Some Answers to 50-Year Old Mexican Tragedy

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Fifty years ago, in October 1968, a massacre took place, in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Mexico City, just days before the country was due to host the Olympic Games. 

The preceding months had seen ongoing confrontations between students – both those from the working-class polytechnic school, IPN, and the middle-class Autonomous National University – and the government's riot police, against a backdrop of authoritarian leadership and growing economic inequality. 

The government was determined to put an end to civil unrest, and on the evening of Oct. 2, gunfire broke out in the Plaza, with snipers, riot police, tanks and helicopters all taking part. 

Many students had already waged pitched battles to defend their premises. It had all started on July 22, when an incursion of riot police entered into two vocational schools to break up a fight.

Protests and marches escalated thereafter in response to police brutality – from indiscriminate beatings to arrests and torture.

Four days later, after “authorized” local protests, some more radical IPN students decided to push on to the main square and seat of government, merging with another march, led by pro-communist students, to commemorate the Moncada assault that had begun the Cuban revolution in 1956.

The revolutionary slogans alarmed President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, worried by the prospect of Communist-inspired disruption of the Olympic Games that would ruin the facade of a stable, prosperous Mexico.

Indeed, the major student concern was the lack of democracy and labour rights. While the elite and the PRI bureaucracy enjoyed an unprecedented economic boom, there was hunger, unemployment and deprivation, especially in rural and indigenous areas. An academic study in 1967 found that of a population of 47 million, five million went barefoot and 11 million were illiterate.

Student demands included freedom for political prisoners; the firing of city police chiefs and officials responsible for the repression; and compensation for the families of those killed or injured in the conflict up to that point.

Confrontation intensified in August, as students, workers and the unemployed took to the streets together.

Two massive marches on August 13th and 27th to the Zocalo, the main square in Mexico City saw upwards of 500,000 people participating. In response, Díaz Ordaz resolved to destroy the movement.

On Oct. 2, 10 days before the start of the Olympics, the 12,000 students and other civilians who had gathered in the Plaza that evening were attacked without warning.

The total number of deaths remains unknown. Some estimates are as high as 1,000, but most have settled on about 300.

For decades the PRI government stuck to its story that students, controlled by foreigners, had triggered the bloodbath, despite countless witnesses to the contrary. International media also played down the massacre.

After the PRI lost power to the conservative National Action Party (PAN) in 2000, the new president, Vicente Fox, instructed a Special Prosecutor’s Office to investigate the massacre. It concluded that the state had embarked on “a spiral of violence” that led it to commit crimes against humanity, including genocide.

It filed charges against former President Luis Echeverria, who as interior secretary in 1968 was in charge of policing, but a tribunal exonerated him in 2007.

On Sept. 24, for the first time, a Mexican government body acknowledged that the massacre was a “state crime.”

Jaime Rochin, head of the Executive Commission for Attention to Victims, said the government used "snipers who fired to create chaos, terror and an official narrative to criminalize" anti-government demonstrations.

The new Mexican president, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, a leftist not beholden to either the PRI or PAN, will take office in December.

Sergio Aguayo, a journalist and academic, said Lopez Obrador’s victory is a fulfillment of the hopes of the leftist student movement of the 1960s.

Perhaps he will finally provide Mexicans with more answers to what happened on that dreadful night 50 years ago.