1968: The massacre in

Tlatelolco
October 2, 2018 By Todd Chretien

With the opening of the Olympic Games days

away, Mexico’s government sent in troops to
carry out a cold-blooded massacre of striking
students. Todd Chretien tells the story as part
of SW’s series on the revolutionary year of
1968.

1. FIFTY YEARS ago on October 2, 10,000

striking students gathered in Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of
Mexico City, just 10 days before the beginning of the Olympic Games. In a flash,
thousands of troops attacked, backed by tanks and helicopters, mowing down unarmed
and panicked students. By the time the sun rose the next morning, as many as 300 were
dead, with many more injured and more than 1,000 arrested. Hundreds of these arrested
students were tortured and humiliated throughout the night, as the presidential guard —
recently renamed the Olympic Brigade — went door to door in the public housing
projects surrounding the plaza, searching for students who had fled the assault.

2. To this day, the Tlatelolco massacre haunts Mexican politics. The students’ courage
and the government’s cowardice have never since been in doubt. It is a cultural and
political reference point, a touchstone. For Mexico, it is like the assassination of Martin
Luther King, Jr. and the Watergate scandal all rolled into one.

3. Ask any activist of a certain age in Mexico where they were when they heard about
the massacre, and they will describe their memories in painful detail. For instance,
award-winning journalist and author of Massacre in Mexico Elena Poniatowska recalled:
I heard about the massacre at 9 o’clock that night, when María Alicia Martínez
Medrano and Mercedes Olivera [both active in Mexico’s civil society] came to
my house...
I thought they had gone mad. They told me that there was blood on the walls of
the buildings, that the elevators were perforated with machine-gun bullets, that
the glass windows of the shops were destroyed, that tanks were inside the plaza,
that there was blood on the staircases of the buildings, that they could hear
people shouting, moaning, and crying.

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4. For those who were present or lost loved ones or comrades, bringing the assassins to
justice has remained a life-long crusade. Although it came 50 years later, the downfall of
the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its neoliberal cousin, the National
Action Party (PAN), and the sweeping victory of center-left presidential candidate
Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO, as he is known) this past July, can be traced
back this blood-soaked day in 1968.

5. In many ways, AMLO’s victory constitutes the revenge (albeit only partial) of the
1968 generation against the state institutions that murdered so many of their friends and
comrades. But far from laying Tlatelolco’s ghosts to rest, AMLO’s victory has raised
expectations, and hundreds of thousands of students are on strike, demanding from him
what previous generations of politicians could not deliver.

6. The story has much in common with other tales of the revolutionary year of 1968.
Like their counterparts from Prague to Chicago to Paris, Mexican students wanted their
government — a government that counted Emiliano Zapata in its pantheon of
revolutionary heroes — to live up to its professed ideals.Their demands were clear and
democratic in nature, including freedom for political prisoners, dismissal of generals
who interfered in national politics, dissolution of the riot police and overturning a law
against “social dissolution,” a legal catchall used to repress young people and political
activists.

7. Inspired by the Black Power revolt that swept the U.S. in the wake of Martin Luther
King Jr.’s assassination, the uprising against Russian intervention to put down the
Prague Spring and the Cuban Revolution, radical Mexican students organized a marched
on July 26, hoping the threat of disruption of the impending Olympic Games would
shine a light on their cause. President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz ordered militarized police to
intimidate the rapidly growing student population through a show of force and the threat
of more. But as in cities around the world, state violence only galvanized the movement.

8.Award-winning mystery author and 1968er Paco Ignacio Taibo explained the
psychological and social context that allowed the radicalization to leap beyond a core of
socialist students to a wide layer of a whole generation:
In a society where there is absolutely no room to breath and only one area has a
concentration of oxygen, when society explodes, everyone will rush toward that
one place to breath in the oxygen. The university was the only place where you
could see banned films, the only place where you could get information in a
country where the press was 99 percent under the control of the government —
ferocious, terrible censorship. It was the only place where there was freedom of
debate and discussion. The university channeled all this in many ways. The
conditions were being created.

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 At what moment did the generation of militants interact with the generation of
hundreds of thousands of students who were simply there, those that were not
political? It happened when repression affected them directly. It wasn’t
repression against a march of campesinos, it was repression aimed precisely at
the students themselves. That’s what caused the virulent reaction on the part of
hundreds of thousands of students.

9. Once the repression touched the students and the government showed it would not
relent, the pace of the protests accelerated, as Arturo Anguiano, a student leader at the
National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), described:
On August 5, a demonstration from Zacatenco to Casco de Santo Tomás
(100,000 participants); on August 13, from Casco de Santo Tomás to Zócalo
(150,000); on August 27, from the Museum of Anthropology in Chapultepec to
the Zócalo (more than 250,000 participants); on September 13, a silent
demonstration (200,000 people).
Corruption
10. Now Díaz Ordaz had a problem. The Olympics were supposed to show off the so-
called “Mexican Miracle” by touting rapid growth and a booming middle class, spurred
by an oil boom and proximity to post-Second World War economic prosperity centered
in the U.S. Intended as the crowing jewel in their efforts to rise into the “first world,”
Mexico’s rulers wanted to have their cake and eat it, too — by posing as sovereign
equals among the European and U.S. elites, while sweeping the contradictions of
Mexico’s boom under the rug.

11.But then as now, the Olympics exposed the underlying reality of gross inequality
lying cheek by jowl with capitalist profits. The economic development was real, but it
didn’t come close to eliminating rural poverty, anti-Indigenous racism and the lack of
adequate urban housing, health care and education.Mexico’s rulers were determined to
present a pretty picture, so they set about scrubbing the city clean of its unsightly poor
ahead of the Games.Thus, the students had to be stopped, no matter the cost. And if
calculated violence only angered the students in July, Días Ordaz bet that a truly
macabre spectacle orchestrated in Tletalolco might just break the movement’s back, at
least in the short term.
12. But anger found other outlets: John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s famous Black
Power salutes on the Olympic podium; prolonged booing of Díaz Ordaz when he
entered the Olympic stadium; and the birth of a radical social and political current that
eventually flowered into trade union organization, socialist groupings, feminist
movements and even, although tangentially, the Zapatista uprising of 1994.
13. It remains to be seen if Mexican students and workers can overcome the social chaos
that capitalism has inflicted on them in the opening two decades of the 21st century.

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Despite Trump’s ludicrous charge that NAFTA has been “very, very unfair to the United
States,” the truth is that his renegotiated trade pact will only aggravate the disasters of
unemployment, deindustrialization, escalating drug cartel violence and state corruption
and complicity.Today, there is an expectation for change that is unrivaled since 1968.
But the military power, personal depravity and individual greed of Mexico’s rulers has
never been greater.

14. AMLO will be trapped between the expectations of his followers and the avarice of
his enemies. And history demonstrates that individual politicians most often sue for
peace in the face of threats from above, as a safeguard against rebellion from below.
Whatever AMLO does, 1968 will haunt him as much as it inspires those who have
nothing to lose but their chains. Mexico’s future, if it is to be a better future, will be
determined by its youth. As Ignacio Taibo remarked in looking back at 1968:
Every generation has a right to its own moment of glory. And that glory is social,
it’s not individual. American society stimulates a virulently powerful idea in its
young people that glory is an individual phenomena, associates it with athletic
glory, economic success, all in individual terms.
I have had individual success. I’m a writer who’s sold several million books —
that’s fine, but it matters very little if you put it next to the glory of social
change. The glory of collective struggle. The glory of putting yourself at the
service of your society.
To put yourself on the side of the victims, of the dispossessed, to take into your
hands your right to change the world. That’s what I believe, sincerely. That’s the
lesson of 1968.

Taken from https://socialistworker.org/2018/10/02/1968-the-massacre-in-tlatelolco

Chretien, Todd. (2018, October 2). 1968: The massacre in Tlatelolco. Retrieved from https://
socialistworker.org/2018/10/02/1968-the-massacre-in-tlatelolco