Enrique Mendieta and the Ghosts of Leftism Past: The Aftereffects of Mexico’s Dirty War in Élmer Mendoza’s Detective Fiction

The road to the post–Cold War neoliberal globalizing system of spiraling wealth inequality, reduced governmental social provisions, and dwindling labor power was paved to a substantial degree with the violent suppression of leftists, particularly throughout the developing world. By working in conjunction with assorted local reactionary forces in various nations to purge populations with a social vision incompatible with a pro-rich, corporate-capitalist socioeconomic order, the United States imperialistically helped create social climates less resistant to the imposition of neoliberal political economy through military dictatorships, International Monetary Fund “structural adjustment programs,” and changing orthodoxies among ruling elites starting in the 1970s and proliferating in the 1980s. For example, when General Suharto seized power in Indonesia with U.S. backing in 1965, his forces massacred 100,000 people affiliated with the Indonesian Communist Party in Bali, 8 percent of the island’s population, with the U.S. embassy providing lists of communists who might be disposed of (Prashad, 2007: 154–155). Likewise, U.S.-backed Saddam Hussein’s elimination of the Iraqi Communist Party, the largest in the Arab world, allowed for the rise of a more authoritarian state not committed to the collective material betterment of its people, as did U.S. and Saudi Arabian support for similar regimes that eliminated the progressive-leftist factions in Sudan and Afghanistan in the name of conservative Islamist states (Prashad, 2007: 160–161, 274).

There is an emerging corpus of world literary fiction that seeks to come to terms with the deteriorated social circumstances brought on in different parts of the world by the global turn toward a neoliberal political economy (for analysis see Walonen, 2016; 2018). One way in which contemporary writers have sought to come to terms with neoliberalism that has yet to receive adequate attention is by reconsidering the popular leftist movements of the past either through the vehicle of historical fiction or through characters in contemporary settings who were part of these movements in their younger days. This way of considering holders of social visions alternative to neoliberalism that did not (or have not yet) come to fruition is evident in works treating, for instance, India’s Maoist Naxalite movement, such as Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (2014) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013), or the U.S. revolutionary left of the 1970s, such as Russell Banks’s The Darling (2004) and Christopher Sorentino’s Trance (2005). In Mexican letters this trend has manifested itself in fictional reappraisals of the leftist insurrectionists suppressed during the country’s dirty war (1965–1982), which have appeared particularly in the contemporary Mexican detective novel, perhaps in part because of the genre’s leftist politicized slant, following in the tradition of Paco Ignacio Taibo II.

Mexico’s dirty war was a long-standing effort on the part of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party—PRI), which had ruled over the nation as a single-party state since 1929, in conjunction with the various branches of law enforcement and the military it was able to draw upon, to quell popular-leftist attempts to achieve greater levels of democracy and economic justice and equality. It was sparked and shaped by multiple overlapping socio-historical contexts of various geographical scales: on an international level by the revolutionary zeal of what many historians have come to term “the Global Sixties” and by Cold War–spirited efforts by the United States and its allies to suppress socialist revolution throughout the Global South; on a regional level by the influence of Cuba’s revolution on Mexico’s political left, on the one hand, and the spread of U.S.-backed authoritarian regimes throughout Latin America, on the other; and on a national level by efforts to move beyond the single-party rule of the PRI and carry farther the transformative spirit of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), among other things.

While much popular and scholarly attention to the radicalism of this period of Mexican history has focused on Mexico City, the year 1968, and the massacre of hundreds of protesters in the Tlatelolco plaza, the forms of resistance and social agitation it saw appeared throughout the country and ran the gamut from peaceful protest to both rural and urban guerrilla activities. Likewise, efforts to stem the tide of populist social revolution were varied, ranging from efforts by President Luis Echeverría’s administration to make some small concessions to the leftists to the use of right-wing youth paramilitary organizations like Los Halcones (The Hawks) to carry out acts of violence against them. The most notorious and enduring of these suppression efforts were the kidnapping, torture, and killing of leftists that have come to be known as the dirty war. Casualty estimates range from the Mexican government’s figure of 600 to the Informe Histórico a la Sociedad Mexicana’s calculation of 2,000 imprisoned, 5,000 tortured, 1,000 murdered, and 1,300 disappeared and the Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de los Movimientos Armados estimate of 400 disappeared and 3,000 dead in the state of Guerrero alone (Calderón, 2012: 212; Mendoza García, 2016: 135). By 1982, the year that the International Monetary Fund began imposing structural adjustments on Mexico, moving the country precipitously down the road of neoliberal political economy, these counterrevolutionary measures had killed off the country’s leftist guerrilla organizations (Calderón, 2012: 264). However, from their ashes arose both the Ejército Popular Revolucionario (Popular Revolutionary Army—EPR) and the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation—EZLN), founded by surviving militants from this earlier period around the time that NAFTA was established in 1994 (Calderón, 2012: 265). And the state violence visited upon urban working-class and rural indigenous communities during the neoliberal era marks a continuation of rather than a break from the repression of this earlier era (Pensado and Ochoa, 2018: 10). So the past of revolution and counterrevolution in Mexico is not dead (to paraphrase Faulkner), in some ways “it’s not even past.”

This continuance of the revolutionary strife of the dirty war period to the present day, both as a legacy and in the form of its survivors, resonates strongly in the work of Élmer Mendoza, the novelist most widely known as “the godfather of narco-lit.” As Michael Wood (2017: 25) observes, Mendoza’s work tends to look at society from the point of view of a crime—his novels use the occurrence and investigation of a crime as a device for surveying contemporary Mexican society. By its very nature the detective fiction genre on which Mendoza draws allows for this sort of social investigation, providing as it does a “framework” for a “wider interrogation of society” (Krajenbrink and Quinn, 2009: 1).

For instance, while it is not a work of detective fiction, Mendoza’s early novel Janis Joplin’s Lover (2001) employs this form of social investigation in considering early drug traffickers in their relation to the Mexican state and the leftist guerrillas of the dirty war period as a means of coming to terms with the rising tides of socioeconomic inequality and violence that have inundated Mexican society since the late-1960s/early-1970s period in which the novel is set. Janis Joplin’s Lover narrates the tale of protagonist David Valenzuela, ¹ a talented baseball player from the coastal town of Chacala, Mexico, who flees to the United States after inadvertently killing the son of a local drug baron, is invited to play for a Los Angeles Dodgers minor-league affiliate, has a one-night stand with the singer Janis Joplin, gets involved with a drug smuggler named El Cholo after returning to Mexico, is imprisoned, and eventually dies jumping from a helicopter from which he is about to be thrown into the sea in the manner that many of the leftist activists of the period were disposed of by law enforcement agents.

The novel bears witness to the Mexican state’s combined suppression of leftists, whom it tortures and then falsely passes off to the mass media as drug traffickers, and its manner of turning a blind eye toward or collaborating with the actual traffickers. David Valenzuela is torn between two poles—that of the revolutionaries, with their collectivist, egalitarian social vision, and that of the narco-traffickers, with their individualistic pursuit of wealth and power. He is courted by both his cousin, El Chato, a student activist turned guerrilla leader, and the rising drug dealer El Cholo. When El Chato goes on the run, later to be killed following the kidnapping and ransoming of a wealthy banker, David agrees to carry out a smuggling run for El Cholo out of desperation to acquire the funds to return to Los Angeles and be reunited with Janis Joplin, to whom he has formed a strong, idealistic romantic attachment. This whole narrative structure of motivations and decisions can be read allegorically: David, as the personification of Mexico, is spurred by a longing for a United States that he envisions as a free-wheeling place of liberty interspersed with mutual dependence and affiliation that is embodied by Janis Joplin, pop cultural exemplar of the hippie generation but, more to the point, performer of the song “Me and Bobby McGee” that gives voice to this vision (in the novel Joplin is searching for Kris Kristofferson, the song’s composer, when she encounters David). This ideal United States as a font of ultimate liberation that David longs for contrasts, of course, with its geopolitical role as an imperial power, also figured early in the novel through the “Vietnam War” water-and-ice-fight game that David and his baseball teammates play. Driven by the Janis Joplin dream of liberty and connection, the novel’s allegory holds that David/early-1970s Mexico is forced to choose between collective social amelioration and the corrupt, mercenary self-interest of the narco-traffickers. With the proverbial scales tilted toward the latter by the repressive arm of the state, Mexico slides steadily toward greater criminality and selfish, inegalitarian materialism. However, the narrative does ultimately affirm some possibility of individual agency, since in the end David jumps from the helicopter rather than being pushed by agents of the repressive apparatus of the state.

Mendoza’s more recent novels, which center on the fictional exploits of the police detective Lefty Mendoza, do not engage with the student activists and leftist guerrillas of the dirty war period in anywhere near as direct and extended a manner as Janis Joplin’s Lover, but these figures continually hover at the margins of these texts and thus these novels insist on the bearing of the earlier suppression of Mexico’s revolutionary left upon the country’s early-twenty-first-century present. And whereas Janis Joplin’s Lover represents the unfolding of the repression of the progressive revolutionary faction of Mexican society during the dirty war, the Lefty Mendieta novels take up the aftereffects of this suppression and the social traces of the purged or exiled leftists.

Set mostly in and around Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, during the opening years of Mexico’s disastrous War on Drugs, Mendoza’s five Lefty Mendieta novels—Silver Bullets (2015 [2008]), The Acid Test (2017a [2011]), Name of the Dog (2018 [2012]), Kissing the Detective (2016), and Murder in Sinaloa Park (2017b)—chronicle the homicide detective Edgar “Lefty” Mendieta’s efforts to solve a series of murders within a noiresque violent and morally ambiguous world in which he comes to frequently rely on assistance from the region’s main drug cartel more than on the branches of the Mexican state. The aggregate picture of early-twenty-first-century Mexican society that emerges from these works is one in which poverty and crime are rampant and the social state has been hollowed out by the decades of neoliberal political economy that commenced with the structural adjustment program imposed on the country by the International Monetary Fund in 1982. Name of the Dog begins with a fictional facsimile of the president of the republic lamenting this state of things and the fact that he has been widely seen as undertaking such actions as initiating the War on Drugs to achieve a semblance of legitimacy after the bitterly disputed election of 2006: “I’m sick and tired of hearing that I want to legitimize myself, that the economy is collapsing, that we’re a failed state” (Mendoza, 2018 [2012]: 16). Shortly thereafter a crime witness adds a “street-level” perspective that accentuates this sense of general malaise, lamenting, “This country is a piece of shit, tell me it ain’t so, deep into a war that’s going no place fast [its War on Drugs], 50 million living in poverty and maybe 60 million unemployed” (30). All the while, as fighting between cartels and government forces and between cartels drags on, the police are “busy keeping watch on another country altogether” (58)—taking imperialist marching orders from the United States. At the same time, provincial drug barons have stepped in where the state has abandoned its role in social welfare provision, providing much-needed public services and employment. One of these, head of the Pacific cartel (the novels’ roman à clef stand-in for the Sinaloa cartel), brings electricity to villages while restoring their churches and schools (35). He exclaims at one point, “I turned this slum into something. I built entire neighborhoods and created more jobs than any government” (153), while his daughter boasts that “the president, his ministers, and every brownnoser around them salutes him. If it weren’t for him millions of people would be unemployed and dying of hunger” (65). Thus, in Mendoza’s narrative rendering, the Mexican state lacks popular legitimacy and either the volition or the wherewithal to provide social amelioration, while the major drug cartels with which it is locked in armed struggle manifest their local power by taking on many of its erstwhile functions.

Hovering in the narrative background of these novels as a sort of spectral trace are the left-populists whose suppression allowed for the evolution of the Mexican society that Mendoza represents in this somewhat dystopian manner. Twice in Silver Bullets, the first volume of the series, a statue of the Mexican revolutionary leader and populist land reformer Emiliano Zapata is mentioned in the course of Mendieta’s peregrinations across Culiacán in search of the identity of a killer (2015 [2008]: 162, 202). Both times the Zapata statue is described as receding into the background as Mendieta drives along, thus symbolizing the way in which the egalitarianism, economic justice, and revolutionary change that Zapata represents is fading into Mexico’s increasingly distant past. ² In the absence of this kind of progressive social force, everyday people in Mendoza’s novels often find themselves trapped between the repressive arm of the state and the havoc wrought by narco-traffickers as they try to maintain their lucrative empires in the face of Mexico’s War on Drugs. One of these people, a gardener whom Lefty talks up in search of clues in The Acid Test, says that he dislikes and avoids the police because of their role in the suppression of leftist activists (2017a [2011]: 196): “Years ago they arrested my son and I never saw him again. A good boy, no doubt. ³ He was a student leader, I never understood what he did wrong, all he did was dream. My older brother had to flee the country and to this day he can’t come back. Was he a leader too? A guerrilla.” These questions of dreaming/idealism and its absence crop up continually when the leftists purged during Mexico’s dirty war are evoked, and it receives its most focused treatment through the figure mentioned here—Lefty’s exiled brother Enrique Mendieta.

When Enrique is first mentioned in Silver Bullets, he is in no way associated with the progressive youth radicalism of late-1960s/1970s Mexico; rather, he is presented as one of the many members of a diasporic transnational Mexico that spans both sides of the border with the United States. His rationale for emigrating was that his lover had died, and for 12 years he has been living in Oregon, where he waxes nostalgic about Culiacán over the telephone to Lefty and is spending his middle age “going to fat” (2015 [2008]: 37). Later Silver Bullets introduces a childhood friend of Lefty’s, Foreman Castelo, a former “urban guerrilla” who left behind social reform for entrepreneurship, starting a murder-for-hire business (130). Castelo represents the devolution from idealistic social reformism to mercenary individualist egotism sans moral calculus. In The Acid Test, the next volume in the series, when Castelo appears no mention is made of this past radicalism; rather, the role of former leftist guerrilla is transferred with a somewhat different thematic function to Enrique Mendieta. When Lefty encounters a close friend of his brother’s from their old neighborhood, he asks him, “Is it true the two of you were guerrillas?” and receives the jocular evasive but affirmative response “Sure, I trained Subcommander Marcos” (2017a [2011]: 131). ⁴ While the text does not outline the former political program or guerrilla actions of Enrique and his comrade, ⁵ noting only that they purchased firearms and “liberated” at least one motor vehicle (247, 248), it leaves for a time the implication that Enrique went into exile to escape the government-sponsored mass program of imprisonment, torture, and even murder of leftist dissidents during the period. ⁶ But though in Kissing the Detective (2016: 201) Enrique mentions having escaped from the “antiguerrilla police twice” during his time as a young militant activist, it turns out that he has had to leave Mexico for the United States because he murdered the priest who had molested a juvenile Lefty (2017a [2011]: 247).

In the morally ambiguous War on Drugs setting of the Lefty Mendieta novels, the figure of the priest-as-molester can be read as symbolizing the abdication of the social force traditionally, albeit contestedly, seen as the arbiter of morality in Mexican society: the Catholic Church. In killing the priest, the guerrilla Enrique has taken this role of moral arbiter onto himself, but while he represents the possibility of moral action in this narrative world it is a distant one—Enrique lives far away in Oregon, rather than in a state on the U.S. southern border, and has only once, clandestinely, revisited Mexico, thus symbolizing that the possibilities of moral action and populist social amelioration that he and his cohort of 1970s reformers represent exist but only as a potentiality far-removed from the daily Northern Mexican realities that Lefty encounters in these novels. In other words, Enrique can be read as representing a lost—but not totally lost—alternative to neoliberalism in Mexico, ⁷ which over the past four decades has ravaged the living conditions of most Mexicans, fostered deep socioeconomic inequalities, and largely pushed aside the popular spirit of the Mexican Revolution.

Along these lines, it is worth noting that Lefty had wanted to become a priest (2015 [2008]: 2) but turned to law enforcement as a means of maintaining some sort of moral order. While often bending the law by taking small bribes (38) or overlooking small crimes and almost invariably collaborating with the local narcotics kingpins in his pursuit of murderers, Lefty represents as close to a moral center as this series of novels offers, and they repeatedly note that he lives “in his brother’s house” (85; 2017a [2011]: 19), symbolically posing him as a semicontinuation of the exiled spirit of leftist radicalism of a previous generation rather than as some anomalous knight errant or conservative guardian of traditional mores. In fact, in Kissing the Detective Enrique formally transfers ownership of this home to Lefty, who eventually reluctantly accepts it (2016: 201). While largely presented as absent in the Mexico the novels represent, the spirit Enrique personifies that will be passed on to Lefty is presented as one of unification and collectivization: Enrique brings about the reunion of Lefty with the son he had not realized he had sired, to which the first three books of the series narratively build (2018 [2012]: 65). This is treated as a potential rallying point for Lefty and, by extension, Mexico when faced with a daunting challenge—when, in a physical altercation with an abundantly muscled spurned lover of his son’s mother, Lefty reminds himself that he has “a brother who had been a guerrilla” and marshals the energies to fight on (116). Again, while Enrique’s existential status is uncertain, even in his country of longtime residence—Lefty muses at one point that his brother may be an undocumented immigrant (2018 [2012]: 195)—he represents a possibility of popular collective struggle and moral social action that has been driven from early twenty-first-century Mexican society but is not entirely unreachable.

In Kissing the Detective Lefty raises the question of a quiet sort of reintegration of Enrique and, by figurative extension, the spirit he personifies with a Mexican society ravaged by neoliberalism and the violence unleashed by its drug war: “You can go back to Mexico whenever you want, you will not have any problem.” But Enrique refuses, citing “persecutors who haven’t respected and aren’t going to respect the amnesty,” and then launches into a diatribe on social disorder and the corrupt political elite in Mexico (2016: 201). This suggests not only the continuing presence in Mexican society of reactionary forces not disposed to reconciliation with the leftist ideals and figures of a previous generation but also a failure of popular democracy and justice that will not allow for the presence of collectivism and egalitarianism. But of course this is what the Lefty Mendieta novels attest to: a society of rampant violence and corruption wherein the powerful are indifferent to the yearnings of the disaffected majority of the population and the wealthy, who have become so through either illicit or state-sanctioned business practices, leave the poor farther and farther behind materially. But Kissing the Detective highlights the fact that a similar social state prevails in the United States as well: the failures and/or abuses of its legal system are evoked in Lefty’s sardonic references to O. J. Simpson, Rodney King, and the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (2016: 187, 208), as is the marginalized social role allotted to the U.S.-based Mexican diaspora—“washing dishes, mowing, or harvesting lettuce” (178). Therefore, when Enrique proposes that, in contrast to the situation in Mexico, in the United States Lefty could seek law enforcement assistance to help save his kidnapped son, Lefty summarily dismisses the idea and muses that the only difference between the U.S. and the Mexican authorities is that they shoot a different caliber of bullet (208). While in the United States this means that law enforcement serves the interests of the wealthy and powerful and perpetuates, in particular, the oppression of the racial minorities that Lefty notes, in Mexico it is manifest in the long tradition of the suppression of left-populist dissent stretching from the dirty war to the present. Just as the spirit of 1970s student revolt, personified by Enrique Mendieta, is presented as not having been entirely effaced, the forms of repression of the dirty war era have continued as well. While in his day Enrique had to evade the “antiguerrilla police,” with their torture and extrajuridical killing, in Murder in Sinaloa Park (2017b: 191), the latest Lefty Mendoza novel to date, Lefty is at one point interrogated by the Mexican federal police in a “torture room” recently used to discipline and question teachers protesting the Educational Reform Act of 2013. Redolent of the interrogation chambers where student leftists were subjected to torture in Janis Joplin’s Lover, this snapshot of a site of state repression in the 2010s serves as a reminder that the basic methods of repression—here of resistance to measures widely seen as designed to break a powerful national teachers’ union and allow for the mass firing of teachers (Slaughter, 2016)—have not changed much in four decades.

While references to the continuities, memories, and participants of Mexico’s dirty war only occasionally appear on the margins of the main plot lines driving the Lefty Mendieta novels, helping to flesh out a picture of Mexican society in the decade or so subsequent to the inception of the country’s drug war, they testify to the continuing resonance of this period of violent repression and reject the downplaying if not wholesale erasure of the events in the collective memory that a series of ruling regimes has sought to perpetrate. One reason for the recent resurgence of this interest in the dirty war may be that the global recession of 2008, the year the first Lefty Mendieta novel was published, called into question the legitimacy and desirability of the neoliberal capitalism that had been so widely and resoundingly trumpeted as the only viable political-economic path forward in the post–Cold War era. This gave rise to a worldwide search for political alternatives such as the suppressed left-populism of the past, particularly in Latin America, where neoliberalism had already begun to be seen as a failed project, and this helped to discredit Mexico’s political elite, opening its past actions to question. The Ayotzinapa disappearances have provided further fuel for the interrogation and delegitimation of Mexico’s traditional power structures, particularly the repressive apparatuses of the state and their histories of violence.

All of this helped lead to the 2018 election of the leftist (though not in any radical or revolutionary sense of the term) Andrés Manuel Lόpez Obrador as president, which may end up marking a significant shift in Mexico’s political economy and concomitantly its official stance toward the legacies of its dirty war. In June 2019 the first of a series of memorials to the victims of the dirty war was opened, and earlier that year Lόpez Obrador made available to the public the national archives pertaining to it, thus lifting the veil of secrecy that had prevailed at the federal level for decades (Krumholtz, 2019). It remains to be seen whether this will prove to be a good-faith attempt to come to terms with the abuses of the past à la the efforts of the Kirchner governments in Argentina or whether it will be more tokenistic in nature. And the main issue facing Mexico today is whether acknowledging and commemorating this history will be part of a larger movement to undo its legacies—particularly the prowealthy, antiworking-class neoliberal political economy to whose inception the dirty war contributed.