Mexico Still Piecing Together the Truth Behind the Massacre of 1968

Last Friday was the 41st anniversary of the massacre of students and civilians at Tlatelolco in Mexico City. On October 2, 1968, days before the opening ceremonies of the Mexico City Olympics, the first held in Latin America or in a developing country, soldiers and paramilitaries surrounded and opened fire on throngs of unarmed demonstrators who had gathered at the Tlatelolco district’s Plaza de las Tres Culturas for a meeting. Unknown numbers of innocents were killed and never seen again.

Forty-one years later, the incident still haunts Mexico. Save for a few survivor’s published chronicles, including that of Oriana Fallaci (who was shot three times at Tlatelolco), the incident was all but covered up by the PRI regime. The Games went on as if nothing had happened. Details, figures, names are still emerging about what exactly occurred at Tlatelolco, this many years later. Survivors continue to march in Mexico City in commemoration for the fallen and for justice  — every October 2, without fail, until, they say, “our health will allow it.”

La Jornada on Sunday carried two stories that shed new light on this national trauma. The first piece details how a historian — as recently as this Friday, October 2 — uncovered documents in the National Archive that verifies collusion in the regime’s response to the demonstrations of 1968. PRI authorities, the Mexican Army, and a paramilitary group known as De la Lux, who were already well experienced in inflicting violence on leftists and demonstrators, are implicated as orchestrators of the massacre.

María de Los Ángeles Magdaleno Cárdenas, the researcher, cites a document that indicates as many as 20,000 people were aligned with De la Lux, including boxers and wrestlers from the tough Merced district. They identified one another during violent confrontations by wearing white gloves — same as survivors recall many of their attackers wore at Tlatelolco. De la Lux eventually became a group known as Los Halcones, or The Falcons, who are generally accused of carrying out another massacre of demonstrators on June 10, 1971, at the height of Mexico’s Dirty War.

Magdaleno Cárdenas lists by name the government and military authorities who directed the activity of De la Lux/Los Halcones, but by now, these men are either dead or too petrified in their age to matter much to the average Mexican. The chilling facts remain: a government turned against and slaughtered scores of its young people. Most of them were not raging radicals but middle-class students who for the first time were standing up and demanding less repression from their government and more freedoms and transparency from their society.

And it was young people, in fact, who were ordered to pull their triggers against them.

La Jornada also reported on Sunday on a slim book just out from an obscure publisher that documents recollections of the Tlatelolco massacre from soldiers who were present at the plaza. The narrators say they were young guys, teenagers, who were recruited in Veracruz and told the military was their best and only option for a better life.

“The commander told us those young people were Cuban Communists who wanted the Olympics boycotted,” one former soldier says in the book. “From that moment on it was Red Alert, which meant we had to be ready for combat, 24 hours a day.”

Another former soldier, Pintor Rodríguez, is quoted from the book, recalling the Dirty War as well as contemporary mass killings in Mexico: “And I ask myself, What is the military for really?”

* Photo above, soldiers at Tlatelolco the day after the killing, via La Jornada.