Young people in Mexico are taking to TikTok to imagine themselves as agents from the country’s 1970s secret police, the DFS – a force which was infamous for torturing, murdering or disappearing thousands during the country’s “dirty war”.
The trend, which has sparked condemnation by some users on the social media platform, has seen young people use AI to transform themselves into agents glorifying the “absolute impunity” afforded to the notoriously corrupt and brutally violent secret police.
The videos mostly show young men in gray or brown suits standing proudly in front of a 1970s Cadillac or Rolls-Royce, accompanied by catchy Mexican music and variations of the same text: “I would’ve loved to live in the 70s with my DFS badge, total impunity … smelling of whiskey and smoke with a shitload of money.”
Founded in 1947 under the country’s dictatorial PRI party, the Federal Security Directorate (DFS) was Mexico’s version of the FBI, providing intelligence on subversive groups, spying on political opponents and suffocating resistance to the regime.
In the late 1960s and early 70s, with the rise of the student protest movement and later armed guerrilla groups, the DFS became notorious for its brutal tactics: kidnapping, torture, and forced disappearance.
The group was involved in “death flights”, in which suspected guerrillas were taken to a military base near the port city of Acapulco, where they were subsequently killed, their bodies put on a plane and tossed into the Pacific.
“They developed a brutal but effective strategy to annihilate the cells of the multiple guerrilla organizations that emerged in the 70s and 80s,” said Sergio Aguayo, a Mexican historian who has studied the DFS closely. “They were ruthless in their attacks against the insurgency.”
In the early 1980s, with the guerrilla movement largely quashed, the DFS became involved with the country’s early drug trafficking groups, offering them protection and even transporting drugs themselves, according to Aguayo.
A journalist investigating the ties between the DFS, the CIA and drug trafficking groups was brutally murdered in 1984. A year later, a DEA agent named Enrique ‘Kiki’ Camarena was kidnapped and murdered by drug traffickers. Subsequent investigations found that the DFS were involved in both killings, and the agency was dissolved in November 1985.
Aguayo said the TikTok videos are examples of “the rise of the culture of violence and the discrediting of the work ethic … The point is to make a lot of money quickly, without paying attention to how it’s done.”
But Irene Soria, a feminist scholar and expert on digital culture, argued that the videos point to something more complex: the rise of the Mexican far right and its opposition to the feminist movement.
“We’ve seen this, especially in the macho-sphere,” said Soria. “This idea of going against feminism, and by placing myself in opposition to feminism, then I’m the resistance.”
Mexico’s feminist movement has become particularly powerful in recent years, with hundreds of thousands of women taking to the streets of cities all over the country to mark International Women’s Day and protest violence against women.
Yet there are also videos posted by women, some of them posing as DFS agents too but many as wives of agents or high-ranking politicians in the PRI.
Soria compares this to the “tradwife” phenomenon in the US, where women also reject modern feminist ideals and adopt 1950s-style gender roles.
“There has been another wave of very young girls who say, ‘Oh no, I do want to be supported,’” she said. “‘I do want to have a family and have a rich guy who maintains me.’”
The DFS videos have also ignited something of a backlash, with some users taking to TikTok to point out the brutal nature of the secret police agency.
“It’s incredible to see how a trend can override collective memory,” wrote one young woman, using the same music from the DFS videos. “We were NOT better off before; stop romanticizing one of the institutions that has done the most damage to the country.”
