In the first act after her inauguration, the new president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, issued this Wednesday a decree of apology from the State for the victims of the student repression of 1968, an episode that marked the history of the country.
“56 years ago, in the plaza of Tlatelolco, after a student movement that asked for freedom, democracy, freedom for political prisoners, it was perpetrated. one of the greatest atrocities experienced in Mexico in the second half of the 20th century,” Sheinbaum said as he began his first morning press conference this Wednesday.
“Public apologies for a crime against humanity (…) magnify the people, recognize crimes like this and, at the same time, put a stop to it and say: ‘Never again,’” he added.
Shortly after he signed the decree, the first issued by the State about the repression known as the “October 2 massacre.”
It points out that the repression ordered by the then president Gustavo Diaz Ordaz It was a “serious government atrocity to the victims, their families and Mexican society as a whole.”
“In the name and representation of the Mexican State, it is politically recognized that the acts of government violence perpetrated on October 2, 1968 against members of the heroic student movement were constitutive of a crime against humanity”.
It also points out that this apology commits the president, as head of the Executive and the Armed Forces, to guarantee the non-repetition of repression or torture.
Sheinbaum said that she is a “daughter of ’68,” since her mother’s participation in the protests of that year and the social movement that it generated influenced her participation in university student organizations and her political career.
“It is something we grew up with, very painful, but at the same time the student movement of 1968 opened the door to political participation for many young people and society as a whole for a more democratic country,” he said.
But what happened in 1968?
A year with consequences
The story that led to the massacre of more than 300 people, almost all of them students, as well as the disappearance or torture of hundreds more, began with a fight in the center of Mexico City.
The anti-riot group of the capital’s police, known as the Grenadier Corps, intervened to calm the fight between two groups of university students. But he did it in a brutal way: he beat dozens of young people and witnesses to the fight.
It was July 23, 1968. At that time the Mexican police had a reputation for committing abuses, but the aggression against the students was excessive. Four days later, students from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) They organized a march against police violence.
But the walk, which was joined by members of the Mexican Communist Party, was repressed by the grenadiers. From that moment on, a student movement began that grew rapidly in a few weeks. The UNAM, the IPN and other universities in the country went on strike.
The Army occupied the UNAM and IPN facilities, but failed to contain the movement grouped in the National Strike Council (CNH). The rector of the National University, Javier Barros Sierra, resigned in protest against the invasion of university autonomy.
The movement was only contained until the afternoon of October 2. That day a new protest march had been called that would start from the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco.
Hundreds of soldiers surrounded the site. When the students announced that the walk was canceled to avoid violence, started a shooting that left hundreds of victims.
According to a video released by Sheinbaum this Wednesday, the dead were at least 325, and there were also hundreds of injured and thousands of detainees, many of them tortured or missing, both that day and in the following days.
But the attack turned into a turning point in the country’s history. Since October 2, 1968, Mexico was different, socially and politically different from the day before.
Mexico before the world
That year a series of student protests occurred in Europe, especially in France, as well as in the United States, recalls Gilberto Guevara Niebla, one of the founders of the CNH.
In that country there was an intense wave of protests against the war in Vietnam, the fight for the civil rights of some minorities as well as a growing process of sexual liberalization and feminism.
“Many factors coincided,” recalls the founder of the CNH. “Through television we knew what was happening in the United States and with the young people of France.”
In addition to growing discontent in that year, and in subsequent years during the 1960s, there was another determining factorsome historians agree.
That 1968 Mexico was venue of the XIX Summer Olympic Gamesscheduled to begin on October 12 of that year.
Weeks before the event, journalists sent by international media arrived. In addition, it would be the first time that the Olympic Games would be broadcast by satellite around the world.
By that time, the student protests were more intense. Many journalists began to cover the demonstrations.
It was not the image of the country that the Díaz Ordaz government intended to send. Furthermore, the president was convinced that the students were part of some kind of communist conspiracy against the Games.
The decision was to send a strong message to end the rebellion of several years, says Guevara Niebla.
“After 1968, Díaz Ordaz declared that when facing the conflict, political resources had been exhausted and force had to be used,” he recalls.
“What they wanted was to destroy the student movement in one fell swoop to make way for the Olympics. The repression took place ten days before they began, they were forced to quell the protestsbut they did it in a brutal way.”
*With reporting by Alberto Nájar
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