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TLATELOLCO: MEXICO '68


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The New York Times
September 14, 1998

MEXICO CITY JOURNAL
Anniversary of '68 Massacre Brings Facts to Light

By SAM DILLON

MEXICO CITY -- The protest rally here on Oct. 2,1968, began like many others across the world in that era of campus revolt
and rock-and-roll. Thousands of demonstrators huddled in a drizzle to hear student leaders with bullhorns denounce the army
occupation of a university.

Then the sky over downtown Mexico City crackled with flares and Tlatelolco Plaza exploded in gunfire. Shooting at the panicked
crowd,troops and the police turned the plaza into an inferno of carnage and screams. When the firing stopped, 2,000 demonstrators
were beaten and jailed, scores of bodies were trucked away and firehoses washed the blood from the cobblestones.

Like the killings outside Tiananmen Square in China in 1989, the Tlatelolco massacre seared the conscience of an entire Mexican
generation. Government officials have resisted every attempt at investigation, insisting that students had provoked the bloodshed by
attacking security forces. But now, 30 years later, the official version of the events is under attack as never before. In a new book, a
prominent academic argues that the violence erupted when government snipers, not armed students, opened fire not only on the
crowd but also on the army's own troops.

The president at the time, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, orchestrated the violence and blamed its victims to justify a broad crackdown on a
democracy movement that he considered embarrassing on the eve of the 1968 Olympics here, says the author, Sergio Aguayo
Quezada. Aguayo's book, "1968: The Archives of Violence" (Grijalbo/ Reforma), one of six by Mexican authors on Tlatelolco
scheduled for publication this year, is part of a broad effort to clarify the massacre.

 

Opposition politicians have used their growing powers to pry open some long-secret government files. Newspapers have published new
details. A television network has broadcast previously unseen film of the repression. Mayor Cuauhtemoc Cardenas has ordered that
Mexico City flags be flown at half-staff for an anniversary memorial on Oct. 2. Photos recently surfaced showing Ernesto Zedillo, the
current president, being roughed up by the police as a student in 1968. But his government continues to cite national security concerns
in denying congressional requests for access to army and other files that could shed light on the events.

"The 1968 student movement was the beginning of Mexico's fight for democracy, but it was interrupted by the massacre," said Pablo
Gomez, who as a student was jailed after 1968 and who now, as an opposition legislator, is a leader of a congressional committee
investigating the event. "We're advancing again, but the authorities still want this history secret." The cover-up began immediately.

Recently uncovered documents show that newspaper publishers worked closely with Diaz in 1968 to present a sugar-coated version
of Tlatelolco and that the police closed and ransacked the office of a magazine that published stunning photos of the events. In 1993,
the 25th anniversary of the massacre, intellectuals who formed a Truth Commission gave up trying to reconstruct the 1968 events
because the government refused to open its archives. Enrique Krauze, a historian, helped shatter the inertia in a history of Mexico
published last year, "Mexico: Biography of Power" (HarperCollins). Using Diaz's memoirs, Krauze showed how the president's
insecurities led him to view the demonstrators as participants in a worldwide conspiracy plotting to undercut his authority.
 

"The president's account is riddled with fantasies and lies," Krauze concluded. After the opposition won control of Congress last
year for the first time and demanded access to the long-secret files on Tlatelolco, the government released 3,000 boxes of papers
stored in the National Archives, mainly from the Interior Ministry. Although many key documents appear to be missing, some are useful
and will form the basis of a congressional report. But the government continues to hold on to the most important documents. A deputy
interior minister, Salazar Toledano, this year declined to give Congress even an inventory of Defense Ministry papers related to Tlatelolco,
saying, "Those files will not be opened for reasons of national security."
 

Among the missing materials are about five hours' worth of 35-millimeter film, shot by government movie crews sent to Tlatelolco
hours before the massacre by the interior minister at the time,Luis Echeverria Alvarez, who later succeed Diaz as president. He
refused to submit to congressional questioning earlier this year. Still, many new historical materials are turning up. Aguayo, a
professor at the Colegio de Mexico, has reviewed not only the Mexican archives but also those in the United States and Europe.
He has also interviewed scores of officials. Aguayo says Diaz, following a script he had used earlier against smaller crowds, wanted
just enough violence to crush the 1968 democracy movement. "He didn't order up a massacre, but he was ready to sacrifice the lives
of a few soldiers and civilians," Aguayo said during a walk through Tlatelolco Plaza one recent afternoon. "But the violence flared
out of control," he said, gesturing to the apartment buildings towering over the site, "after the snipers opened fire from the rooftops."

Aguayo argues that the army, ordered to disperse but not shoot at the demonstrators, was not told that there would be sniper fire.
The soldiers opened fire themselves, he said, after a general in command of a paratrooper battalion was among the first to be wounded.
The government originally insisted that 27 people died, but others put the body count far higher. Robert Service, who was a diplomat
at the U.S. Embassy in 1968, estimated for Aguayo that "nearly 200" had died. "This year a lot of new information is coming out,"
Aguayo said. "But this wound isn't going to heal."