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RIGHTS-MEXICO: Tlatelolco Massacre – 40 Years of Impunity

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Oct 1 2008 (IPS) - The rivers of ink that have been spilled in investigations, trials and the collection of testimony on the Oct. 2, 1968 massacre of student demonstrators in Tlatelolco square in Mexico City have made it clear that the state was responsible. But not one person has been sentenced, and no one even knows exactly how many young protesters died.

The only high-level official from that period who is still alive and has been identified by witness testimony and other evidence as one of those responsible for ordering the massacre is former president Luis Echeverría (1970-1976), who was interior minister at the time.

The 86-year-old Echeverría has been under house arrest since November 2006 awaiting a legal resolution that will indicate whether or not he is to be tried for crimes like the 1968 massacre and others related to the violent repression of dissidents during his years as interior minister.

More than 15,000 bullets were reportedly fired into the square that night. The death toll, which included children and bystanders, varies widely. Official documents reported less than 40 deaths, while investigations put the number at more than 130, and human rights groups estimate between 200 and 350.

Most of the victims were students who had gathered in the Mexico City square to protest against the government of late president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970) and demand democracy in a country where the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had been in power since 1929.

The entrances to the square had been blocked by tanks and trucks. Some of the police and military shooters were posted in the tall apartment buildings surrounding the square, while others fired on the crowd of thousands of students from street level.

Most political analysts agree that the massacre marked a watershed in Mexican history, and that Oct. 2, 1968 marked the start of the decline of the PRI, although it was not until December 2000 that the party lost its grip on the national government to conservative President Vicente Fox (2000-2006).

“People kept me from reaching the square; some ladies told me I better leave, that they were killing everyone. I couldn’t get in, but I learned that a lot of bodies were lying around and that the military acted like animals,” Rafael Fernández, a clothing vendor who was 17 at the time, told IPS.

But although “everyone talks about Oct. 2, it’s important to understand that what came later was even worse, with the arrests and the emergence of guerrillas and the brutal repression,” said Fernández, one of the participants in the student and cultural movements of the late 1960s in Mexico.

The “dirty war” against leftists and other opponents waged by the PRI regimes left 532 victims of forced disappearance between the late 1960s and early 1980s, according to an investigation carried out during the Fox administration by the Special Prosecutor’s Office on Social and Political Movements of the Past.

The atrocities committed in those years were the dark side of governments that claimed to be “revolutionary,” defended Cuba in their foreign policy, took in political exiles from a number of Latin American countries ruled by military regimes, broke off diplomatic relations with dictatorships, and called for a new, more just world economic order.

The PRI governments kept official documents referring to the Tlatelolco massacre under lock and key. But that did not prevent independent investigations from being carried out, and since the early 1990s efforts to clarify what happened that day have continued, picking up steam after Fox took office and a large part of the official archives were opened up to the public.

However, the results have been inconclusive. Based on official documents, the Special Prosecutor’s Office on Social and Political Movements of the Past concluded that 32 people were killed – just six more than the initial death toll reported in 1968 by the notorious Dirección Federal de Seguridad, the now-defunct secret police agency.

By contrast, the Consejo General de Huelga (Strike General Council) set up by the National Autonomous University of Mexico students, which led the 1968 protests, put the number of victims at 200.

And a declassified report from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico estimated the deaths at between 150 and 200, while other investigations have put the death toll at 40 to 50.

Not one of the people who actually shot into the crowd has faced penalties, and it is not completely clear who gave the order to open fire.

Díaz Ordaz assumed responsibility for the incident, although he claimed that the students shot at the soldiers and police first. The late former president said the student movement “was nothing more than a disgusting alliance of infiltrated conspirators” who spouted communist slogans.

“With the gift of hindsight, the movement (of 1968) appears clearly as the main link in the process of dismantling the authoritarian system,” wrote leftist columnist Miguel Granados.

In the view of prominent historian Enrique Krauze, identified with the liberal wing of the political right, thanks to the events of 1968, “the supposedly revolutionary country accustomed to obedience and silence” was transformed into a nation characterised by greater freedom and democracy.

More than 600 books, documentaries and other films, radio programmes, legal investigations and even university theses and dissertations have been produced on the massacre in Tlatelolco square, also known as the “Plaza of the Three Cultures” because it brings together vestiges of the pre-Columbian Aztec civilisation and the Spanish colonial period, alongside buildings from the modern era.

The massacre put an end to several weeks of student demonstrations and strikes demanding democracy, in a country that was formally democratic but where the PRI controlled all branches of the state and a major part of the social movement.

Just 10 days after the killings, Mexico City hosted the 1968 summer Olympics, which came off without a hitch.

Forty years later, impunity continues to surround the massacre, and the only person who faces possible punishment is the elderly Echeverría, who is facing various charges, including the accusation that he gave the order to open fire on the protesters in the square that day.

Investigations have shown that Echeverría, described at the time as “progressive” by intellectuals of the stature of Carlos Fuentes and Fernando Benítez, was an interior minister who resorted to strong-arm policies and later a president who unleashed a bloody crackdown on leftwing dissidents.