'68

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  For myself I think, on the contrary, that if there is something from ’68 to be defended, it is its long-lived magical aura, created with love and persistence, in a country of cheaters and cheated, by dint of real democracy tenaciously practiced for 123 days (or 130, according to Marcelino Perelló, who is always correcting my simple-minded statistics) of university occupations and assemblies at all levels.

  Against the digestible account of the objectivity hounds, I recommend the counterversions of Miguel Hernández (“the inextinguishable ray”) and Michael Ende (“unending history”), which for decades now have energized thousands of Mexicans in their ongoing struggle for full democratic rights.

  I am thus in favor of the fantasy, the antiauthoritarian myth of the Movement, along with the accompanying bloody-mindedness with which that Movement fought for democracy. I am in favor of saying it yet again: It is not over yet. As for objectivity, I don’t give a royal shit about objectivity.

  Because, when you get down to it, this is a myth that gives them a major pain in the ass.

  I was at the first meeting of the Twenty-Five-Years-After Committee. We often met in bookstore cafés, and people at nearby tables would crane their necks to glimpse this reemergence of the dinosaurs. With enormous pleasure I rediscovered faces from back then, a crowd I love: Adriana Corona, Gastón Martínez, Blanquita, Trobamala, Eugenia, García Mota, Filemón, Carlos López. They were better looking now, improved even, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding; at the very least they had a more finished aspect, with their opulent mustaches, unabashed silver locks, and reading glasses. So many defeats had somehow not been in vain. My generation, if nothing else, had achieved a certain style. Born to lose but not to bullshit, whispered the phrasemaking gnome in my head.

  In ’68, looking back, we dressed a bit like timid customers of clothing chains like Milano and El Niño Elegante. What could be more horrible and puritanical than those wide-sleeved shirts and slightly flared pants! Now, though, we looked like a bunch of unemployed anthropologists, our attire ranging from jackets with leather patches at the elbows (like Dustin Hoffman in All the President’s Men) to turtleneck sweaters (the young Jean-Paul Belmondo). On the other hand, the complete disappearance of miniskirts among my female peers took some getting used to.

  Our meetings tended to follow a pre-set ritual: photos of Movement days were passed around, films were shown, and we chewed over old history for all the world as though we had not lived through it, as though we needed to convince ourselves that it had all really happened.

  One of the many Com25 meetings, held in a university auditorium with students and political groups in attendance, almost ended in a brawl. How naïve it was to suppose that all this was a thing of the past—that the sectarianism of the old left had vanished along with the old left itself. Far from it! The sad fact of the phenomenon’s staying power was only too plain to see. Manifestly, tyrannosauruses—flesh-eating predators as opposed to us herbivorous dinosaurs—were quite capable of reproducing, and thereby perpetuating, a contagion that drives its victims mad, turning them into the mortal enemies not of the real agent of their poverty and suffering (the oh-so-far-off repressive State) but of their closest neighbors, with whom differences must be invented as quickly as possible so as to inflame hatred against them.

  On the domesticated television show Nexos, Rolando Cordera tried to wring self-criticism from a few stubborn defenders of the ’68 Movement. “So, did something go awry?” he persisted. “Was there a failure of organization? Was something not working properly?”

  And I thought to myself, yes, without a doubt—and from the outset. But I also thought, just like the television panelists, that I wouldn’t be the one to say so. The fact is that seeing the downside is a burdensome luxury that the defeated do not tend to indulge in public.

  Who were the real inheritors of the Movement of ’68? The University Student Council movement of the late eighties clearly had an incontestable claim to the mantle. But it was important not to exclude the democratic syndicalism of the 1970s; the Cardenista electoral revolt; the brigades of volunteers who transformed Mexico City as they worked amid the devastation of the earthquake of 1985; the workers’ cooperative of La Pascual; the critical journalists fired over and over again by their papers; or the people’s lawyers who went to Nicaragua and in many cases left much of their souls there. Even a significant number of those who took part in the Cardenas anti-PRI revolt of 1988 could claim to be true heirs of ’68. Obviously, therefore, the veterans of the ’68 Movement, thousands of them now in their forties and firmly ensconced in the middle and professional classes, had simply no monopoly on ’68 as their own little baby.

  Us and the others: in a passageway I heard a bunch of kids claiming that ’68 was something to do with other people, because they themselves were not even born back then. To me this seemed like historical illiteracy. I wasn’t around when Hidalgo tolled the bell that started Mexico’s struggle for independence, but that doesn’t make me distant, foreign, or without a viewpoint in that regard. It is not a matter of having been there when others were not. Not about other generations having better myths than one’s own. It is all about entering into conversation with Jules Vallès and the Paris Communards, with Flores Magón and John Reed, or with Juana the Oaxaqueña who, in Cuautla with Morelos’s army in 1812, lifted her dress and bared her ass to the gachupines—the Spaniards in their firing positions opposite—to make them waste ammunition.

  The trouble was that official versions, fully copyrighted, were seemingly under construction, and it was precisely these versions that needed to be destroyed. The Movement was entitled to more than the accounts offered by its participants; it also deserved the versions of its inheritors. Property rights to ’68 belong also to those who were not yet born at the time.

  Throughout that September, as demonstrations and other events were being organized and many interviews and documents related to ’68 were being published, I kept hearing the same phrase at meetings, rallies, on television programs, radio broadcasts, and even in private conversations: “The Movement does not belong to anybody.” Yet most of the time I got the impression that what was really being said was just the opposite. Experience has sensitized us to doublespeak, and in these voices I couldn’t help hearing the whispered message that the Movement of ’68 was indeed the private property of the speaker.

  The term botear—meaning to pass around a can to collect money—was born in ’68. And here we were, “canning” once more, at the intersection of Mexico City’s Eje Central and Avenida Juárez, in the shadow of the Latin American Tower. Once more we were poorer than church mice, because Com25 had proved particularly adept at running up bills (due mainly to the cost of announcements of its activities in the papers). The result was really quite entertaining. There were about twenty of us. Flash sociological analysis: the forty-something professionals were working much better with the eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds. Smiles all around.

  The area we were in was blighted by unemployment. “I’m cold,” someone said. On balance, said someone else, the main thing wasn’t the money—the main thing was being back in the street. Sound the bugles!

  That night I listened with Paloma to Raúl Jardón’s program on educational radio: “The ’68 Movement in Memory.” An impressive effort that got the whole family gathered around the radio—shades of the 1950s. We liked the way Eberguenyi narrated the week’s events. We liked Jardón’s selection of period music, reviving Donovan and Leonard Cohen, Dylan and Oscar Chávez. We liked the old voices singing, “Cuando todo granadero sepa leer y escribir” (When every riot policeman can read and write).

  The seriousness of the program was much enhanced by the main interview with Marcelino Perelló, unquestionably one of the most lucid voices of the ’68 generation. He called for two things: the renewal of the Movement’s demand for public dialogue—the initiation, in other words, of that impossibility, a Mexican glasnost, something the country’s authoritarian government could never c
onceivably grant—and a return to everything in the Movement that had been revolutionary or profoundly transformative in character.

  The Truth Commission came into being in a tiny theater packed with press. Its members included some of the best known writers, lawyers, journalists, and actors in Mexico: Alonso Aguilar, Sergio Aguayo, René Avilés, Bernardo Batiz, Jorge Castañeda, Felipe Ehrenberg, Luis Javier Garrido, Miguel Angel Granados Chapa, Hernán Lara Zavala, Froylán López Narváez, Sara Lovera, Lorenzo Meyer, Héctor Ortega, Elena Poniatowska, Javier Wimer, Eraclio Zepeda, José Agustín, Carlos Monsiváis, and Carlos Montemayor.

  The purpose was not only to learn more about the events of 1968, but also to make the facts public.

  Com25 bequeathed six issues to the Truth Commission for its consideration: 1. Clarification of the charge against the Movement that it was the outcome of a plot or conspiracy.

  2. Origins and motives of the repressive action of July 1968.

  3. Genesis and unfolding of the events of 2 October 1968 and the identification of those responsible.

  4. Clarification of the contradictory information released concerning those killed and wounded during the ’68 Movement.

  5. Legitimacy of the penal judgments passed as part of the repression of the Movement.

  6. Definitive assignment of responsibility for these events.

  It fell to me to work alongside Ilán Semo as Technical Secretary to the Commission. For several months witnesses would be interviewed and documents examined. Commission meetings, held on the upper floor of El Juglar bookstore in the south of Mexico City, brought together Movement veterans, ex-soldiers, and neighbors and relatives of the dead. Letters were received, too, from former government functionaries and former police officers.

  In due course a very long report was published which established that the Movement’s prime causes were social in nature and that the State’s response consisted of repression, censorship of the media, and lies. A list of the names of the victims of the Tlatelolco massacre was drawn up, and evidence was laid out showing that it was a sector of the army, under the control of the President of the Republic, that coordinated the shooting in Tlatelolco.

  Luis Tomás Cervantes Cabeza de Vaca had a moment of glory during a press conference, when a Televisa reporter challenged him, none too graciously, as follows: “You were one of the ones who elected the Truth Commission. Who, might I ask, elected you?”

  “I was elected,” came the reply, “in July 1968 by a student assembly at the University of Chapingo, and, as far as I know, my mandate has not yet been revoked. All the comrades on the Twenty-Five-Years-After Committee were duly elected by their school assemblies. . . .”

  Thunderous applause.

  Another apt rejoinder was that of “El Pino” Martínez de la Roca, delivered with the half-bitter smile that suits him so well, in response to a question from a young woman reporter from Channel Eleven who was interviewing him, and clearly enjoying it, so that the generation gap between the two was bridged by the force of emotion: “It certainly isn’t the most important thing,” he said, “but I sure would like someone to tell me why they kept me in jail for two years, six months, and five days.”

  I now made friends that I had never made in ’68, doubtless for lack of time. One was Cabeza de Vaca, once a student leader at Chapingo; another was Salvador Ruiz Villegas, sometime leader at the School of Engineering. My friend Paco Pérez Arce says that meeting someone you haven’t seen in twenty years can leave you with a sense of loss, but in 1993 I had the opposite experience, for throughout those days I had a strange feeling of reconnection.

  The two above-mentioned characters were a tad crazy—crazier than most, in fact. After our meetings they would walk all the way home—supposedly to clear their heads. Late one night I found myself trotting beside them through San José Insurgentes, then through Nápoles. As we went past the big houses, trying not to step in dog shit, we decided the best thing of all was to have discovered that having different opinions was no sin. That there is more than one path to Rome, that left-wing thinking is ultimately ethical in character, and that who knew where Rome would turn out to be anyway? The sort of spiel, in short, that might well have been heard twenty-five years earlier.

  When, a good while ago now, I wrote the pages that precede this epilogue, my main concern was to solidify my own memories. Now, in 1993, as I revisited those memories I looked at them once again to see whether the bath of nostalgia into which I had plunged over the last few days really had anything to do with them. I discovered that memories not originally mine were now becoming part of my own narrative, that the lived and the told, the heard and the seen, were fusing in my mind. Memory was being collectivized, and others’ memories were becoming part and parcel of my own.

  On 2 October 1993 we were in the street again. Even though the slogan I proposed—“One day of glory for so many days of shit”—was rejected in favor of the far more traditional “Today, like yesterday, for democratic rights,” I was still pleased. I was in my Sunday best. I had brought both my most loving memories and my abiding hates back into the street.

  For endless kilometers—so endless that we took to chanting “The Three Musketeers is not the same as Twenty Years After”—I marched alongside Paloma and my daughter. I was not the only one: a good many comrades had brought their kids. A surprising demonstration, really, with parents and kids together, vying with one another to see who could come up with the best chants, who could dream up the most really unreal country.

  II. Thirty-Five Years After (2003)

  Every time someone declares it forgotten, transcended, resolved, or dead and buried, it comes back. The ’68 Movement is just plain ornery that way.

  In the June 2000 elections the PRI fell for the second time: the thousand-year Reich of the cattle-thieves was disintegrating. With this rout of the PRI, our generation had at last fulfilled its pact with the devil: its vow to get the PRI out of Los Pinos, the presidential residence.

  This is not the place to characterize the decaffeinated transition that has since taken place. An encounter did occur, nevertheless, with thousands of the absent: social pressure obliged the Vicente Fox administration to set up a special public prosecutor’s office to address the political crimes of the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called dirty war.

  Over the last ten years the persistence of the intellectual community and of a number of newspapers and magazines has repeatedly turned the spotlight back onto the ’68 Movement and the question of who was responsible for its repression. Photographs and films have been dug out of archives, an excellent documentary has been made by Carlos Mendoza, the files of General García Barragán have been opened, and a book published, Parte de Guerra II, with a commentary by Carlos Monsiváis and Julio Scherer García that sheds much light on the role of the army. Carlos Montemayor has made a semitechnical study of the Tlatelolco killings that even manages—on the basis of the positions of the military sharpshooters and the trajectories of their fire—to demonstrate that the Presidential guard fired on both infantry and students. Special issues of the magazine Proceso published long-concealed photographs of the torture perpetrated in police stations.

  Very few doubts remain as to the facts. What had already been clearly grasped by public opinion is now solidly documented.

  However, as long as the murderers are not brought to justice, the wounds will fester. The special prosecutor’s office has moved only under external pressure, lurching this way and that, opening investigations and calling on ex-presidents to testify, which they refuse to do. As for us, obdurate as ever, thirty-five years down the line, we are back in the street yet again.

  Mexico City, late November 2003

  PACO IGNACIO TAIBO II, author of more than fifty books, is a distinguished historian and essayist. He is also renowned world-wide for his detective novels. His numerous literary honors include two Dashiell Hammett prizes, a Planeta prize for the best historical novel, and the Bancarella Prize for his biography of Che Guev
ara.

  DONALD NICHOLSON-SMITH has translated numerous works from the French and Spanish including Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life.

  1 Materialistas, in Mexican Spanish, are heavy-goods vehicles.—Translator.

  A first version of the present work, significantly shorter, entitled “Fantasmas nuestros de cada día” (Our Everyday Ghosts), appeared under the imprint of the now defunct publishing house Marco Polo, as well as in the Monterrey daily El Porvenir and in the magazines Encuentro (Mexico City) and Casa de Las Américas (Havana).

  The translator extends many, many thanks to Alejandro, Howie, Jill, Jim, Mia, and Ramor.

  First published in 1991 by Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, Mexico City

  Copyright © 1991 by Francisco Ignacio Taibo Mahojo English translation copyright © 2004 by Donald Nicholson-Smith

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.