1968 was intended to be a banner year for Mexico. The Olympics were to be held in Mexico City at the end of that year. Like every nation preparing to be the center of international attention, the Mexican government sought to keep incidents with the country to a minimum.
1968 was also the year the student movement bloomed. If there is one thing governments hate, it's students marching in the street.
And there was plenty for young people to be protesting. Government repression was at an all time high. The Mexican police...well...were like any unregulated force. They protected the powers and stomped down everyone else. (Everybody has read about
the Standford Prison Experiment, right?)
Ten days before the Olympics games' opening ceremony, students from Mexico City marched on the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of the city. 15,000 people marched. 5,000 people congregated outside an apartment complex for a peaceful rally.
At sunset, police surrounded the area. They fired live rounds into the crowd. Stories spread that between 200 and 2000 people died.
Then nothing.
Wanting to appear to be a civilized country, the families of the dead stayed quiet.
(That's not a surprise. Mexican-Americans have kept silent about...things that break my heart. That breaks my family's heart.)
What happened that day was buried for thirty years. After Vicente Fox came to power and overthrew the PRI, commissions were formed and records were revealed.
Military officers dispersed among the crowd in civilian clothing. At an appointed time, they began firing on their own army.
That was all the pretense the government needed. They murdered political activism in Mexico City for decades, and they did it by murdering hundreds of people.
Outrage is easy. The PRI has been out of power in Mexico for eight years. The men who pulled those trigger have grown old.
One story stood out for me. In one of the early riots, protesters looked for some makeshift weapon which they could use for self-defense. Most of them had large 20 cent coins in their pockets. They threw them at soldiers.
The soldiers stopped to pick up the coins. They were peasants looking for the opportunities their opposite numbers in the crowds were looking for. They were kids themselves.
I look at the history of my people, and I realize it is the history of a people screwed by everyone, including themselves.
BOO! Military shooting!