1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  Fate likes to tease paranoids. The day of this demonstration happened to be July 26, and the downtown student march ran into the annual march of a handful of Fidel supporters. Combined, this year’s July 26 march was the largest the Mexican government had ever seen. The army headed them off and steered them into side streets, where some protesters were throwing rocks at the soldiers. The demonstrators throwing the rocks did not look familiar to the students. And they found the rocks in trash cans, which was curious because downtown Mexico City trash cans did not generally contain rocks. Days of battles followed. Buses were commandeered, the passengers were forced out, and the buses were driven into walls and set on fire.

  The students claimed that these and other acts of violence were carried out by military plants to justify the army’s brutal response, an accusation that was largely confirmed in documents released in 1999. The government blamed the violence on the youth arm of the Communist Party. By the end of the month at least one student was dead, hundreds injured, and unknown numbers in prison. Each encounter was a recruitment for the next: The more injured and imprisoned, the more students demonstrated against the brutality.

  In the beginning of August the students organized a council with representatives from the various schools in Mexico City. It was called the National Strike Council—the CNH. The CNH, unlike Mexico itself, but very much like SDS, SNCC, and so many sixties protest organizations, was scrupulously democratic. Students voted for delegates, and the CNH decided everything by the votes of these three hundred delegates. Roberto Escudero was the oldest delegate, elected by the graduate school of philosophy where he was studying Marxism. He said, “The CNH could debate for ten or twelve hours on ideology. I will give you an example. The government proposed a dialogue. CNH said it had to be a public dialogue—because they controlled all information that was not in the open. It was one of the problems, the government wanted everything secret. So the government called to discuss this idea of a dialogue. The CNH had a ten-hour debate on whether this phone call was a violation of their principle of only having public dialogue.”

  Like the Polish students four months earlier, Mexican student demonstrators carried signs protesting the press’s complete adherence to the government line, but they were left with no way to disseminate to the general public truthful information about what was happening and why they were protesting. So in response to the fact that the PRI controlled all the news media, they invented the Brigades, each of which had between six and fifteen people and each of which was named after a sixties cause or personality. One was called the Brigade Alexander Dubek. The Brigades mounted street theater. They would go to markets and other public places and stage conversations, sometimes arguments, each playing a role, acting out a scene in which current events were discussed; and people overhearing these loud conversations would learn about things they never read in the newspaper. It worked because societies with completely corrupt press learn to pick up news on the street.

  In September Díaz Ordaz’s nightmare became reality. A French student from the May Paris movement arrived in Mexico to instruct students. But he did not teach about revolution or building barricades or making Molotov cocktails, all of which the Mexican students seemed to have already learned anyway. The architecture student Jean-Claude Leveque had been trained during the French student uprising in silk-screen poster making by Beaux Arts students. Now Mexico City became covered with images printed on cheap Mexican paper of silhouetted soldiers bayoneting and clubbing students, a man with a padlocked mouth, the press with a snaked tongue and dollars over the eyes. There were even Olympic posters with a vicious monkey, who unmistakably resembled a certain president, wearing a combat helmet.

  But Mexico was different from France. In Mexico a number of students were shot while trying to put up posters or write graffiti on walls.

  By August student demonstrations and the accompanying army violence spread to other states. One student was reported killed in Villahermosa, the capital of Tabasco state. In Mexico City the CNH was able to call out fifty thousand protesters to demonstrate on the issue of army violence. U.S. News & World Report ran an article in August that said Mexico was having disturbances “on the eve” of the Olympics. This was exactly what Díaz Ordaz did not want to see, the Mexico City Olympics beginning to look like the Chicago convention. “Before the troops could restore calm about 100 buses were burned or damaged, shops sacked, four students killed and 100 wounded.” The authorities blamed the violence on “Communist agitators directed from outside Mexico.” According to the Mexican government, among those arrested were five Frenchmen “identified as veteran agitators” of the student uprising in May in Paris. No names or further identification was offered. But the magazine pointed out that there were “other factors,” including discontent over one-party rule.

  “Demand the solution to Mexico’s problems.” A 1968 silk-screen poster of the Consejo Nacional de Huelga. The figure in the back holding up the book is taken from posters of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

  (Amigos de la Unidad de Postgrado de la Escuela de Diseño A.C.)

  By the end of August more than one hundred thousand people were marching in the student demonstrations, sometimes several hundred thousand, but the students suspected that many of the marchers were actually government agents placed there to provoke violence. Díaz Ordaz decided to play Charles de Gaulle—usually a mistake for any head of state—and stage a huge demonstration in support of the government. But apparently he did not think he could draw the crowds, so he forced government workers to be bused into the center of Mexico City. One of the more memorable scenes involved office workers taking off their high-heeled shoes and furiously whacking them against the armor of tanks to express their fury at being forced to participate.

  In addition to his determination to save the Olympics, his fear of destabilization, and his frustration at his inability to control the students, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz must have been shocked by what was taking place. He was an extremely formal man from the nearby state of Puebla, on the other side of the volcanoes from the capital. Puebla was a deeply conservative place. He came from a world in which men, even young men, still wore suits and ties. In his world it was acceptable for the president to be derided with wit at cocktail parties, but not to be ridiculed openly in public, portrayed as a monkey or a bat in public parades. These youth had no respect for authority—no respect for anything, it seemed.

  Every year on the first of September the president of Mexico delivers the Informe, the State of the Union address. In September 1968 Gustavo Díaz Ordaz said in his Informe, “We have been so tolerant that we have been criticized for our excessive leniency, but there is a limit to everything, and the irremediable violations of law and order that have occurred recently before the very eyes of the entire nation cannot be allowed to continue.” His speeches often had a threatening quality to them, but this one, in which he assured the world that the Olympics would not be disturbed, sounded especially menacing. The phrase everyone remembered was “We will do what we have to.” Like Alexander Dubek with the Soviets, the Mexican students did not know with whom they were dealing. Martínez de la Roca said, “It was a threat, but we didn’t really listen.”

  The demonstrations continued. On September 18 at 10:30 at night the army surrounded the UNAM campus with troops and armored vehicles and, using a pincer movement, closed in and evacuated buildings, rounding up hundreds of students and faculty, ordering them to either stand with hands up or lie on the ground where they were. They were held at gunpoint, bayonet point in many cases, while the army continued their siege of the entire campus, building by building. It is not known how many faculty members and students were arrested, some to be released the next day. More than a thousand were thought to have been held in prison.

  On September 23, at the Polytechnic, the police invaded and the students fought them back with sticks. Then the army came—Obregón’s Army of the People—and for the first time fired their weapons at students.
The New York Times reported forty wounded. They also reported exchanges of gunfire and one policeman killed, although there is no evidence of the students ever having possessed firearms. Unidentified “vigilantes,” probably soldiers out of uniform, started attacking schools and shooting at students.

  The violence was escalating. Finally, on October 2 the government and the National Strike Council had a meeting. According to Raúl Álvarez Garín, one of the CNH delegates, the long-awaited dialogue was a disaster. “There was no dialogue with the government. We didn’t say anything.” One of the street posters that month showed bay-onets and the caption “Dialogue?” “The meeting ended very badly,” Roberto Escudero recalled, and the CNH moved on to the rally at which they were to announce a hunger strike for political prisoners for the next ten days until the opening day of the Olympics. Then on that day they would again try to negotiate with the government. The rally to announce the plan was to be at a place called Tlatelolco.

  The students did not understand that a decision had already been made. The government had concluded that these students were not Pancho Villas—they were Zapatas.

  If this story had been written by an ancient Greek tragedian, it would have played its final scene at Tlatelolco. It is as though it were fated to end in this place. Mexican stories often start out being about the threatening foreigner but always end up being about Mexico, about what Paz called “its hidden face: an Indian, Mestizo face, an angry, blood-splattered face.” Martínez de la Roca loved talking about American influences, about the Black Panthers and civil rights. But looking back on the speeches of the CNH, he was surprised to realize how nationalistic they were with their speeches about violating the constitution and the ideals of Zapata. And so their story turns out not to be about Che, or the Sorbonne, or Cohn-Bendit, or even Berkeley; it is about Montezuma and Cortés and Carranza, about Obregón and Villa and Zapata. It was played out in a place the Mexican government called La Plaza de las Tres Culturas, the Plaza of Three Cultures—but the event is always identified by the Aztec name for the place, Tlatelolco.

  If a single place could tell the history of Mexico, its conquests, its slaughters, its ambitions, defeats, victories, and aspirations, it would be Tlatelolco. When Montezuma ruled an Aztec empire from the island of Tenochtitlán in the high mountain lake that is now the site of Mexico City, one of the small affiliated allies was the nearby kingdom of Tlatelolco, a thriving commercial hub in the empire, a market center, whose last ruler was the young Cauhtemoctzin, who came to power in 1515, four years before the Spanish took control. The Spanish destroyed Tlatelolco, and in the midst of its ruins they built a church, a habit they developed when destroying Muslim areas in Iberia. In 1535 a Franciscan convent was built in the name of Santiago, the patron saint of the newly united Spain.

  In the 1960s the Mexican government added its own presence in this spot of conquest and destruction, a high-rise Ministry of Foreign Relations and a huge, sprawling, middle-class housing project made up of long concrete blocks each given the name of a state or an important date in Mexican history. The buildings went on for miles—good apartments at subsidized rents for loyal PRI families, a PRI stronghold in the center of town. Not that there was any opposition. But the buildings stood as proof that PRI delivered. In 1985 this exemplary construction proved not to be of the quality that PRI had claimed, and it was a whispered scandal when most of the buildings tumbled, faltered, or collapsed in an earthquake. The Aztec ruins and the Franciscan church, on the other hand, were barely damaged.

  Tlatelolco consists of a flagstone-paved plaza surrounded on two sides by the black stone and white mortar walls of a considerable complex of Aztec ruins. The church also faces the plaza on one of these sides. In the front and on the other side are housing projects. The building in front, the Edificio Chihuahua, has an open-air hallway on the third floor where people can stand in front of a waist-high concrete wall and look out at the plaza.

  It is the kind of place an experienced political organizer would not choose. The police had only to block a few passageways between buildings and the plaza would be sealed off. Even the army operation at UNAM allowed a few quick students to slip out. But from Tlatelolco there would be no escape.

  The rally was scheduled to begin at 4:00. By 3:00 police were already stopping cars from entering the downtown area. Determined people came on foot—couples, families with small children. Only between five thousand and twelve thousand people went into the plaza, depending on whose estimate is believed—one of the smallest showings since the troubles started in July. It was a rally to make an announcement and not a mass demonstration.

  Myrthokleia González Gallardo, a twenty-two-year-old CNH delegate from the Polytechnic Institute, went despite her parents’ pleas not to; they feared something terrible would happen. But she felt that she had to go. Progressives in Mexico were just beginning to think about women’s rights, and she was one of only nine women of the three hundred delegates. “The CNH did not listen as much when a woman spoke,” she recalled. But she had been chosen to introduce the four speakers, which was an unusually high-profile role for a woman.

  “As I approached Tlatelolco with the four speakers I was to introduce,” she recalled, choked with tears thinking about it thirty-four years later to the month, “we were warned to be careful, that the army had been seen nearby. But I wasn’t afraid, though we decided to make it a short meeting. There were workers, students, families coming into the plaza, filling it up. We didn’t see any army in the plaza.”

  They went up the elevator to the third-floor balcony of Edificio Chihuahua, a commanding perch from where they could address the crowd in the plaza. “We took our place on the third floor and started the speeches,” she said. “Suddenly, off to the left, over the church, were helicopters with a green light. Suddenly everyone down in the plaza started falling. And then men with white gloves and weapons appeared, maybe from the elevator. They ordered us down to the ground floor, where they began beating us.” In the background she heard the tap-tap-tap of automatic weapons fire.

  The Mexican army had two chains of command, the regular army, which reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Ministry of Defense, and the Battalion Olympia, which reported directly to the president. It seemed soldiers from both organizations were there. The soldiers of the Battalion Olympia were disguised in civilian clothes. But in order to recognize one another, each wore one white glove, as though this clue would not be noticed by others. These soldiers went up to the third floor of the Edificio Chihuahua and mingled with the CNH leaders. Then, as Myrthokleia Gonzalez Gallardo began speaking, they opened fire at the crowd below. Many eyewitnesses describe these men as “snipers,” which implies precision marksmen, but in fact they fired indiscriminately into the crowd, hitting protesters but also the regular army. One of the first people hit was an army general.

  The army fired back furiously at the balcony where the men with white gloves were shooting, but also where the CNH leaders stood. The men in white gloves appeared to panic and forget that they were undercover. “Don’t fire!” they were heard to shout down. “We are the Battalion Olympia!”

  According to witnesses, automatic fire continued in the plaza and many witnesses spoke of “snipers” in the windows of the Edificio Chihuahua. Raúl Álvarez Garín, one of the CNH leaders on the balcony, was taken with many others to the side of the plaza between the Aztec ruins and the ancient Franciscan church and forced to stand with his face to the wall. These prisoners could see nothing. But Álvarez Garín clearly remembers hearing constant automatic gunfire for two and a half hours.

  The crowd ran toward the space between the church and the Edificio Chihuahua, but it was blocked by soldiers. Others tried the other side of the church between the ruins, but all escapes were blocked by soldiers. They tried to run into the church, which was supposed to be open at all times to give sanctuary, but the massive sixteenth-century doors were barred and snipers were shooting from the Moorish curves of the scalloped wall a
long the domed roof. It was a perfect trap. A few of the survivors have stories of soldiers taking pity and helping them out.

  The sound of automatic fire for two hours or more is one of the most consistent reports from witnesses. Others, including González Gallardo, remember seeing the army attacking with rifles and bayonets. Bodies were seen being piled up in several downtown locations. Martínez de la Roca, who had already been arrested and locked in a small Lecumberri cell, saw the prison fill up with bleeding prisoners, some with gunshot wounds.

  The Mexican government said four students were killed, but the number grew to about a dozen. The government-controlled newspapers also gave small numbers, if any. Television simply reported that there had been a police incident. El Universal on October 3 reported twenty-nine dead and more than eighty wounded. El Sol de México reported snipers firing on the army, resulting in 1 general and 11 soldiers wounded and more than 20 civilians killed. The New York Times also reported “at least 20 dead,” whereas The Guardian of London reported 325 dead, a figure then cited by Octavio Paz, who ended his diplomatic career in protest. Some said thousands were dead. And there were thousands missing. Myrthokleia González Gallardo’s parents, who had warned her not to go, spent ten miserable days with the Red Cross looking for their daughter among the dead. After ten days they discovered her in prison. Many were in prisons. Álvarez Garín spent two years and seven months in a cramped Lecumberri cell. He was elected head of his cell block. “It was the only election I ever won!” he said. Martínez de la Roca also served three years in prison.

  For many years it was difficult to say if a missing person had been killed, was in prison, or had joined the guerrillas. Many did join armed guerrilla groups in rural areas. Families were hesitant to make too much of their son or daughter being missing because it might help the government identify their child with an armed group if that turned out to be the case. Today human rights groups claim five hundred Mexicans allegedly connected to guerrilla groups were killed by the military in the 1970s. But no mass graves have been found from Tlatelolco or any of the later killings. There were cases of whole families being threatened if they persisted in asking about a missing relative from 1968. Martínez de la Roca said, “Families don’t come forward about missing children because they have received anonymous phone calls saying, ‘If you say anything, all your other children will die.’ I understand. When I was a kid someone killed my father and told me if I didn’t keep quiet about it, he would kill my older brother. So I didn’t say anything.”