'68

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  It Is Made Clear That Barricades, Once Built, Lodge Immediately in Memory

  The massacre terrorized parents and drove their children crazy. It put us on the defensive for the first time. This time, it was for real. The Movement’s leadership—cadres formed over the last four years of student struggle, natural leaders thrust into the streets by the insurrection of ’68—was decimated. At this time a couple of thousand students were imprisoned. Those among the better-known figures—a handful—who had managed to survive the massive arrests at Ciudad Universitaria, the attack on the Santo Tomás campus and on Zacatenco, who had not been caught on 2 October, had not been wounded or killed, either went into exile or took up forms of clandestine action that isolated them from their student base. The bloodletting, in short, was immense, and the less politically sturdy sectors retreated to a waiting posture. Ten or twelve thousand diehards strove to keep the Movement alive by means of information-brigade work, rallies that put the speakers’ lives at risk, and press conferences at the Casa del Lago in the Bosque de Chapultepec. In effect, a truce was imposed that was to last until the Olympic Games were over.

  What was that time like for those who were not locked up? We knew that at Military Camp 1 the arrested had been tortured, that our comrades, our leaders, our friends, those with whom we had shared a floor to sleep on or a last bite of food or a cigarette, had been mauled, punched, terrorized with blank ammunition, clubbed, held down under the filthy water of the horse troughs, castrated. . .

  Infiltrators and snitches had been freed. News of tortures filtered out continually through a network of fear, thanks above all to lawyers and relatives. Fantastical confessions concerning the origin and nature of the Movement had been extorted from a number of our leaders; most had proved impossible to break down. These were all our prisoners, inseparably and absolutely bound up in our lives. That they were inside and we outside was pure chance. Just as they were inside for us, keeping a prison bed warm for us, as it were, we were likewise struggling to deal with their absence by keeping their places on the bench for them. Between those inside and those outside was an ocean of love affairs, comradeship, fraternity, guilt, and sacrosanct loyalty. We may have been only 17, 19, 20, or 25 years old, but we felt a terrible responsibility, we bore a truly loathsome weight on our shoulders.

  In late October, the three demands were framed that would focus our efforts over the next month: unconditional freedom for the prisoners, return of the schools, and an end to repression. The government handed the schools back, hoping that the students would back down. But during the first days of November the schools, assembly by assembly, obstinately voted yet again to continue the strike. We were not going back to class without our prisoners.

  Leaving—and Staying

  We were sleeping in my room at the family house in Roma: René Cabrera, the finest poet of my generation, the one who had written “We do not need to say we are growing closer to grow further apart”; Jonathán Molinet, better known at Preparatory 1 as “El Hombre Lobo”; and me. We took turns sleeping. One of the three was always at the window, watching the street and ready to raise the alarm. We had a rooftop escape route half-planned in case they came for us in the middle of the night. The other two slept. René and I used to talk in our sleep. El Hombre Lobo claimed that we babbled incoherently, that when one of us said something in his sleep the other would answer. I am sure he was right. The days weren’t long enough to tell one another all the stories we had to tell. Terrible stories—stories of persecution, more arrests, tortures. I fancy we were all talking in our dreams during that November.

  I gave my blue plaid sheepskin jacket to Mario Nuñez and saw him off as he went into exile with Marcelino Perelló and Guillermo Fernández, student leaders among the most wanted by the police. They had escaped by pure luck. I had nowhere to go, and I didn’t appear to be of any great interest to the law. I had already left once.

  So I kept watch one night out of three, with El Hombre Lobo and René. Waiting for the black cars with their antennas, but they never came.

  The Dead

  Lourdes lived in the area behind the airport. She was a serious girl, snooty even, but tragic, blessed with the rare self-awareness that takes it for granted that life is bound to abuse you. We had been comrades in preparatory school. Through other people she got in touch with me at the house where I was hiding. A cryptic message: she would be in the third row of the Cine París, second show. I don’t recall the film. Nor do I have a clear memory of Lourdes’s features. She had curly hair and seemed to belong to another generation, to another period, a 1950s-type woman. Years later she joined a guerilla group and was disappeared. At the movie she leaned close and whispered in my ear: “I have photos of the dead.”

  It was very dangerous to know things. “The dead” were the people murdered in Tlatelolco, the bodies that had vanished. We set up a second meeting. I said I would get a group of foreign journalists together. Lourdes left the movie theater ahead of me. I didn’t ask her how she had got the photos; I assumed she had sneaked with a camera into the military airport behind her house. The rumor was that an airplane had left the night of 2 October and that the bodies had been flung into the Gulf of Mexico. Murder was not enough: the bodies had to be disappeared also.

  Two days later I waited for Lourdes at the Monumento de la Madre beneath a sun with cojones—distinctly un-Aristotelian, as Alejandro Zendejas, another of our poets, would say. Lourdes never made it. They had arrested her.

  Ending But No Happy

  The resistance lasted one more month. Hundreds of rallies, debates, brigade activity. . . But we were in the stage of no return. We needed to find new forms of struggle, and we couldn’t. In the end, on 4 December, the last schools accepted the resumption of classes. I voted to end the strike, thinking that we had to bring the repression to an end and reorganize. The National Strike Council disbanded. Everyone swore in their own particular way that there could be no forgetting, that something would have to be done, that one day we would return.

  In forty years’ worth of memories, I can recall no greater desolation than the one we faced the day classes resumed. The flowerbeds were trampled, no one had cigarettes, precious few smiles were exchanged. We returned to defeat, with the prisoners and the dead wandering through the courtyards like ghosts from The Communist Manifesto: sons of the Revolution of 1848, German Jews adrift in Europe, Poles with no fatherland—and these eighteen-year-old Mexicans in search of the country glimpsed during those few days and now fading. I didn’t last long: studying was quite meaningless. After trying to strangle a sociology teacher who made fun of the Movement on the first day of class, I quit school.

  One day I fainted halfway through a meeting. Then I also quit the political organization in which I was active. I got married. The marriage lasted four months. Fanny walked out. I let the kitchen things grow moldy, and I wrote a novel that was turned down by four publishers. To cut down on laundry I stopped wearing socks and underpants. I spent my nights awake, sitting on the floor in a bedroom with a carpet but no furniture. I felt I had lost so many things, but I couldn’t define them. I found a repellent job as a scriptwriter for soap operas. I combined it with an equally horrible job writing horoscopes for a television program, and a third, a night job, writing radio stories for drivers. I decided I needed urgently to return to two things: my country and my life. I started looking for a way back.

  In Which We Return to the Idea of Ghosts and Their Persistence in Time

  When all was said and done, it had been nothing but a student movement lasting one hundred and twenty-three days. No more and no less. Yet it had given us—given a whole generation of students—a past and a country, a ground beneath our feet. In the ensuing months thousands of us, within the University and without, tried to find our way. The most unhinged joined an urban guerilla struggle that over the next five years bled out into a mercilous dirty war. A very large group of us went into the neighborhoods and founded community organizations that for t
wenty years offered a model of popular resistance. Others went into the factories in search of the reasons the student movement had not resonated with the workers. Others again sought to transform higher education, starting unions and pushing for educational reform. Still others ended up in the countryside—an even stranger land. On these disparate journeys we took with us all our strengths and all our weaknesses: a voluntarism inured against defeats, an ingrained stubbornness, a lot of book-learned Marxism, a lot of sectarianism of the old and the new varieties, and a lot of fucking ignorance. There were distinct virtues in the mix: a notion of politics as moral, which would take a few years to develop fully, and a healthy feeling that we were not immortal.

  Twenty years after, a fair number of those of us from back then are still alive and kicking. Others wore themselves out, many were corrupted. Most did not pile up more defeats in life than those that were imposed upon them. Of course there were defeats, a shitload of them, but surrender was rare. Sixty-eight bequeathed us the reserves of defiance and determination that had been the motor of the Movement as a whole, and it infused us with a sense of place, a firmly rooted feeling of nationality.

  We ran into each other again in 1973, at the time of the doomed attempt to defend Chile, and again during the unrelenting call for pro-Nicaragua solidarity in the seventies; we saw each other in the days of the earthquake and during the University Student Council (CEU) movement in 1986. In reality we saw each other continually: at the time of the electricians’ movement; during the Spicer strike; at the La Pascual cooperative and during the marches for Demetrio Vallejo; during the upheaval at Social Sciences, when we wrought disaster by trying to transform the universities but merely turning them into centers of a Neanderthal Marxism; when architecture students were building sheet-metal houses in Santo Domingo; in the transformation of the Mexican press; when a movement of socially conscious doctors arose and a crazy generation of honest labor lawyers; in the tenants’ legal struggles; in the revival of critical social commentary; when people were fired for refusing forced PRI membership in 1985; on street corners; during lonely nights cursing at the television; in the courts as we went through our divorces; on the garment workers’ marches; in the registry-office ledgers when we baptized our sons Ernesto; and during so many poisonous benders as we made it to forty and found ourselves bewildered—genuinely surprised—to be growing older. We saw each other, too, in the launching and destruction of dreams and projects and in the books we read. And we met again at the elections just past.

  And so we go on, bearing with us the ghosts of our dead, the ghosts of our occasional traitors, the ghosts of our suicides. There are nights when I see Dulce María chewing on her pencil and Carlos Thierry falling asleep on his chair and Doctor Lino Osegueda smiling at me during the Spicer strike as if we were invincible, as if we were immortal, as if he wasn’t going to kill himself two years later.

  And I cannot let go of Alejandro Licona’s toothy smile, even if Elisa Ramírez tells me that he disappeared in the south of France, that he may well have drowned at sea or be locked up under a false name in a mental hospital. I still say to Licona, “We’re going to keep on giving them hell, aren’t we, Alex, my old buddy?”

  But then there are days when I see myself, and I don’t recognize myself. Bad times, when the night prolongs a rainy day, when sleep won’t come, and I wrestle vainly with the computer keyboard. I realize then that we seem doomed to be ghosts of ’68. Well, what’s so bad about that? I ask myself: better to be Draculas of resistance than PRI-ist monsters of Frankenstein, or of modernity. And then the keys produce graceless sparks, weak flares, memories that are sometimes painful but most of the time raise a slight smile; and I long for that old spirit of laughter; I mourn, growing fearful of the dark, for an intensity now lost, for that feeling of immortality, for that other me of that never-ending year.

  TWO EPILOGUES

  I. Twenty-Five Years After (1993)

  In early August 1993 we dinosaurs began being summoned by word of mouth, telephone calls, and a brief announcement in the press to a reunion at a meeting place of our own choosing. Dinosaurs (whatever Spielberg may think) are history-loving little beggars, nostalgic, recalcitrant to authority—all of which explains why their favored grazing area turned out to lie in the past and specifically in the auditorium that they themselves, one glorious afternoon twenty-five years earlier, in the thick of the ’68 Movement, had renamed “Che Guevara Auditorium.”

  So I headed down to the south of the Distrito Federal, something that is harder and harder for me to do, because I wanted to see how time had treated the ’68 old guard. And also because the invitation had given the venue its proper name—our name—as opposed to the archaic “Justa Sierra Auditorium” (Sierra being a bureaucrat of the Porfirio Diáz era, quite distasteful to me).

  The idea was to take a look at us, and at me, in the light of the twenty-five years gone by since the Movement of ’68, that mythical origin of almost all of us, indeed of almost everything.

  Memories of that time were always coming back: tender, incisive, sometimes rough-edged, caustic. What made these confounded fantoms so durable?

  I can easily explain how they affect me. This flotsam was, after all, morally formative in my case, so much so that even on bad days I can summon up a host of discrete images: David Cortés taking on a tank with his length of pipe, the bulging eyes of Héctor, “El Chilito,” when he spotted armored vehicles trundling across the esplanade of the Ciudad Universitaria, the menu at Political Sciences under occupation, and some very private feelings of fear. But what about the others? Were they moved merely by a nostalgia with its back firmly turned on present-day reality?

  That our ghosts had staying power could not be doubted: when the day of the meeting came, that vast University auditorium was packed, half of it with forty-something Movement veterans, the other half with eighteen-year-olds. Nor were all the dinosaurs red, and here and there a pterodactyl could be seen—even a variety with the less than heroic pedigree of a PRI-IST vulture.

  From this throng emerged an ill-defined organization that declared itself open to all who cared to join: the “Twenty-Five-Years-After Committee,” known thereafter (to economize on letters) as Com25. That evening Com25 called for two initiatives: first, the institution of a “Truth Commission” to cast light on everything concealed by the official accounts of the ’68 Movement; and secondly, the initiation of a petition to the government to open up all its archives. These actions would conclude with the publication of a manifesto on 4 December, the anniversary of the day in 1968 when the general student strike was abandoned.

  I decided that night to join these efforts. The novel and the screenplay I was working on would just have to wait.

  Three hypotheses: (a) a myth is not necessarily a lie, (b) generally speaking, the myth is the rumor-borne truth of those that got screwed (after all, the victors control national television, and (c) myths do not aways embody the finest aspects of the story—sometimes they preserve only the cheapest and most ridiculous details.

  The legend of the wanderings of the Aztecs as they searched for their home on the lake; the quest for the nonexistent Aztlán; Wyatt Earp at the O.K. Corral; the romantic heroes of the poems of Byron or Espronceda; the exploits of all the big-hearted outlaws (Robin Hood, Dick Turpin, Chucho El Roto); the day Dad stood up to his boss and told him to go fuck himself; songs in which three horsemen appear in the heavens (God, Zapata, Jaramillo); Pedro Infante, troubadour champion of the poor. . . Such elements are the raw material of mythology—not lies, but something else, something essential: the stuff of our own lives.

  Of course, there is also Benito Juárez as the “little pastor” of the nation, the claim that Elvis Presley was born in Sinaloa, Uncle Joe Stalin visible through a lighted window in the Kremlin working away late into the night for the fatherland, the fucked-up vision of the essential Mexico proposed in Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude, the on-screen machismo of Rock Hudson—all the makings of myt
hs that are perfectly silly, not to say idiotic.

  Despite the paucity of attempts to tell the story—a couple of fiction films, a couple of documentaries, two or three novels—awareness of the ’68 Movement had been growing over the last few years, nourished by the vague stories parents told their children, the nostalgic memories of the glory days recounted by a generation since trapped by years of vain struggles and month after month of shit work, of lurching from one financial crisis to the next, of juggling principles with the need to survive.

  Myth material par excellence.

  Demythification is not the only option, however. Another is remythification.

  In response to the mobilization of ’68 veterans, a host of seekers after the “objective” truth about the Movement emerged in the media. Dubbed “objectivity hounds” by us dinosaurs (as everyone knows, dinosaurs are basically herbivorous and passionate), what they were after was a digestible version of the facts that would in no way upset the present of the yuppies of Ali Baba and his forty (PRI-ist) thieves. The “objective” version of ’68 would surely be aired in public in all its certitude, then duly vanish from the popular middle-class imagination.

  They would say things like, “It was only a student movement. You also have to see things from the State’s point of view. What did they think—that it wouldn’t defend itself?” Or, “Things are different now. Remember, there has been a great deal of progress in the last few years.”