Impunity Reigns Lorna Scott Fox Considers the Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968: What Happened and What It Means for Mexico

10/3/2018 The Tlatelolco massacre: what happened and what it means for Mexico POLITICS SEPTEMBER 26, 2018

Subscribe now to the TLS and get the best writing on big books and big ideas from only £1.50 or $2.40 per week

Survivors of the Tlatelolco massacre display a protest banner outside the residence of the former President Luis Echeverria, 2006 © Jorge Silva/Reuters Impunity reigns Lorna Scott Fox considers the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968: what happened and what it means for Mexico

LORNA SCOTT FOX

In a grainy clip, shot from high above by a surreptitiously placed camera, we see a group of men, each wearing a single white glove, being stopped by soldiers. One shows a credential, and they are let past. It is sometime in the afternoon on October 2, 1968, in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, in the Tlatelolco district of Mexico City: once a site of human sacrifice, at the heart of the city state of Tenochtitlan, this was where the Mexica made their last stand before falling to the Spaniards in 1521. Now another massacre is about to take place, unleashed by these and other plain clothes officers on 12,000 students, workers and residents gathered for a strategy meeting in the huge square, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/tlatelolco-massacre-1968/ 1/16 10/3/2018 The Tlatelolco massacre: what happened and what it means for Mexico bordered by social housing, a seventeenth-century church and an archaeological site – the three cultures on one spot.

People are smiling in the early photographs of that evening, as the student strike seemed within reach of settlement, after months of bloody confrontation. The Olympic Games, the first held in a developing country, were to start in ten days: with the world’s press looking on, there was sure to be a truce. The campus of the Autonomous National University (UNAM) had been vacated by occupying troops the day before. A polytechnic (IPN) college and attached vocational high schools, near the Plaza, were still occupied; but, as the protesters began to take in the quantity of tanks and soldiers encircling the meeting, the planned march on them was called off.

Many students, aged fifteen and upwards, had already waged pitched battles to defend their premises, for the principle of inviolable autonomía is sacred to the Mexican education system. It had all started on July 22, with what even the docile Universal newspaper termed a “provocation”: the violent incursion of riot police (granaderos) into two vocational schools, notionally to break up a fight between them and a UNAM-incorporated preparatory school. (Brawls between the working-class IPN and the middle-class UNAM were something of a tradition.) Protests and marches escalated thereafter in response to state brutality – from indiscriminate beatings to arrests and torture, and, by the end of September, some dozen killings by Mexico’s multiple security forces. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/tlatelolco-massacre-1968/ 2/16 10/3/2018 The Tlatelolco massacre: what happened and what it means for Mexico Two convergences defined the student movement. On July 26, after “authorized” local protests, some more radical IPN students decided to push on to the main square and seat of government, the Zócalo – merging along the way with another march, led by pro-communist students, to commemorate the Moncada assault that had begun the Cuban revolution. The revolutionary slogans all now shouted as they were beaten back alarmed President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and his security chiefs, already haunted by the prospect of communist-inspired disruption of the Games that would ruin the display of a stable, prosperous Mexico under the benevolent wing of US corporations. The second coming together was of “high” and “low” educational roads, ending the kind of fights that had given the state an opportunity to make incursions just a few days earlier. After one UNAM preparatory had had its eighteenth-century door smashed in by a bazooka, the two student bodies joined forces in early August. Around 230 delegates, from the capital and provinces, formed the National Strike Council (CNH).

So began a utopian experiment in direct democracy, especially remarkable in Mexico’s authoritarian culture, where vertical hierarchies prevailed socially and politically. The encounter between classes was a mutual education: history and theory in exchange for street smarts and live contact with the country’s social problems. As told to Elena Poniatowska for her collection of testimonies Massacre in Mexico (1971; see also the TLS, May 4, 2018), the university students felt duty-bound to enlighten the polytechnicians, droning on about Lenin, Marcuse and imperialism. Impatient https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/tlatelolco-massacre-1968/ 3/16 10/3/2018 The Tlatelolco massacre: what happened and what it means for Mexico IPN del egates would shout out “¡Concretito!”, “Nuts and bolts! Who’s got tomorrow’s posters?” CNH assemblies also saw heated disagreement about tactics and clashes between those of differing political affiliations. The overarching demand for greater civic participation meant the crucial work of consciousness-raising took place in the streets and slums. The IPN was at the forefront of the roving brigadas with their loudspeakers, xeroxed leaflets and newspapers shoved through bus and car windows, and their street theatre and speak-ins that attracted sympathetic crowds and gave people the chance to voice their own complaints.

A major concern was the lack of democracy and labour rights. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had ruled since 1929. When, during his 1948–52 tenure, President Miguel Alemán rolled back the socialist-nationalist measures of the 1930s and opened the country to US and European capital, he put a loyal hardliner – the infamous Fidel Velázquez – in a position for life at the head of the trade union confederation, to keep wages down and forestall industrial action (railway workers and doctors who attempted it were fed false promises, sacked and jailed). While the elite and the PRI bureaucracy enjoyed an unprecedented economic boom, there was hunger, unemployment and deprivation for the rest, especially in rural and indigenous areas – an academic study in 1967 found that of a population of 47 million, 5 million went barefoot and 11 million were illiterate.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/tlatelolco-massacre-1968/ 4/16 10/3/2018 The Tlatelolco massacre: what happened and what it means for Mexico Nevertheless, the students failed to inspire a general strike, or to galvanize the whole country, as had happened – with fickle brevity – in France. This was partly because the Mexican populace was cowed; partly, perhaps, because the students’ demands barely touched on national issues. Nor were they focused on education, as had been the case in previous struggles. Instead, their stated demands were: freedom for political prisoners; the repeal of article 145 of the Penal Code that criminalized “social dissolution” (a measure introduced in 1941 to persecute strikers and peaceful protesters); the disbandment of the granaderos; the sacking of city police chiefs and officials responsible for the repression; and compensation for the families of those killed or injured in the conflict so far.

One highly significant, if informal, demand was to negotiate in public. This went against every instinct of a regime adept only at brute force and covert manipulation. As tortured students (and young workers mistaken for students) reported, interrogators tried to make them confess to being financed and armed by the Soviets, the Cubans, the Trotskyists, terrorists with designs on the Olympics, or dissident politicians. In fact, the students had refused to arm, despite the blandishments of PRI infiltrators in the CNH, and were entirely financed by fundraising in the streets. The idealism of young dreamers seeking democratic change in a stifled, exploited, dependent economy was naturally more influenced by the Cuban revolution than by Paris; yet their most warlike supporters were the students’ mothers, who made Molotov cocktails and threw boiling water from their flats on the https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/tlatelolco-massacre-1968/ 5/16 10/3/2018 The Tlatelolco massacre: what happened and what it means for Mexico granaderos during the skirmishes. Confrontation intensified in late August, as students, workers and the unemployed took to the streets together. The President delivered an ultimatum, and the media were ordered to speak of terrorists and traitors, never students. A mass silent march on September 13, against mis representation and demagogy, impressed the public; five days later the army overran the UNAM, failing to capture CNH leaders but ransacking labs and arresting students and professors, to widespread outrage. Later that month, Díaz Ordaz and his circle resolved to destroy the Movement once and for all.

On the evening of October 2, the students thought they had won. Cheers greeted a column of railway workers proclaiming solidarity. Government and student representatives had met, albeit inconclusively, in the morning. The latter did not suspect that this was part of a trap to ensure CNH leaders attended the rally. At 18:10, as the meeting was winding down, red and green flares lit up the sky. The speakers’ balcony on the third floor of the Chihuahua apartment block was instantly invaded by men, wearing one white glove each, who yelled at everyone to get down before firing revolvers – a plausible student weapon – into the crowd, and at the military: one of the first to be wounded was the general in charge. Snipers fired from adjacent buildings. The advancing soldiers responded. Granaderos, tanks and helicopters joined in. The first shoot- out lasted ninety minutes, followed by another from 23:00 to 23:30.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/tlatelolco-massacre-1968/ 6/16 10/3/2018 The Tlatelolco massacre: what happened and what it means for Mexico Fifty years on, the confusion of those hours has not been dispelled, thanks to successive Mexican governments’ consistency in withholding or destroying evidence, including most of that gathered by the cameras posted around the plaza in advance, to “prove” student terrorism. Though city police documents have been parsimoniously released, the most important, kept by the Defence Secretariat, are still secret, and it is these that the Comité del 68, a student veterans’ group founded in 1978, has been campaigning for decades to have opened. What happened, and who was behind it, remains fiercely disputed, to the extent that one writer claimed in 2011 that the army had never fired a shot. The most recent account, by the historian Sergio Aguayo – ’68: The students, the president, and the CIA (2018) – is cautiously evidence-based: Aguayo’s answer to many of the queries I put to him, after reading his book, was, “We don’t know”. Some veterans may view it as revisionist. In most first-hand accounts, for instance, a stampede towards the two exits from the square was blocked by advancing bayonets, forcing people back into the plaza to be mown down. Aguayo cites other witnesses who recall that the plaza emptied in about two minutes, the soldiers “following orders” to let people through their ranks. And who were the snipers? We know that the white gloves belonged to the Olympia Battalion, a secret mixed commando formed by the government to “protect” the Games. Survivors on the speakers’ balcony told of how it was raked by infantry gunfire, until the provocateurs ducked down and began shouting vainly into the din: “We’re the Olympia Batalion! Don’t shoot!” As for the others, ten are known to have been https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/tlatelolco-massacre-1968/ 7/16 10/3/2018 The Tlatelolco massacre: what happened and what it means for Mexico posted by General Luis Gutiérrez Oropeza, chief of the Estado Mayor Presidencial, an elite military unit. The rest are anyone’s guess, Aguayo says. His conclusion is that conspiracy and cock-up were to blame: “Díaz Ordaz planned the death of a handful of people”, but the complex operation span out of control – possibly because the code of red and green flares sent contradictory signals to different forces. The engineer and former CNH member, Félix Gamundi (imprisoned after Tlatelolco, now a leading activist in the Comité del 68), grants that the troops may have been kept in ignorance, even though they were issued with 70,000 rounds. But he is adamant that everything that happened was planned: the Defence Secretariat must release the files to determine responsibilities, he insisted when we talked on the phone.

The sniper fire hit many on the ground. When the Chihuahua’s upper floors caught fire, escaping families also became targets. Some brave neighbours let fleeing students into their flats. Police and military forces searched the buildings (this went on all night, to the terror of the residents), using previously vacated apartments to question and beat people up, before marching them down staircases that were gauntlets of blows. Surreptitious acts of kindness from individual soldiers, such as offers of water, are poignant reminders of the Mexican Army’s formerly positive image. Over 2,000 captives, after standing for hours in the rain in their underwear, ended up in the “Black Palace” of Lecumberri jail, where some remained, convicted of extravagant crimes by an abject judiciary, for more than two years (they refused to apply for amnesty or pardon). Dead https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/tlatelolco-massacre-1968/ 8/16 10/3/2018 The Tlatelolco massacre: what happened and what it means for Mexico bodies were removed from the Plaza overnight, numbers and destination unknown.

For decades the state stuck to its story that students, controlled by foreigners, had triggered the bloodbath, despite countless witnesses and the gradual reconstruction of a truer, if always incomplete, account. Some give credence to the later accusation by the then Defence Secretary, Marcelino García Barragán, of an ambush of the army ordered by the highest authority, without his knowledge; others call this an implausible whitewash. Likewise the exoneration by some analysts of the Minister of the Interior at the time, Luis Echeverría, who as head of the cabinet was ultimately answerable and, in most Mexicans’ opinion, actively responsible, though he covered his tracks. A struggle for favour was under way among the inner circle since, according to the practice known as el dedazo, each PRI president simply designated his successor – and the next “election” was in 1970. Communications at the time between Echeverría and Díaz Ordaz have, according to Aguayo, vanished from the National Archive. (A transcript has recently come to light of Echeverría talking to Henry Kissinger in 1974, in which the former explains that, having been the weakest pre-candidate, he placed himself “out front” by helping his boss to beat the communist and student problem.) In his presidential report of 1969, Díaz Ordaz assumed full responsibility – “personal, ethical, social, juridical, political and historical” – for Tlatelolco, enabling Echeverría, ostensibly untainted, to succeed him as the

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/tlatelolco-massacre-1968/ 9/16 10/3/2018 The Tlatelolco massacre: what happened and what it means for Mexico fiftieth President of Mexico. (Díaz Ordaz vanished from public life for almost a decade.)

After the PRI lost power to the conservative National Action Party (PAN) in 2000, the new President, Vicente Fox, was pressured by the Comité and other groups to instruct a Special Prosecutor’s Office (FEMOSPP) to investigate the historic repression of social movements. The conclusions were astonishingly direct – to subdue the students, for instance, the state had embarked on “a spiral of violence . . . that led it to commit crimes against humanity, including genocide” – but the full report was never made public. One judge’s attempts in 2006 to prosecute Echeverría for Tlatelolco and other crimes were shelved by another judge in 2009. Echeverría, the only perpetrator who is still alive, feigned dementia, Gamundi explains sardonically. But the Comité continues campaigning for his case to be reopened, in the name of historical justice with emblematic significance for the present.

Today, the FEMOSPP report can only be consulted through a tenacious American research institute and public law centre, “indexer and publisher of former secrets”, the National Security Archive (nsarchive .gwu.edu). Since 1985, the NSA has promoted transparent government around the world – it was through them that I came to know about the Kissinger– Echeverría transcript. The centre’s Mexico Project, directed by Kate Doyle, has obtained the declassification of key US intelligence cables from 1968, and yet the role of the US in the events remains unclear. “Evidence of direct involvement https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/tlatelolco-massacre-1968/ 10/16 10/3/2018 The Tlatelolco massacre: what happened and what it means for Mexico in Tlatelolco has not been found in the archives”, Doyle told me. The CIA – which recruited Díaz Ordaz, Echeverría and other officials in the mid-1960s – “was satisfied with the regime’s narrative about the massacre because it fitted the agency’s own world view”. There was a disconnect between the CIA and other US agencies: whereas the State Department and FBI were sceptical of communist instigation of the student movement, the CIA station chief in Mexico, Winston Scott, was convinced of it. And Scott and Díaz Ordaz were, Doyle emphasizes, inappropriately close friends (Scott was godfather to Díaz Ordaz’s child), reinforcing each other’s Cold War paranoia. Aguayo holds them “jointly responsible” and does not rule out wider CIA participation. On October 5, just three days after the massacre, even the FBI uncritically relayed the story of the “Olympia Brigade” as a commando of Trotskyist snipers. When Scott himself subsequently passed on to his superiors at the CIA fifteen different versions of events, he was recalled: as Jefferson Morley put it in Our Man in Mexico (2008), “the puppet master had become a puppet”.

The Olympics of 1968 opened to much fanfare and no boycotts. Somehow a kite of a black dove was sailed over the presidential dais. International media played down the massacre, despite the irony of such a preamble to these “Games of Peace”. Young people protested worldwide, but governments maintained a complicit silence; Cuba and the USSR actually applauded Mexico’s firm handling of dissent. When British parliamentarians asked questions, Mexican diplomats mentioned Northern Ireland. A veil was drawn https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/tlatelolco-massacre-1968/ 11/16 10/3/2018 The Tlatelolco massacre: what happened and what it means for Mexico over both the Movement and its criminal suppression. Even less reported abroad was the Corpus Christi massacre (the halconazo) of June 1971, in which a paramilitary group, Los Halcones, killed 120 student demonstrators in Mexico City; yet this was the moment when many Mexican radicals gave up on legal, peaceful protest and formed urban and rural guerrilla groups, prompting the dirty war of the 1970s that left hundreds dead and thousands disappeared. President Echeverría, smoothly dissociating himself from both Tlatelolco and the halconazo, spent the six years of his presidency rebalancing the PRI tradition of co-option and crackdown. The war against the domestic Left was masked by welcoming exiles from right-wing dictatorships (Argentinian and Chilean, in particular) and by cultural- economic concessions to middle-class youth: rock music and miniskirts became acceptable, the UNAM was enlarged, and the civil service tripled in size to absorb veterans of 1968.

But no amount of modernization could make up for the paternal power’s betrayal of the country’s children. Tlatelolco had shaken much of society from its apathy. The spell had been broken by young people daring to taunt the president himself, shouting outside the palace: “¡Sal al balcón, hocicón!” “Come on out to the balcony, big-snout!” The eruption of critical, transformative thought and action was irreversible. An active civil society developed, as progressives flocked to political parties after the 1977 electoral reform, which legitimized hitherto clandestine groupings like the Communist Party and sanctioned the foundation and resourcing of new ones. The ’68 generation https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/tlatelolco-massacre-1968/ 12/16 10/3/2018 The Tlatelolco massacre: what happened and what it means for Mexico also founded social movements and NGOs, often living and working among impoverished communities in an extension of what the grassroots engagement of the brigadas had begun. Jesús Vargas, a Tlatelolco survivor who went on to organize peasants and miners in the 1970s, declared in a recent interview that its very repression turned a student protest into “a movement for democracy, a movement for justice, a movement for the most marginalized peoples in this country”. “The student movement sparked the redignification of politics”, Gamundi says. “The practice of a new form of politics based on principle.”

But this resurgence has lately been set back, as embattled as any politics of principle around the world. Inequality and want in Mexico are as bad as in 1968, while insecurity has soared. After the students had made the first cracks in the rigid edifice of the regime, Mexico’s socio-political energies diversified – the rise of indigenous resistance, such as Zapatismo, a positive example – and also fragmented. While the state remains as repressive as ever, there was a certain hollowing out of centralized control, especially once the drug cartels, soon multiplying like Hydras, became empowered by the end of one-party rule in 2000: the PAN lacked the experienced grip of the PRI, and a grotesque illustration of neoliberal economic freedom ensued. Officials from governors to local policemen now do the narcos’ lucrative bidding, and hundreds of thousands of citizens have disappeared or been killed (250,000 dead in the past ten years alone).

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/tlatelolco-massacre-1968/ 13/16 10/3/2018 The Tlatelolco massacre: what happened and what it means for Mexico While drug bosses are selectively captured, the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators of Tlatelolco still protects state officials in and out of office, says Pável Ramírez, the scientist son of a disappeared guerrilla, with whom I’ve often demonstrated in front of the Mexican embassy in London: “No official has ever been tried for forced disappearance, even though it’s legally a crime”. Impunity remains Mexico’s great disgrace. Explaining that the Comité del 68’s aim is not revenge for old wrongs, but rather to enact truth and justice, Gamundi stresses the future: “No democracy is possible where impunity reigns”. Administrations have continued to lie, scapegoat and cover up in the purest Díaz Ordaz tradition. Just one example, complete with sham investigations and false confessions extracted by torture, is the still unsolved disappearance of forty-three trainee teachers from the famously radical Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Guerrero state in 2014. They were commandeering buses to attend the annual October 2 memorial march in Mexico City – the reminder that Tlatelolco is still an open wound.

The rawness surrounding Tlatelolco is partly due to the unknown death count. In the absence of proof, estimates have fluctuated wildly. The eventual consensus, between the government’s original figure of seven and the surmise by some of up to 1,000, was around 300: all those souls crying for justice, whose stolen bodies made closure impossible. In 2006, Doyle and the National Security Archive collaborated with the magazine Proceso for eight months, cross-checking every available record. Just thirty-four victims were confirmed by name, plus ten anonymous. “There may be https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/tlatelolco-massacre-1968/ 14/16 10/3/2018 The Tlatelolco massacre: what happened and what it means for Mexico others”, Doyle wrote, appealing for help from the public. Survivors say there must be others, and that the silence is, even now, from fear. The numberless dead are intrinsic to the emotional and symbolic memory of that night.

“Like a pressure cooker building up since 1968”, in Gamundi’s image, rage exploded in this year’s general election. Though many who voted for “zero corruption, zero impunity” did so disbelievingly, to castigate the established parties, the next day brought a wave of euphoria – if only because a leftist victory had been “allowed”, unlike in 1988 and 2006, when Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and then Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the current winner, were fraudulently denied the presidency. A former mayor of Mexico City, López Obrador ran three times and refused to concede for months after 2006; he founded the civil association that would become his party, MORENA, in 2011. He divides progressive opinion with his readiness to compromise, despite attempts to paint him as another Hugo Chávez. Until he takes office in December, “everything is possible, but nothing is certain”, Aguayo cautions. If the coalition maintains integrity, confronts impunity as promised, and facilitates real civic participation, Mexico’s constantly thwarted democratic transition may yet take another step. And the student movement’s original courage and creativity, too long obscured by the shadows of that sacrificial night, will be remembered instead for launching the transformation of Mexico.

Subscribe now to the TLS and get the best writing on big books and big ideas from only https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/tlatelolco-massacre-1968/ 15/16 10/3/2018 The Tlatelolco£1.50 massacre: or $2.40 what happenedper week and what it means for Mexico

Out of step The fight continues Elena Poniatowska on the Sudhir Hazareesingh continuing crisis of considers the international government in Mexico causes and consequences of

Twenty Questions with Yuri Herrera What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? ‘Those things you really want to silence are

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/tlatelolco-massacre-1968/ 16/16