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

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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 Subscribe 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.
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