1968 (59 page)
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.
