Croft Visiting Speaker: Intelligence and Power in Modern Mexico

Monday, September 14, 2015 - 7 p.m. - The Joseph C. Bancroft Conference Room (Croft 107) - Dr. Aaron Navarro, Trinity University

On Monday, September 14, the Croft Institute is proud to host Dr. Aaron W. Navarro, Associate Professor of History, Trinity University. Professor Navarro teaches courses on various facets of Latin American history, including country surveys of Brazil and Mexico.

Dr. Navarro's research is mainly focused on twentieth-century Mexican politics, especially opposition presidential campaigns, secret police and intelligence agencies, the military in politics, and the development of a single-party dominant system under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). The key source for his research has been the archives of the Mexican intelligence services. When these papers were made accessible to the public in the late 1990s, he was the first U.S. scholar to work through the entire collection for a research project and begin to catalog the contents. Dr. Navarro's new project is an extension of this earlier work and seeks to place Mexican President Miguel Alemán (1946-1952) in the context of the dramatic shifts in the political system at mid-century. While at the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Navarro tripled majored in Plan II, History, and Spanish, before he received his Ph.D. in History from Harvard University. 

Dr. Navarro's research forms the basis of his lecture, "Intelligence Matters in Latin America". 

Co-sponsors for the event are the Arch Dalrymple III Department of History and the Center for Intelligence and Security Studies.