3 While Foucault does not appear to have been involved in the political activities of any of these groups during his visits to the United States, he had anonymously co-authored a portion of an investigative report that the GIP published in November 1971 to counter the official narrative of the assassination of Black Panther Party member George Jackson at San Quentin prison in August 1971. Foucault also arrived in the United States for the first time when the FBI was still undertaking its notorious counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) of clandestine operations against a wide range of groups on the left, including the Communist Party, Puerto Rican independence groups, the Socialist Workers Party, the civil rights movement, the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, the student movement, and the New Left. 2 And, in the two years between Foucault’s first visit to the United States in March 1970 and his second visit in March 1972, he had immersed himself in the activities of the Prisons Information Group (GIP), which he had founded with others to disseminate the voices of prisoners. He had thrown his support behind Marxist students in Tunisia who had revolted against the authoritarian regime of Habib Bourguiba in the late 1960s.
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Foucault had also established a reputation as a radical intellectual with a history of militant engagements at the time of his initial visits to the United States. He had visited the United States with great frequency in the 1970s and 1980s. 1 Conde and Pitanga’s discovery left me with an elementary but irrepressible curiosity: did the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States compile a file on Foucault? It did not seem outlandish to think that Foucault would have caught the attention of the FBI. The file revealed that Foucault’s participation in a protest at a student assembly in São Paulo in 1975 had become the focal point of his surveillance by the SNI.
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#THE WEEK MAGAZINE VIEWPOINT ARCHIVE#
They requested materials on the French philosopher Michel Foucault from the National Archive of the Ministry of Justice in Brasília and obtained a file on him compiled by an intelligence agency established by the Brazilian dictatorship, the National Intelligence Service (SNI).
![the week magazine viewpoint the week magazine viewpoint](https://images.uniquemagazines.co.uk/Large/349722_31.jpg)
Nearly a decade ago, two Brazilian researchers, Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues and Maria Izabel Pitanga, made a remarkable discovery.