The Two Lefts of Jorge Castañeda

In 1981, as revolution and counterinsurgency raged across Central America, Mexico’s secret police believed they had bagged an important spy: Jorge Castañeda Gutman, the son of the foreign secretary. According to surveillance carried out by the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS), Castañeda was an avowed “Marxist Leninist” who had betrayed his country on behalf of the Cuban government, by using his father’s connections to help foreign revolutionaries from Central America. A quarter century later, in 2006, Jorge Castañeda published an article in Foreign Affairs that would have shocked his DFS pursuers.