the DFS, approached Buendía, the most influential columnist of his time, from behind, raised his coat and there, in the middle of the Insurgentes Centro Avenue, he executed him.
Personnel templates contain columns with specific data: the names of departments, the number of items they consisted of; Name, function and category of each member of the payroll (director, head of department, agent); Key to the Federal Register of Polluters, salary received and financial compensation.
For example, the director Zorrilla Pérez, who was later found guilty of participating in the planning of the murder of Manuel Buendía, received just over 685,000 pesos as direct annual salary and an additional compensation of 470,000 pesos was requested, which is approximately more than one million pesos from these years.
Among the statistical tables there is one that provides clues for locating the context of the document. A bar chart describes the increase in the number of employees (personnel) between 1977 and 1983. According to this scheme, it would have multiplied rapidly: from 459 to 3,008 members. Just over 3,000 DFS agents are deployed throughout the area.
The C-047 agents column appears on the first page of the document. At the top, with the position of commander, is the name Félix Martín Lozano Rangel, followed by Fernando de la Sota Rodallaguez. Then dozens more until you reach 35 items. There is only one woman in the entire team: Amalia Jaimes Corona.
* * *
C-047 had survived until the last day of the DFS. The documents provide a profile of the type of work carried out by the group’s agents, alongside the statements of two former police officers who asked that their names not be disclosed.
Among many of the documents signed with the code C-047 is the detailed record of departures and arrivals of foreigners through Mexico City International Airport.
Monitoring foreigners was one of the most common tasks of the DFS. According to the book Our Man in Mexico. Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA, these activities were part of a collaboration between the DFS and the CIA, known in the nomenclature of the US agency’s operations as “LIFIRE”, to monitor those who flew to Cuba: ” At Mexico City airport, Anne Goodpasture regularly collected the proceeds of a joint program with Mexican security forces called LIFIRE, passenger lists and passport photos of sympathizers traveling to the island.”
Tens of thousands of reports were generated about passengers entering and leaving the airport. Observation and tracking of foreigners was one of C-047’s main tasks.
Sergio Aguayo confirms the DFS’s particular interest in information on guerrilla groups in Latin America and in particular on issues related to Cuba.
“The phones of Russian, Cuban and Polish citizens were constantly tapped; Every person entering and leaving the diplomatic mission was photographed. The same thing happened at the international airport with travelers between Mexico and Havana… At a house on Shakespeare Street in Polanco, DFS agents handed over to the CIA the reports of this surveillance and even in this house there was a security base consisting of 10 to 20 DFS agents in the service of the CIA,” the specialist wrote in his book La Charola.
A former DFS agent brought in for the job recalls that one of his duties was to monitor the entry of foreigners into the international airport and then follow up on them. “I had to go to the Hotel Versalles, which no longer exists, near the Ministry of the Interior, to assist them in monitoring a group of visitors under the control of the Ministry of the Interior. It was a very important Arab-Palestinian group; “We have carried out surveillance work, including with the asylum seekers.”
The emigration of Mexicans abroad was also closely monitored. Towards the end of 1969, the C-047 team discovered a group of students traveling to Patricio Lumumba University in the then Soviet Union.
At the time, they weren’t able to find out much about the 60 students who flew to Moscow; only that they traveled with the support of the Mexican-Russian Cultural Institute on scholarships.
Once the group was discovered, agents made their appropriate report. Other areas of the DFS followed suit and put together a more comprehensive information map about what they believed to be the X-ray picture of subversion.
The DFS files viewed show how the spying and surveillance mechanism worked. An undated report in the nation’s General Archives points to the travelers to Moscow: “In late 1969 and early 1970, Mexicans studying at the Patricio Lumumba University in Moscow, Russia, were Fabricio Gómez Sousa, Alejandro López Murillo, Candelario Pacheco Gómez and Camilo Estrada Luviano, on the advice of their class advisors, looked for a way to contact the North Korean embassy in Moscow, where they received an offer for 50 Mexican students to receive training in guerrilla warfare, lasting six months, with the North Korean government covering the costs…”
The document contains at least 36 names whose entry met DFS classification standards, indicating that each of them already had their corresponding file.
#1: El Guero Lozano
Minutes 6:16. Chapter IV. Long shot of “This was the DFS”: The man in his fifties walks towards the camera. Blue shirt, no beard and with a small bag in his hands. An abrupt cut: the same man struggles to put on a fake mustache, beard, and wig; Glasses and tie. In a few seconds it was transformed.
Narrator’s voiceover: “So that the agents are not discovered, it is necessary to change their physiognomy when they attend events organized by the subjects under investigation, that is, those elements who already have personal contact with them…”.
The character who changes his image, which was common among spies at the time, is Félix Martín Lozano Rangel, better known as El Güero Lozano.
The traces of El Güero Lozano have been diluted in the labyrinths of oblivion. For those who knew him closely, he was the man from all of Nazar Haro who had complete confidence in him and was responsible for directing C-047.
There is a collection of photos of their agents in the DFS archives. These are payroll statements and administrative cards of the deployed personnel. They correspond to the years 1971-1972.
Among the images is one that corresponds to Félix Lozano Rangel. The pompadour makes a slight curve over his forehead; Not a hair is out of place. Beneath his thick eyebrows, his eyes look smaller than they perhaps were.
“He is Félix Martín Lozano,” confirm two former agents when looking at the photo and video image.
The written and in-person testimony makes it clear that the head of Nazar Haro’s trusted agent had complex responsibility for communicating with U.S. spy agencies.
This relationship “was managed by a comical and imaginative department cryptically called C-47, corresponding to the CIA and the embassy in general. The department consisted of a single person: El Güero Lozano,” writes Jorge Carrillo Olea, former director of the Center for Intelligence and National Security (Cisen), the organization created after the DFS died, in his book Clumsiness of Intelligence .
There was no public trace of Félix Martín Lozano’s story, nothing linking him to the DFS, and even less to C-047. So far, the documents published along with this text have been found.
El Güero will be 90 years old in 2023. And chances are good that his stories as commander of C-047 will stay with him.
Torturer Ayatollah
One of the former DFS agents who agreed to speak to the team of journalists recalls that in one of the DFS headquarters there was an area called “The Disco.” It depended on C-047 and was operated by a character with the nickname The Ayatollah, a tall, very thin and very cultured Arab who spoke several languages.
“He created this area, La Disco. It was a place of professional torture. When he tortured someone, the only thing you heard was the music of those years, disco music and what is still called psychedelic today. One of his favorite torture methods was the falanga. It consisted of making very well calculated and intermittent blows with a board on the sole of the foot; slow, neither strong nor violent; “So soft that the person being tortured hardly notices it, but in the end it breaks your knees.”
This practice was among those repeatedly used by the Army and DFS agents in the fight against insurgencies. In fact, a 1980 Amnesty International report reported that falanga or falka was still used as a method of torture.
José Luis Moreno Borbolla, a member of the Red Brigade of the September 23rd Communist League, describes how they used it. “They tied me to a board to put me in a horse trough, the famous little well, combined with electric shocks all over my body, and they also beat the soles of my feet with a board,” he recalls in his book Testimonies from the Dirty War.
Edward Peter, author of “The History of Torture,” describes this method as follows: “The continuous flogging of the soles of the feet (…): Each blow is felt not only in the soles of the feet, which bulge painfully as the stick touches sensitive nerves “crushes” the soles of the feet; The pain shoots through the leg muscles and explodes in the back of the head. The whole body suffers and the victim writhes like a caterpillar. Movement of the ankles, feet and toes is reduced. “In half of the cases examined, the chronic consequences of falanga persisted between two and seven years.”
Once one of the leaders of the White Brigade heard the howling from the disco and said to one of the former agents:
–Tell them to stop sucking and give us this guy.
–No, boss, come on, I’ll explain what it does to them.
–And why do they make so much of the blowjob?
– Now to find out what you want to know…
– Tell him to give it to you, we will get the information from him.
The former agent tells reporters that the Ayatollah did more sophisticated high school stuff. It was certain that anyone who fell into La Disco would have a bad time. “They spoke because they spoke. They sent prisoners in and out, it was on the ground floor, secluded, access restricted.”
One day, he says, I asked the Ayatollah what he felt when he tortured his victims. “What do you feel when you use these tortures? “Stop demanding blowjobs.” That was his response.”
–What happened to the Ayatollah?
–He drank coffee like crazy and smoked a lot. And then he started losing his mind because he became addicted to cocaine. He ran out of all his money for drugs and one day, out of money, he stole a watch from Commander Juventino Prado Hurtado, the head of the White Brigade. He gave her a mother.
* Quinto Elemento Lab is an independent, nonprofit journalistic organization that promotes and conducts investigative reporting in Mexico.
COORDINATION AND EDITORIAL: Ignacio Rodríguez Reyna
ILLUSTRATIONS: José Quintero
DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT: Isaac Ávila Ramón Arceo and Emmanuelle Hernández
ANIMATIONS: Francisco López
VIDEO POST PRODUCTION: Iván Cerón
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