From the 1940’s until 1987 the Puerto Rican Police- in collaboration with the FBI and CIA- watched, intimidated, and in some cases murdered political activists on the island. The program remains one of the longest continuous surveillance programs by the US government on its own citizens. Aimed mostly at people advocating for independence from the United States, the operation, led by a secret police division, tracked over 150,000 people and compiled extensive dossiers on over 15,000.

The program was uncovered in 1987 after a decade-long investigation into the brutal execution of two university students by the Puerto Rico Police Intelligence Division in 1978. When the unit was dismantled, the original surveillance files were returned directly to the victims, whole and unredacted. This is the only such declassification in the world, and a rare view into the inner workings of how states use surveillance for ideological persecution. The files reveal that neighbors, close friends, andeven in some cases family members served as informants in exchange for money or under coercion. To this day, those who watched and were watched live side by side in a society with deep wounds but no collective memory of what happened.

For the last 9 years I have become a guerrilla archivist, finding these files and recompiling the archivethrough still life photography, digitization and research. The resulting reconstructed “archive” repairs the web of time where it was broken, affording a window into forbidden political history and a chance at a national truth and reconciliation process at a time when the colonial relationship with the US is more fraught than ever.

In 2015, the photographic archive of the secret police in the National Archives of Puerto Rico was declassified. This book is made up of images from that archive of over 40,000 images and paired witha surveillance manual given to officers detailing watching techniques. The manual is transcribed as is, preserving typographical errors, and translated into English.

Some images were taken hidden but most were confrontational, obvious; the panopticon materialized in daily life. In the images there are moments where somebody looks directly back at the camera: an interaction, a collaboration or rejection. The stares are glimpses into the perception, attitude and awareness of this opaque, secret, illegal practice by its own subjects and sometimes the perpetrators. If the images the police took of themselves were meant to be secret, staring into thecamera is its acknowledgement. If the images the secret police took of subjects are violent, the counter gaze is its resistance.

The Intelligence Division created an archive that was intended as a weapon against those who governments see as a threat to their political project. The images are largely devoid of captions and present more questions than they answer. They are heartbreakingly ambiguous given that they are one of the only documents of this largely forbidden and forgotten political history.

But this practice has not ended. The final component of the book are stills from a leaked police video documenting protests in 2017 against the imposition of an Federal Fiscal Control Board. In subsequent investigations into the wrongful arrests of protestors it came to light that not only were there troves of footage but also a huge cache of personal data and private conversations requestedfrom Facebook of over 500 individuals who interacted with protest videos.

All of these images recontextualize these crucial moments in history from the state’s perspective for the first time. By understanding that gaze can we come to understand the current civil society it built? If so, does that allow us to dismantle its control over us now?