MEXICO CITY -- The late Mexican writer Elena Garro, first wife to Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, worked as a spy for -- and was spied upon by -- the government more than 30 years ago, the country's freedom-of-information institute said Thursday.

The agency, known by its Spanish initials as IFAI, released the information in response to a citizen's request, citing documents from the General National Archive.

The records show that Garro was a federal government "informant" reporting on political, social and cultural events of the era from 1962 until 1970, the IFAI's statement said.

"The same documents show ... that at the same time the federal government had other informants who reported on the activities of the informants, including Elena Garro," it added, without elaborating.

The dates of Garro's government service correspond to the last two years of the administration of President Adolfo Lopez Mateos, who governed from 1958-1964, and the entire six-year administration of President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, who governed from 1964-1970. Both served under the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, which governed Mexico from its founding in 1929 until its historic defeat by President Vicente Fox in 2000.

Diaz Ordaz's government was blamed for repressing political and social groups, especially a student movement whose members were massacred in October 1968 in Mexico City.

The IFAI decided on Wednesday to order the General National Archive, which guards all intelligent information, to release the documents to the petitioner, who was unidentified.

The petitioner also requested any information in the security archives on Paz himself, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1990. IFAI officials did not comment on that request.

Garro was born Dec. 12, 1920, in the central state of Puebla and died in August 1998 at age 77 in Cuernavaca, a city 35 miles (55 kilometers) south of Mexico City. She married Paz in 1937 and the couple separated in 1959, never to reconcile.

The author of more than two dozen novels in Spanish, Garro left Mexico after the 1968 student massacre, returning and moving to Cuernavaca in the 1990s.