CHAPTER 19
All the history of every people is symbolic. This is to say: history and its events and its protagonists allude to another concealed history, are the visible manifestation of a hidden reality.
—OCTAVIO PAZ, Posdata, 1970
GUSTAVO DíAZ ORDAZ was a very ugly man. Mexicans were divided into two camps about their president: those who thought he resembled a bat and those who thought he was more like a monkey. His small frame, little snipped nose, long teeth, and thick-lensed glasses that magnified his irises to a primordial size all contributed to this debate. The monkey side gave him his nickname, El Chango, a Mexican word for a monkey, though his long, flapping arm gestures were suggestive of bat wings. But he was credited with a good sense of humor and reputedly once responded to the accusation of being “two-faced” by saying, “Ridiculous, if I had another one don’t you think I would use it?” And though not especially skilled with language, he had a powerful, booming speaking voice. His voice was the only physical attribute in his favor. But a good voice is an important attribute for a president of Mexico. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote, “Accustomed as they are to delivering only monologues, intoxicated by a lofty rhetoric that envelops them like a cloud, our presidents and leaders find it well-nigh impossible to believe that aspirations and opinions that are different than their own even exist.”
In 1968 the president of Mexico was worried. Some of the things that worried him were in his own mind and some were real. He had reason to worry about the Olympics. So far this year, almost every cultural and sporting event had been disrupted. The winter games in Grenoble, France, had gone well, though perhaps too much attention had been paid to Soviet-Czech competition. But the games had taken place before April, when the French were still bored. The April Academy Awards were postponed two days to mourn the death of Martin Luther King and then were overshadowed by politics. Bob Hope, not well liked on the Left for his girlie shows for the troops in Vietnam, appalled the audience with jokes about the postponement. Two films about race relations, albeit simplistic stories almost silly with didacticism—In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—won awards. In a positive touch of the times, Czech director Jirí Menzel won the Oscar for best foreign language film for Closely Watched Trains, and he was free to travel to receive it. It was a completely politicized event.
“Let’s demand to know who is responsible.” 1968 Mexican student silk-screen poster depicting President Díaz Ordaz as a monkey.
(Amigos de la Unidad de Postgrado de la Escuela de Diseño A.C.)
Disruption would be even worse than politicization. Protesters had closed the annual Venice Biennale art show and the Cannes Film Festival, attacked the Frankfurt Book Fair, and even disrupted the Miss America pageant. Even the winner of the Kentucky Derby was disqualified for drug use. And of course there was the Chicago convention. Nothing like that was to happen in Mexico.
Díaz Ordaz, as president of Mexico, the appointed leader of the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, was heir to the revolution and guardian of the stated contradiction in the ruling party’s carefully worded name. In 1910 Mexico had been a labyrinth of political chaos and social injustice. Centuries of inept colonial rule followed by corrupt dictatorships and foreign occupations then culminated in thirty years of one-man rule. It was a familiar pattern. After years of chaos, the dictator Porfirio Díaz offered stability. But in 1910 he was eighty years old and had arranged for no successor or any institutions to outlast him. There were no political parties, and he represented no ideology. Mexico was divided by different cultures, ethnic groups, and social classes, all with dramatically different needs and demands. When the country erupted into what was called the Mexican revolution that year, it was an endless series of highly destructive civil wars, most of them fought on a regional basis. There were many leaders and many armies. But this was the Mexico Hernán Cortés had found in the early sixteenth century. The Aztecs had ruled by managing a coalition of leaders from different groups. Cortés had defeated the Aztecs by dividing his coalition, gaining the loyalty of some of the leaders. That was how politics was played in Mexico.
Francisco Madero, a bourgeois from the north, led one faction. He attracted upper-class, middle-class, and working-class Mexicans of moderate politics. Also in the north were tough, mounted guerrilla fighters—bandits who took up the cause of the revolution, in some cases as paid mercenaries. The most brilliant of these was Pancho Villa. Villa was the only revolutionary leader to get good American press. Even Madero was criticized bitterly for suggesting a minuscule tax on the Mexican oil that was controlled and imported to the United States by American oil companies. But Pancho Villa had little of the “anti-Americanism” of which Washington suspected all the others. He did personally rape hundreds of women and murder according to whim, and he was a racist who killed Chinese people whenever he found them working in mining camps. His lieutenants were even more murderous and sadistic, devising hideous tortures. But General Villa was not anti-American. The Americans supplied his weapons and ammunition. Ten thousand men rode with Villa, mostly in the northern state of Chihuahua. They robbed and raided, did as they wanted, and once even won a spectacular military victory for the revolution at Zacatecas.
In the central area, in Morelos, was Emiliano Zapata, who did not fit in with any of the others, aside from the fact that they were all mestizo—of mixed European and indigenous blood. Zapata with his big, sad eyes was leading a peasant revolt in the central highlands. His followers were agrarian Mexicans, either mestizo or from indigenous non-Spanish-speaking tribes, of which there are still many in Mexico, fighting for land. His goal was to have the arable land of Mexico taken away from wealthy landowners and distributed equally among the peasants. He and his followers intended to go on fighting regardless of what the others did, until the farmers got their land.
Fighting continued after Madero became president in 1911, and he was helpless to stop it. Madero, for whom Zapata had a great fondness, was from the wrong class. He was a landowner with a large ranch in the north, and he was surrounded by other figures such as Venustiano Carranza, who had interests in the moneyed classes and were disturbed at the way this Zapata was trying to turn the Revolution into a revolution. Madero could not give Zapata his land, and he could not bribe the bandits, the “generals” in the north, enough to make peace seem profitable to them. Like many revolutionary figures, Madero was murdered by supporters of the Revolution.
By the end of 1914 the combined forces of the revolutionary armies of Carranza and Pancho Villa and Zapata had secured control of Mexico and defeated the federal army that Porfirio Díaz had left behind. Zapata and Villa moved their armies into the capital as a new revolutionary government was formed. Carranza declared himself president and reluctantly and under great pressure adopted Zapata’s land reform program, though he did little to put it into action.
Álvaro Obregón, who, like most leading figures of the period, held the title of general, was a schoolteacher from the northern state of Sonora who had started out with a guerrilla army but had learned the modern warfare of machine guns and trenches. He had military advisers from Europe’s “Great War.” His temperament and politics, which had a huge influence on the shaping of modern Mexico, were resolutely moderate. He had sympathy for workers and peasants but was not about to do anything too revolutionary. He had considerable worker support and enlisted them in his army as “Red Battalions.” In April 1915 Villa had a showdown with Obregón, who surrounded the mounted bandits with barbed wire and trenches with machine-gun emplacements. Villa used his field artillery effectively and fought furiously, but he never understood modern tactics. His men were cut down by the machine guns and cut up by the barbed wire. Obregón himself had an arm blown off, and the partial limb in a pickling jar became the emblem of Obregón’s Red Battalions, which was later fashioned into the Revolutionary Army of Mexico, supposedly an “Army of the People” that embodied the ideals of the revolution.
Zapata stuck to his land reform goals. Such stubborn local chieftains could usually be bought off. But Zapata would not take money or accept compromise. His organization was infiltrated by an army double agent who was allowed to carry out several sneak attacks, killing large numbers of soldiers, to prove his authenticity to Zapata. Once Zapata trusted him, the agent led Zapata, looking splendid as always in his dark riding clothes on his sorrel horse, into six hundred army rifles that opened fire. Upon his death in 1919, the murdered revolutionary became the Che of his day, the youthful poster boy for a new revolutionary government that had killed him rather than carry out his revolution.
There was a lot of killing going on in Mexico—so much so that from 1910 to 1920 the total population of the country declined by several hundred thousand. In November 1920 the one-armed Obregón became president. He legalized all the land confiscations that had taken place, something Carranza had refused to do. By this act, along with having the man who set up Zapata’s murder shot, he finally obtained a peace settlement with Zapata’s fighters in Morelos, even though most of the land was getting distributed to generals and only small patches to the poor. Villa was bought off and agreed to spend the rest of his days as a comfortable rancher. But in 1923, friends and family of people he had murdered and raped over the years shot him as he passed by in his new automobile.
Some can be bought off, and some have to be shot. That became the Mexican way. “No general can withstand a cannonade of a hundred thousand pesos,” Obregón once said. By 1924 a fourth of the national budget went to paying off generals. But many other “generals,” local chieftains with their bands of armed followers, were shot.
Starting with the 1917 constitution, a system of government was established whose primary goal was not democracy but stability. In 1928 Mexico almost slid back into revolution. Obregón ran for president without an opponent and was elected. He might have been on his way to dictatorship were it not for the artist who, while sketching him as president, took out a pistol and shot him to death. The assassin was immediately killed.
It seemed the changing of presidents was forever threatening the national stability. The Mexican solution was the PNR—the National Revolutionary Party—formed in 1929. Through this institution, a qualified president could be chosen and presented to the public. For six years this president would have almost absolute power. There were only three things he could not do—give territory to a foreign power, confiscate land from indigenous people, and succeed himself as president. During World War II, in an attempt to appear more stable and democratic, the PNR changed its name to that uniquely Mexican paradox, the Institutional Revolution Party.
That is what Mexico had become, not a democracy but an institutional revolution—the Revolution that feared revolution. The PRI bought out or killed agrarian leaders, all the while paying verbal homage to Zapata and carrying out as little land reform as possible. It bought out the labor unions until they became part of the PRI. It bought out the press, one newspaper at a time, until it completely controlled them. The PRI was not violent. It tried to co-opt. Only in those rare situations where that did not work would it resort to killing.
In 1964 the PRI chose the former minister of the interior, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, as the next president. Of all possible candidates, he was the most conservative. As minister of the interior, he had managed unusually good relations with the United States. He seemed the right choice to lead Mexico in the dangerous 1960s.
Díaz Ordaz was eager to put Mexico on display. It was at one of its best moments of economic expansion, with annual growth rates between 5 and 6 percent, up to 7 percent for 1967. In January 1968 The New York Times reported, “Steady economic growth within a framework of political and financial stability has distinguished Mexico among the major Latin American countries.” Octavio Paz wrote with a tone of incredulity about this period, “The economy of the country had made such progress that economists and sociologists cited the case of Mexico as an example for other underdeveloped countries.”
The 1968 summer Olympics was the first large international event hosted by Mexico since 1910, when as three decades of dictatorship was crumbling, Porfirio Díaz attempted an international celebration of the centennial of the beginning of the independence movement. The 1968 Olympics was the first time the Mexican Revolution was to show itself to the world with all its accomplishments, including an emerging middle class, the modernity of Mexico City, and the efficiency with which Mexico could run a huge international event. It would be televised to the world that Mexico was no longer backward and strife-torn but had become an emerging, successful modern country.
But Díaz Ordaz also understood that the world was having its 1968 and there would be troubles. The most apparent controversy on the horizon, the U.S. race conflicts, had the potential to politicize the games the same way the King assassination had politicized the Oscars. The idea of a black boycott of the Olympics first emerged in a meeting of Black Power leaders in Newark after that city’s riots during the summer of 1967. In November, Harry Edwards, an amiable and popular black sociology instructor at San Jose State College in California, again raised the idea at a black youth conference. Most athletes and black leaders did not think a black boycott would be effective, but one of Edwards’s first adherents to the idea was Tommie Smith, a student at San Jose State College and an extraordinary athlete who already held two world records in track and field events. Lee Evans, another champion sprinter at San Jose State, also said he would boycott. In February fresh life was breathed into the boycott idea by the International Olympic Committee, which in exchange for a few token gestures readmitted the apartheid team of South Africa.
Harry Edwards, a six-foot-eight, bearded twenty-five-year-old in sunglasses and black beret, was a former college athlete who insisted on referring to the U.S. president as “Lynchin’ Baines Johnson.” From his sports boycott office in San Jose, he was interested not only in the Olympics, but also in boycotts of college and professional programs. In 1968, though, the big target was in Mexico City. A poster on his wall said, “Rather than run and jump for medals, we are standing up for humanity.” His wall also featured the “Negro traitor of the week,” a prominent black athlete who opposed the boycott. Among those so honored were baseball’s Willie Mays, track’s Jesse Owens, and decathlon champion Rafer Johnson. A boycott of the 1960 Olympics had been suggested to Johnson, and Dick Gregory had called for a boycott in 1964. But this year, with the help of Harry Edwards’s office, the idea seemed to be gathering force.
In March, Life magazine published a survey of top black college athletes and was surprised to discover a widely held conviction that it would be worth giving up a chance at an Olympic medal to better conditions for their race. Life also found that black athletes were angry about their treatment at American universities. They would be promised housing but would get no help when confronted with housing discrimination. At San Jose State, white athletes were entertained by the athletic department in fraternities that did not accept black members. In the top 150 college athletic programs, there were only seven black coaches. White coaches bunched the black athletes together in locker rooms or on road trips. Academic advisers were constantly counseling them to take special easy courses so they could pass. And they would find that no one on the faculty or the student body ever talked to them about anything other than sports.
The International Olympic Committee had made the decision to let South Africa back early in the year, after a successful winter Olympics. It did not yet understand what 1968 was going to be like. In the spring, the Mexicans, sensing disaster, asked the committee to reconsider after at least forty teams threatened to boycott the games. The committee reversed itself, once again banning South Africa. This made a number of black American athletes, including Smith and Evans, say that they would reconsider competing in Mexico. The Americans were trying desperately to avoid a black boycott because they were putting together a track and field team that had the potential of being the best in American history and perhaps in the history of the modern sport. At the end of the summer, Edwards told a Black Panther meeting that the Olympic boycott had been called off but that athletes would wear black armbands and decline to participate in medals ceremonies. By September the Mexican government had every reason to hope for an extremely successful Olympics.
The Mexican government did not see itself as a dictatorship, since the president, in spite of his absolute power, had to step down at the end of his term. There would be no Porfiriato, as the three decades of Porfirio Díaz’s rule was known. The government responded to the needs of the people. If workers wanted unions, the PRI would provide them with unions. Mexicans who wanted to change things, improve things, make life better, needed to join the PRI. Only PRI members could be players. Even Emiliano Zapata’s three sons, one of whom inherited his father’s spectacular face, worked for the PRI. In Mexico the PRI still encountered Villa-like people who could be bought off, as well as a few Zapatas, people too stubborn to be co-opted, people who had to be either locked away indefinitely in prisons or killed. When the peasants kept noticing that the revolution was not delivering on its promise of land, they turned to peasant organizations, which were all controlled by the PRI. Sometimes a new organization emerged to represent the peasant. Its leaders too had to be bought out or killed, just as did new labor organizers and new journalists.
As the economy experienced its seemingly miraculous growth, year after year, there was an increasing suspicion that the distribution of this new wealth was grossly unfair. In 1960 Ifigenia Martínez, a researcher at the economics school, conducted a study that showed that about 78 percent of disposable income in Mexico went to only the upper 10 percent of Mexican society. No one had ever scientifically researched this before, and the results seemed hard to believe, so others, such as the Bank of Mexico, repeated the study but got the same results.
Such research was just the statistical explanation for an observable phenomenon: In fast-growing, rapidly developing Mexico, there were a lot of unhappy people. Starting in the late 1950s a series of protest movements emerged—peasant movements, a teachers union protest, a Social Security doctors’ strike, and, in 1958, a bitter railroad workers strike. They were quickly crushed, with everyone either co-opted, imprisoned, or killed. Ten years after the railroad strike, its leader, Demetrio Vallejo Martínez, was still in prison.
Yet in 1968, as the Olympics approached, there was only one group that the PRI did not have under its control, and that was students. The reason for this was that students as a political force was a new concept in Mexico. The students were a product of Mexico’s new economic expansion. After World War II, the growth rate in Mexico City began accelerating. By 1968 Mexico City was one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, its population increasing at about 3 percent each year. Typical of the pyramid-shaped demographics of rapidly developing countries, a very large percentage of the Mexican population, especially the Mexico City population, was young. And with a growing middle class, Mexico had more students than ever before, many of them crammed into the National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM, and the National Polytechnic Institute, on vast, sprawling new campuses in the newer parts of a capital city that swallowed miles of new area every year.
These students, like those in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States, and so many other places, were acutely aware that they had more economic comfort than their parents. But in the case of Mexico, they were also aware that they had been the recipients of a growing economy that had not benefited many of the people around them.
Roberto Escudero, who became one of the student leaders in 1968, said, “There was a big difference between our generation and our parents’. They were very traditional. They had received benefits from the Mexican revolution, and Zapata and others from the revolution were their heroes. We had those heroes, too, but we also had Che and Fidel. We saw the PRI more as authoritarian, where they saw it as revolutionary liberators.”
Salvador Martínez de la Roca, a small, scrappy-looking blond man known to everyone as Pino, also was a student leader in 1968. Born in 1945, he was studying nuclear physics at UNAM in 1968. Pino was a norteño, a Mexican from the northern states, where the United States is much closer and its cultural impact far greater. “In the 1950s we loved Marlon Brando in The Wild One and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause,” he recalled. “We were more interested in American culture than our parents. In the fifties students wore shirts and ties. We wore jeans and indigenous-style shirts.”
To him UNAM also showed him more of the world. “The Cine Club at UNAM showed films that were not available anywhere else in Mexico—French films, the first film I ever saw about lesbians, Easy Rider. There was a cultural rebellion. We loved Eldridge Cleaver and Muhammad Ali and Angela Davis, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger,” he said. Songs of the civil rights movement such as “We Shall Overcome” were well known, and Martin Luther King, especially after his death, had a place in the UNAM student pantheon of heroes in proximity to Che and Zapata. The Black Panthers also enjoyed some popularity at UNAM. Norman Mailer was widely read by students, as were Frantz Fanon and Camus. But, as Martínez de la Roca said, “Most important was the Cuban revolution. We all read Régis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution.”
There were many strikes and marches at UNAM before the famous 1968 events. In 1965 students supported the doctors’ strike for better wages. In 1966 UNAM students went on strike for three months against an authoritarian rector, Ignacio Chavez. In March 1968, after the big marches in Europe, Mexico City too had a march against the Vietnam War. But compared with those in the United States, Europe, or Japan, the Mexican student movement was minuscule—a few hundred students.
In 1968, for the first time, the small student movement became a concern of the Mexican government because it did not want any problems during the Olympics and because of President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s particular way of viewing the world. A world in which spontaneous movements spread without organizers across the world on the airwaves of television was something new and, for the Mexican president, very hard to believe. He was convinced there was an international conspiracy of revolutionaries moving from country to country, spreading chaos and upheaval. A key component in this conspiracy was the Cubans. So while the Mexican government defied the U.S. embargo and openly befriended Cuba, in reality the president had a paranoid dread of the Cubans and carefully monitored flights to the island, keeping and studying passenger lists. While publicly refusing to embargo Cuba, he did not let Mexico conduct trade with the island and consulted with American intelligence about “the Cuban threat.” While Díaz Ordaz had been minister of the interior, he had cultivated close relations with the CIA and FBI. It was in the nature of Mexican policy toward the United States to have this contradiction between public stance and private communication, the same way that in 1916 Carranza had pretended to oppose U.S. intervention while in reality encouraging U.S. president Woodrow Wilson to send troops to Mexico and attack the troublesome Pancho Villa.
Lecumberri, a black castle in downtown Mexico City, looks like the Bastille and is in fact a French-style prison, with a round central courtyard and cell blocks stretching out in spokes. The cells are about fourteen feet long and six feet wide. In 1968 this was the infamous dungeon into which political prisoners were thrown. Today, the National Archives documents that were state secrets in 1968 are housed in Lecumberri, where the bars have been replaced with large windows and well-polished parquet wooden floors have been installed. The cramped fourteen-by-six-foot cells are filled with files that have clearly been laundered. But they do paint a picture of the kind of state paranoia that was obsessing the Díaz Ordaz government.
The Ministry of the Interior had had a wealth of informants. Every student organization, even if it had only twenty members, had at least one who reported to the government, writing up records in tedious detail of meetings in which nothing happened. Communists of any kind were of particular interest, and of even greater concern were any foreigners who talked to Mexican communists. The government kept detailed reports on who was seen singing Cuban songs, who proposed erecting a Vietnamese statue and who supported the suggestion, and who were on flights to Havana, especially around the time of July 26, when Cuba had its annual celebration of Castro’s first uprising. The names of people participating in an homage to José Martí were also noted, even though the writings of the Cuban father of independence were admired by both pro- and anti-Castro elements.
Díaz Ordaz was also obsessively concerned about the French. This may in part have been because Mexican students had a fascination with the French May movement out of all proportion to its consequence. Though American and German and numerous other movements were older, more durable, better organized, and of greater impact, to many Mexican students, May in Paris was the event of 1968.
This was in part because of a nineteenth-century concept that endured in Mexico—that France was the imperialist world power. The French had briefly ruled Mexico. In 1968 a French graduate degree was still the most prestigious degree in Mexico, and Sartre was considered the leading intellectual. Lorenzo Meyer, a prominent Mexican historian from the Colegio de México, himself a graduate of the University of Chicago, said of this lingering Francophilia, “I think it was caused by inertia . . . something lingering from the past.”
But both the students’ admiration and the president’s fear of the French student movement were also based on the myth that the Paris students were able to join forces with the workers and together shut down the country. On May 31 the Trotskyite Revolutionary Workers Party in Mexico City called for a student and worker meeting “to do what was done in France” and “to apply to Mexico the experience of France.” On June 4, in the school of political and social sciences at UNAM, a newspaper had appeared from the Trotskyite Revolutionary Workers Party IV International, Mexican section, with the text “All worker states should support the revolutionary French movement for the formation of a new worker state. The PCF [French Communist Party] and CGT [PCF’s trade union] that traditionally are sellouts and traitors to the French revolutionary movement have asked the leadership of the French movement and the workers together with the students and the peasants to confront world capitalism. This French revolutionary movement is a powerful blow to the legacy of the French Communist Party and world bureaucracy.” On July 24 UNAM’s economics school offered a meeting with two French students, Denis Decreane and Didier Kuesza, both from Nanterre.
All of this was reported to the Ministry of the Interior by government informants within these tiny leftist student groups. The notion of radical students joining forces with workers, as they believed the French students had done—a menacing concept to most political establishments—was particularly threatening to the PRI leadership. It was the PRI that was supposed to bring together diverse elements of society and then control relations between them. That was the way the system was meant to work.
On July 18, the government noted, a communist student group had a meeting about the possibility of a student hunger strike in support of Demetrio Vallejo Martínez, in prison since he led the 1958 railway workers strike. He was one of the best-known political prisoners. In fact, the student strike never happened, but Vallejo Martínez went on a hunger strike by himself, eating nothing but lime water with sugar until he collapsed August 6 and was hospitalized and fed through tubes.
Ironically, the one serious attempt to organize Mexican students in solidarity with the French had fallen apart because of lack of interest. At the end of May, José Revueltas, a well-known communist writer and winner of Mexico’s National Prize for Literature, talked to a group of students about holding a rally in support of the French in the auditorium of the school of philosophy, which was called the auditorium Che Guevara. But the plans drifted into June, and by July the Mexican students felt they had too many problems of their own. “After all,” said Roberto Escudero, “they only had one death and that was an accident.”
To the president, these were all bits of evidence of a global conspiracy of French and Cuban radicals to spread disorder around the world. They had been doing it effectively all year, and now, with the Olympics coming, it was reaching Mexico! It was repeatedly noted in Interior Ministry files that student tracts often ended with, “Viva los movimientos estudiantiles de todo el mundo!”—Long live the student movements around the world!
These small groups of students, together with world events, had set off in the president’s mind that distinct strain of Mexican xenophobia that dates to the Aztec experience—the fear of the foreigner conspiring to undermine and take over. The Ministry of the Interior carefully watched American students who came to Mexico for the summer, when Mexican school is still open. They also watched the many Mexicans who attended Berkeley and other California schools and were coming home for the summer. And in fact, these Mexican students from California were influential in the Mexican student movement. Roberto Rodriguez Baños, who in July 1968 was chief of the national desk of AMEX, the first Mexican news agency, which began as an alternative to state-controlled news, said, “In 1968 Mexican students read with fascination about Paris, Czechoslovakia, Berkeley, Columbia, and other U.S. universities. Ever since the Watts riots in the summer of 1965, most Mexicans were convinced that the U.S. was in a state of civil war. They had seen on television a huge American neighborhood in a major city in flames. The government had seen what had happened in France, Czechoslovakia, and the United States and were convinced that the world was destabilizing. It saw in the student movement these same outside forces coming to destabilized Mexico.”
Mexico was one of the few countries in the world that did not condemn the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The Institutional Revolutionary Party did not like revolutions anymore. The government was ready to do whatever was necessary to stop the revolution from coming to Mexico. It was worried about the Cubans and the Soviets. It worried about Guatemala and Belize on the southern border, and worrying about Belize meant it also had to worry about the British, who still had military bases there. Porfirio Díaz had been famous for saying, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.” But now the world was getting smaller. To Díaz Ordaz it was “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to everyone else.”
What disturbed the PRI was that it was not sure how to control students who were not looking for food, land, work, or money. The PRI could form student organizations, the way it had formed labor unions, journalism groups, and land reform organizations, but the students had no incentive to join a PRI student organization. Student leaders were leaders only because they earned the support of the students every day. If a leader was co-opted by the PRI, he would no longer be a leader. Lorenzo Meyer said, “The students were as free as you could be in this society.”
By summer the government’s growing anxiety was becoming visible. Allen Ginsberg, on a family vacation before taking on Chicago, was stopped at the border and told that he would have to shave off his beard to enter. Just a few months before, sounding like the peacemaking moderate in a turbulent year, Díaz Ordaz had told the Mexican press, “Everyone is free to let his beard, hair, or sideburns grow if he wants to, to dress well or badly as he sees fit. . . .”
If all the student movements of 1968 had a contest to see which had the most innocuous beginnings, the competition would be stiff, but the Mexican student movement would have an excellent chance of being in first place. Until July 22 it was a small and splintered movement. Plans for the Olympics were proceeding well. Eighteen sculptors from sixteen countries, including Alexander Calder and Henry Moore, were arriving to set up their works. Calder’s seventy-ton steel piece was to be placed in front of the new Aztec Stadium. Others were arranged along the “Friendship Route” to the Olympic Village. Oscar Urrutia, who headed the cultural program, in announcing all this to the press quoted an ancient Mexican poem, which ends, “Yet even more do I love my brother man.” That was to be the theme of the games.
All that happened on July 22 was that a fight broke out between two rival high schools. No one is certain what caused the fight. The two groups were fighting constantly. Two local gangs, the “Spiders” and the “Ciudadelans,” may have been involved. The fight spread into the Plaza de la Ciudadela, an important commercial center in the city. The following day the students were attacked by the two gangs but did not respond. The police and special antiriot military units stood by watching, but then they started to provoke the students and exploded tear gas grenades. As the students retreated to their schools, the military pursued them through the neighborhood, beating them. The rampage lasted three hours, and twenty students were arrested. Numerous students and teachers were beaten. The reason for the attack remains unknown.
Suddenly the student movement had a cause that resonated with the Mexican public—government brutality. The next step happened three days later. A group of students decided to march to demand the release of the arrested students and protest against violence. Up until this point, all of the student protests against political prisoners had been about activists from past movements, such as the one that had led to the railroad strike. Before this, they had never had any of their own in prison. Unlike the other demonstrations, this one drew more than a few students.
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 Dub
ek. 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 along 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.”
In the year 2000, Myrthokleia González Gallardo happened across a friend from student times who was amazed to see her. All these years the friend had assumed Myrthokleia had been killed in the plaza.
In 1993, for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the massacre, the government gave permission for a monument to be placed in the plaza. Survivors, historians, and journalists searched for the names of victims but could come up with only twenty names. There was another effort in 1998 that yielded only a few more names. Most Mexicans who have tried to unravel the mystery estimate that between one hundred and two hundred people were killed. Some estimates are higher still. Someone was seen filming from a distance on one of the high floors of the Foreign Ministry, but the film has never been found.
After October 2, the student movement dissolved. The Olympics progressed without any local disturbances. Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s chosen successor was Luis Echeverria, the minister of the interior who worked with him on repressing the student movement. Until he died in 1979, Díaz Ordaz insisted that one of his great accomplishments as president was the way he handled the student movement and averted any embarrassment during the games.
But very much in the same way that the invasion of Czechoslovakia was the end of the Soviet Union, Tlatelolco was the unseen beginning of the end of the PRI. Álvarez Garín said in a remarkably bold 1971 book on the massacre by Mexican journalist Elena Poniatowska, “All of us were reborn on October 2. And on that day we also decided how we are all going to die; fighting for genuine justice and democracy.”
In July 2000, for the first time in seventy-one years of existence, the PRI was voted out of power, and it was done democratically, in a slow process over decades, without the use of violence. Today the press is far more free and Mexico much closer to being a true democracy. But it is significant that even with the PRI out of power, many Mexicans said they were afraid to be interviewed for this book, and some who had agreed, upon reflection, backed out.
The tall rectangular slab erected for the twenty-fifth anniversary lists the ages of the twenty victims. Many were eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old. At the bottom it adds, “y muchos otros campañeros cuyos nombres y edades aún no conocemos”—and many more comrades whose names and ages are unknown.
Every year in October, Mexicans of the ’68 generation start crying. Mexicans have a very long memory. They still remember how the Aztecs abused other tribes and argue over whether the princess Malinche’s collaboration with Cortés, betraying the Aztec alliance, was justifiable. There is still lingering bitterness about Cortés. Nor is it forgotten how the French connived to take over Mexico in 1862. The peasants still remember the unfulfilled promises of Emiliano Zapata. And it is absolutely certain that Mexicans will long remember what happened on October 2, 1968, amid the Aztec ruins of Tlatelolco.