As guerrilla groups sprouted up across Mexico in the early 1970s, the military and police routinely resorted to extreme acts of violence, including the systematic use of torture. In The Last Door, Gladys McCormick provides the most thorough account of how torture became a crucial and routine practice of the Mexican government’s war against subversives. Drawing from extensive oral history interviews and declassified government documents, McCormick describes experiences of arrest, torture, and detention in which forced disappearances became all too common and advocates for justice rallied around political prisoners. Torture was not always about extracting information; it was also about inflicting punishment on a faceless so-called enemy and instilling terror into advocates of social change. As McCormick argues, torture became a quotidian practice of state making in Mexico during the 1970s, leaving individuals and their families forever changed. The lack of repercussions for government officials notorious for employing torture, even in spite of a growing movement for truth and justice, has led to entrenched impunity that is endemic in Mexico as its contemporary security crisis continues.
Gladys I. McCormick is Associate Professor of History and Jay and Debe Moskowitz Endowed Chair in Mexico-US Relations at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
“McCormick has written a deeply moving and meticulously researched history of the Mexican dirty war by focusing on one of its main technologies: torture. The stories she narrates make for poignant reading and demonstrate how state terror and violence formed a structural feature of the PRI’s long rule over the country. What also makes this excellent scholarship so compelling is its tragically direct relevance to Mexico today.”—Alexander Aviña, author of Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside
"In this groundbreaking study of state terror and impunity in Cold War Mexico, McCormick rejects the notion of the single-party PRI state as being exceptional in the broader Latin American region. With careful attention to her training in gender and memory studies, she points to the subversive decade of the 1970s as a critical period in the nation’s 'dirty war' history that witnessed the emergence of innovative and institutionalized counterinsurgency tools, which are still operating in Mexico today."—Jaime M. Pensado, author of Love and Despair: How Catholic Activism Shaped Politics and the Counterculture in Modern Mexico
"The Last Door is an astonishing account of torture in Mexico that explains how the state institutionalized cruelty to ensure its power and crush dissent. McCormick weaves dozens of interviews with activists and revolutionaries who survived torture in the 1970s into an extraordinary story of political violence that persists today."—Kate Doyle, Senior Analyst, National Security Archive
296 pp.6 x 9Illus: 4 b/w figures, 3 maps
9780520404205$29.95|£25.00Paper
May 2025