State Violence and the Bitter Ends of the <i>Milagro Mexicano</i>

Abstract For decades, scholars tasked with analyzing the demise of the “Mexican miracle” would concentrate largely on the economic fallout of the miracle’s end. But over the last two decades, with the opening of new archives from Mexico’s secret police and intelligence agencies, scholars have begun to argue that the rise and fall of the miracle was shadowed by a spiraling campaign of state violence—a campaign whose depth and breadth has only recently begun to be recognized, investigated, and documented as a guerra sucia, a dirty war. But the process of uncovering and interpreting this state violence in the archives has met with real resistance from the state agencies and political parties implicated in those files, which have been repeatedly released and restricted. Today, as historians reckon with the violence endemic to the milagro mexicano and its aftermath, much more than the historiography is at stake.