Murder and Coverup in Mexico

FrontPage: The 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City were the first to be held in South America and the first to be hosted by a Spanish-speaking country. Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional, in power since the 1920s, saw the games as a validation of its one-party rule. Mexican students saw it as an opportunity to protest the regime of PRI boss Diaz Ordaz.

On October 2, 1968, ten days before the opening ceremonies, several thousand students gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, the main square in the Tlatelolco neighborhood of Mexico City. According to British journalist Robert Trevor, who was in the crowd that day, “The majority of these protesters throughout this era were college and high school students who sought to make a better Mexico for them and their children to grow up in. These protests never turned physical for the students.”

In Trevor’s account, Mexican government troops began firing on the crowd from the surrounding rooftops, joined by helicopters. The government claimed only 25 casualties, including seven policemen, but Trevor knew that hundreds had been killed. The official figures and names of those murdered, arrested and imprisoned were never released, and the PRI regime conducted no investigation.  President Diaz Ordaz and interior minister Luis Echeverria faced no charges and Echeverria became president in 1970.

On June 10, 1971, government-trained paramilitary forces attacked peaceful protesters at the Santo Tomás campus of the National Polytechnical Institute. An estimated 120 perished in what has become known as the Corpus Christi Massacre. Nobody faced charges and the PRI regime continued to cover up both attacks and smother dissent across the country.

The PRI regimes continued until 2000 when Coca-Cola magnate Vincente Fox of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) took power, but this was little more than a change of labels. The PRI continued to dominate Mexican institutions and Fox maintained the coverup.

In 2001 Fox ordered a special prosecutor for the crimes of the past but nothing came of it, and the president blocked release of information. For their part, Mexican writers kept digging. Sierra Campuzano’s History of Mexico: An Analytical Approach exposed the “hundreds of dead and wounded, thousands of arrests” but in 2003, on Fox’s watch, Mexico’s Public Education Ministry yanked History of Mexico from shelves and classrooms. In 2007, architect Rosa Maria Alvarado found at least bodies of protestors buried under a hospital under the massacre site. Mexican police threatened violence if she went public with the revelation. read more