USA: According to a recent batch of declassified documents published by the US National Archives, former Mexican president Jose Lopez Portillo, who governed the nation from 1976 to 1982, was a resource for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
A memo from a gathering of CIA agents on November 29, 1976, was one of the documents pertaining to a CIA investigation into the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Bill Sturbitts, a US intelligence official who participated in the discussions, informed his peers that "Mexico will soon have a new president, a man who has had control of Liaison for a number of years."
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Although Lopez Portillo wasn't specifically mentioned in the memo, the meeting happened just a few days before he took office.
As the lone representative of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled the nation from 1929 to 2000, he had run for office earlier that year. Age 83, Lopez Portillo passed away in 2004.
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The meeting detailed in the memo was held in anticipation of the papers from the CIA's inquiry into Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who was found guilty of killing JFK, being made public in mid-December 1976.
Shortly before the fatal shots were fired in Dallas, Oswald travelled to Mexico, and US intelligence subsequently conducted a massive surveillance and phone-tapping operation in the nation.
Authorities came to the conclusion that the Marine veteran shot the president while the presidential motorcade was passing by from a nearby building's sixth-floor window.
Oswald called himself a "patsy" and refuted the allegations. While in police custody, he was shot and killed two days after JFK was assassinated. Jack Ruby, who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, received a death sentence but passed away in prison from lung cancer.
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According to the declassified paper, Sturbitts predicted that Mexico's new president "can be expected not to look favourably upon publicity of that relationship" with the CIA during the 1976 meeting.
The fourth former president of Mexico to be identified as a US intelligence asset is Lopez Portillo. The other three were Adolfo Lopez Mateos (1958–1964), Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1964–1970), and Luis Echeverria (1970–1966).