The CIA Station in Mexico: The Last JFK Assassination Records Secrets

01.10.2026

Briefing Book #: 931

By Claire Dorfman and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi

Source:https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence-mexico/2026-10-01/cia-station-mexico-last-jfk-assassination-records

Washington, D.C., October 1, 2026 - The CIA continues to keep secret major substantive portions of an internal accounting of its activities in Mexico, including information on covert operations targeting student groups in the days leading up to the massacre at Tlatelolco 58 years ago this week on October 2, 1968. Long-redacted excerpts from the three-volume Mexico City station history are among the last remaining secrets from the massive trove of records that were reviewed for declassification under the JFK Assassination Records Review Act of 1992.

At the same time, other CIA documents from the JFK collection offer clues as to what the Agency is hiding. In 1967, one year prior to the Tlatelolco massacre, a CIA official warned of the consequences of supporting the radical right-wing student group MURO (Movimiento Universitario de Renovadora Orientación). “We appreciate the need for a Station militant action team for specific harassment purposes as the need arises,” the official wrote. “We believe, however, that the long-range negative effect of perpetuating MURO outweighs the tactical short-range benefits to be derived from MURO harassment actions at our instigation.” By 1968, the CIA station in Mexico City had been financing far-right radical extremists at universities and adding to the polarization of the Mexican student movement for years. Together, the redacted station history and other declassified documents from the JFK files reveal that, despite dissent within the Agency and State Department, the CIA continued to conduct extensive operations against leftist student groups in Mexico, even after the violence at Tlatelolco.

The CIA’s Mexico City station history is an essential document in the JFK Assassination Records Collection that provides a rare view into U.S.-Mexico relations and what the CIA considered its most important operations in a capital of Cold War espionage. The document lists and describes dozens of CIA covert operations carried out in Mexico, including projects with cryptonyms like LIHUFF, LICOAX, LIMIX, LIAGOG, and LINOODLE. Yet full transparency remains elusive, as critical redactions remain in the 2025 release of this record. For the Agency, the secrets still buried represent some of their most sensitive projects and relationships with foreign governments.

The records published today by the National Security Archive highlight what the JFK collection does and does not reveal about CIA operations in Mexico. Taken together, these documents provide important context to help identify and understand the secrets the Agency still refuses to release more than half a century later. A close reading of the redacted history and these related records reveals what the CIA is most eager to conceal:

Nearly ten completely redacted pages detailing CIA operations against left-wing student groups in the lead-up to the massacre at Tlatelolco on October 2, 1968

Key paragraphs related to Miguel Nazar Haro, one of the architects of Mexico’s brutal surveillance state and a CIA asset

Operations targeting labor and campesino groups in Mexico City and the countryside

Intelligence gathering against the Mexican government through liaison relationships with high-level members of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI)