The former president of Mexico José López Portillo, who ruled the country between 1976 and 1982, was an informant for the CIA, the US intelligence agency, according to a document declassified on Friday by the US National Archives Administration. López Portillo was active in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the oldest party in Mexico and which for 80 exercised hegemonic control in the government of the country.
The former president died in 2004 at the age of 83.
His collaboration with the CIA spanned several years and lasted at least until before he took office.
The declassified document is related to the CIA's investigations into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which occurred in 1963. The file indicates that the agency followed the footsteps of the only accused of the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, to Mexico, where he to run a multi-target phone call spying operation.
López Portillo's connection to the CIA is recorded in a file dated November 29, 1976, two days before the PRI politician formally assumed the presidency of Mexico.
The document is a memorandum of a meeting that took place that same day between eight CIA agents, at a time when several files related to the investigation of the
Kennedy case
were going to be declassified.
The agents externalized in the meeting the risks of the publication of the documents.
One of them, Bill Sturbitts, "noted that Mexico will soon have a new president, a man who has been in control of the link for several years."
López Portillo was not mentioned directly in the memorandum, but by then he had already won the elections —in which he was the only candidate on the ballot— and was just waiting for the formality of being officially sworn in on December 1. of that year.
Agent Surbitts told his colleagues that it was "foreseeable that he [López Portillo] would not welcome the fact that this relationship was made public."
And he added: “wiretapping was involved in that relationship,” according to the memo.
Image of the CIA intelligence report that has just been declassified.
The American writer Jefferson Morley has noted that López Portillo is the fourth Mexican president with ties to the CIA.
The other three were his predecessors in the Presidency of the Republic, all from the PRI: Luis Echeverría, who ruled from 1970 to 1976 and who was the one who appointed López Portillo as his successor, as was the tradition of the hegemonic party;
Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970) and Adolfo López Mateos (1958-1964).
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