Tim Smyth: The 1971 Student Massacre That Mexico Would Rather Forget Tim Smyth - VICE News
go to original June 12, 2014

Nearly 2,000 people marched on Tuesday in Mexico City to commemorate the 43rd anniversary of the 1971 massacre of dozens of student protesters, known as 'El Halconazo’. (RT)

Scores of students and leftist protesters on Tuesday marched in Mexico City in memory of the victims of the Halconazo, or Mexico’s Corpus Christi Massacre of 1971 — an annual protest that has become a somber tradition to prevent the collective memory loss of the state’s past crimes against its citizens.

The march commemorates the June 10, 1971 massacre, when government-trained paramilitaries — the Halcones, or "Falcons" — attacked a protest march outside the Santo Tomás campus of the National Polytechnical Institute.

The Halcones’ first wave used bamboo canes and knives to attack demonstrators. The second wave emptied firearms into the protesters.

Halcones followed the injured to hospitals to finish them off in front of terrified doctors and medical staff — putting the Halconazo incident on par with the infamous 1968 Tlatelolco massacre — where hundreds were reportedly killed after military troops shot into a crowds of unarmed students, despite the official government death toll includes only few dozen victims.

But unlike the Tlatelolco massacre, the Halconazo has never been acknowledged formally by Mexico’s government, and 43 years later, survivors said the factors that led students to take to the streets then are similar to the factors that compel students in Mexico to protest Tuesday.

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