Mexican Students Remember '68 Massacre in the Plaza de Las Tres Culturas Paul Imison - CounterPunch.org
go to original October 6, 2012

Student demonstration in Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Mexico DF, 1968. (Comité México 68 Pro libertades Democráticas)

Forty-four years ago this Tuesday, Mexican soldiers gunned down as many as four hundred student protesters in the Plaza de Las Tres Culturas in Mexico City just days ahead of the 1968 Olympic Games. With an unprecedented media spotlight about to descend on the country, the Gustavo Diaz Ordaz administration wanted to show that everything was rosy in the Aztec garden, despite a long summer of police repression and civil unrest.

In the aftermath, the government claimed that the protesters fired first, that the student movement had been infiltrated by “Cuban agitators” bent on violence, and that no more than 30 people had been killed by security forces. In reality, there was evidence of hundreds dead, and bodies being disposed of to cover up the extent of the atrocity.

The CIA, whose presence in Mexico in those days was justified by the Cold War (it’s now justified by the “war on drugs”) was on hand to offer helpful advice, prompting a communiqué from the Mexican government six days before the massacre that the protests would be “under complete control very shortly”.

After a decades-long whitewash by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) regime (which spent 71 years in power), a 2001 investigation found that Presidential Guardsmen in sniper positions deliberately shot at soldiers on the ground, provoking them to fire into the crowd. No senior official has ever been prosecuted for their role in what we know today as the “Tlatelolco massacre”.

It remains the most shocking event in modern Mexican history. Students and other civil groups protest the long cover-up every October 2, but Tuesday’s demonstrations had a double edge. On July 1 this year, the PRI’s Enrique Peña Nieto won the presidency in a highly dubious election and returned the former dictatorship to power after twelve years in opposition.

The students protesting in 1968 were part of a movement known as the National Strike Council that had risen up against the increasing authoritarianism and corruption of the PRI since it seized power in the wake of the Revolution of 1910. In May this year, another generation of students – many of whose parents weren’t even born in ‘68 – picked up the baton to oppose the return of the party and what they viewed as the “imposition” of Peña Nieto by the country’s media and economic elite.

The #YoSoy132 (“I am 132”) movement was born on May 11 after a spontaneous protest against Peña Nieto on a university campus in Mexico City. It quickly snowballed into an entire pro-democracy movement that forced the four candidates into a third television debate organized by students and put immense pressure on the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) to investigate evidence of vote-buying and other fraud.

Yet the movement fell short of stopping Peña Nieto’s victory being ratified by the Electoral Tribunal last month; the new president will be sworn in on December 1.

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