The Dice Was Loaded: Two Photographers Reconstruct Mexico's Cold War Spies

Mexican photographers Valeria Arendar and Eleana Konstantellos have spent an ongoing project, The Dice Was Loaded from the Start, reconstructing the history of Cold War espionage in Mexico — a country where, according to the artists, "it is even said that all Mexican presidents who were in charge of the country between 1958 and 1988 were recruited by the US Intelligence Agency (CIA)."

Thirty years of superpower rivalry, from the aftermath of World War Two until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, ran on proxy wars, nuclear arsenals and the Space Race. It also ran on intelligence networks. By maintaining diplomatic ties with both the United States and the Soviet Union, and hosting both embassies in its capital, Mexico became a crucial node in the CIA's and KGB's work. Operation LITEMPO, a covert CIA operation, is one example. Yet little is known publicly about what actually happened there.

The two photographers found this history while researching political events of the 1970s and 1980s. Both build individual practices on the history and politics of 20th-century Latin America, grounded in family history: Arendar's heritage is Russian, Argentinian and Mexican; Konstantellos' is Greek, French and Mexican. A single image in the series — the artists' families' passports — quietly acknowledges those intertwined stories.

What does the archive actually contain?

The project is grounded in records of the Dirección Federal de Seguridad, Mexico's secret police, created with CIA support and operational for more than 35 years. The files now sit in the Archivo General de la Nación.

"There are millions of records, most of them ridiculous and registering people's daily routines," says Arendar. "For example, if you travelled to Cuba… you were automatically labelled a communist, a subversive, and needed to be under surveillance. I think the accumulation of all these seemingly innocuous files created an atmosphere of paranoia within Mexico's so-called democracy."

How do you photograph a secret?

The series collates four registers: archival images, forensic still lifes, unfamiliar apparatuses and staged photographs. The staging translates archive contexts into images — one shows a young man in a business suit smoking while an L-shaped ruler measures his height — delivered with sharp humour and play.

"We approached the project as a kind of game, and that's really what's behind the practice," says Konstantellos. "The staging, the fiction, dressing up and stepping into different roles, as a way of trying to understand the gaps in the official histories – and, in a sense, filling them."

The game has limits. "A lot of the files might seem overwhelming and make you wonder, what did they use them for?" says Konstantellos. "Often, the information in them turned into torture, disappearances, and a whole host of things that are much more intense – things that we often omit, that we don't quite know how to handle within the project, because they are very delicate."

One image addresses that darkness directly: a student killed in the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. In the lead-up to the Mexico City Olympics, non-violent demonstrators protested authoritarian rule, political repression and inequality; President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz framed them as a 'communist conspiracy', and soldiers and police opened fire on unarmed civilians. The photograph ties surveillance to state violence and enforced disappearance.

Why is photography itself the subject?

A second strand catalogues espionage kit. Drawing on analogue photographic technology and research into the collection of the German Spy Museum, the artists built a typology of surveillance tools the KGB might have used in Mexico — shot against cold, sterile backdrops in greyscale, or lit in dramatic chiaroscuro.

"Photography is a fundamental part of espionage," says Konstantellos. "It is direct proof that someone entered a house at a particular time, or that an exchange of information took place. Photography is always a secondary character in espionage, and we realised it would be interesting to incorporate the medium itself, to create a kind of meta-project through analogue photography and all its different components."

Where has the project turned lately?

More recently, Arendar and Konstantellos moved away from the genre's familiar furniture — gadgets and men — toward the women inside Mexico's intelligence networks.

"We didn't want to be two women photographing more male spies, as Hollywood has done, so we decided to approach the project through a gender perspective," says Arendar. "The structures that made espionage possible included secretaries, receptionists, telephone operators, the wives of diplomats and so on – all roles that remained largely invisible. We call them the unconscious army of espionage."

In the resulting images, women carry briefcases, pass documents, climb staircases, move files, listen in, sit at hairdressing salons, wait at home. All but one look away — a gesture that underlines women's secondary place in espionage's histories while casting them, paradoxically, as indispensable. The most effective spies are the ones you never know about.

"The gradual disappearance of faces accompanies a shift in the project," the artists explain. "Individual identities cease to be the centre of attention, giving way to a reflection on those anonymous presences that sustain the system from the margins."

A further meta-layer: both artists perform for the camera, and their authorship disappears with them. "Our physical resemblance plays into this ambiguity, and we want this uncertainty to be part of the experience of the images," they say. The viewer is left wondering who is photographing whom.

Does a Cold War project speak to now?

The artists think so, particularly on surveillance. "They still raise the same key questions," says Konstantellos. "Espionage is one of the most current issues we're experiencing, and being able to discuss it from the perspective of the past helps people gain some distance and reflect on it."

One photograph makes the point with a wink: two women under hooded hairdryers, listening intently — a fiction about diplomats' wives that mirrors the everyday. "We've all gone to the hairdresser and eavesdropped," smiles Arendar. "You don't set out to do it, but it has become normal."

Where photographs have long been read as evidence, The Dice Was Loaded from the Start treats them as tools for speculation and reconstruction — visual form for histories the archives cannot fully reveal. "What's interesting about fiction is that it also helps us think about future worlds," the artists say. "In that sense, it helps us to rethink the past to envisage a better future." With the project still ongoing, the next instalments will tell whether that bet pays off.