As has happened with other special issues of the Revista Mexicana de Política Exterior, dedicated to figures of letters and diplomacy, readers are offered a series of texts on the figure and work of Rafael Bernal (Mexico City, 1915-Fribourg, Switzerland, 1972). Although his best-known facet is that of a narrator, founder of the noir novel with his famous El complot mongol, Bernal also stood out in other tasks: as a historian, documentalist and as a diplomat with an undoubted talent for carefully observing and interpreting the events of international relations.