Ph.D. in Contemporary Arab and Islamic Studies from the Autonomous University of Madrid. Master’s degree in Asian and African Studies with a specialization in the Middle East from El Colegio de México. He was trained in International Relations at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and in Social Anthropology at the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), where he completed a postdoctoral fellowship. In 2013, he served as Head of the Department of Asian Languages at the Center for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (now the National School of Translation) at UNAM. Later, he joined the Center for International Relations at UNAM’s Faculty of Political and Social Sciences as a full-time professor, where he founded the Seminar on Middle Eastern Studies. He has received several distinctions, including the National University Recognition for Young Academics (RDUNJA) on two occasions (for teaching in Social Sciences in 2018 and for research in Social Sciences in 2022). Additionally, he has been recognized by institutions such as the Coimbra Group and the International Convention of Asian Scholars. Notably, in 2022, he was awarded the Young Scientist Research Prize in the field of Social Sciences by the prestigious Academia Mexicana de Ciencias (AMC). He is a member of the National System of Researchers (SNII) at Level 2 and serves on the Academic Council of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies based in Madrid, Spain. Some of his most recent publications include: (2025) Militarism and Authoritarianism in MENA: From the Pandemic to the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict, UNAM, Mexico. (2025) and Historia mínima de Irán moderno, El COLMEX, Mexico (2025).
The story of the People's Combatants of Iran (Moyahedin-e Jalq-e Iran) is the sad saga of the noblest hopes and aspirations of a revolutionary mobilization that became distorted over time into a set of betrayals that let down each and every revolutionary ideal of 20th century Iran. This distortion transformed them into a vulgar and violent cult that abandoned even its own promises of change and social justice, so that it is safe to say that the story of the Moyahedin sums up in itself the best and the worst of contemporary Iranian political culture.
This book is a long-term and unique Spanish-language research on this controversial organization. It is a manuscript elaborated with the help of primary sources, interviews with Iranian politicians, activists, former members and intellectuals specialized in the subject, and the result of a series of research stages carried out between 2011 and 2019 in Tehran, Madrid, Paris, Washington and New York, in which the necessary material was recovered to document the trajectory of the group and its ways of articulating interests with political actors as varied as Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein to people like John Bolton and Turki Al Fasal, for whom this group has been attractive throughout its history not so much for its ideology, but for the military potential and the information networks it has always had inside Iran.