By Estefanía Camacho Jiménez—

When you visit the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, on a quiet afternoon, when the old trees are almost the only sound amplified by the plaza’s peculiar acoustics, you can feel something like a stifled scream. It has always astonished me that so many tragedies could have taken place there.

The plaza contains traces of three major tragedies. In 1521, a massacre followed Cuauhtémoc’s defense of Tlatelolco against Hernán Cortés. “It was neither a triumph nor a defeat; it was the painful birth of the mestizo people that is Mexico today,” reads a monumental plaque. In 1968, students were massacred only four years after the inauguration of Mario Pani’s modernist housing complex.

Then, during the magnitude 8.1 earthquake of September 19, 1985, the Nuevo León building collapsed, killing many of its residents. Each tragedy has its own memorial in a plaza where beautiful apartments still stand, some seemingly frozen in the 1960s.

That Afternoon

That afternoon was confusing. According to the immediate accounts of journalists, residents and survivors, there was no way to determine how many people had been killed on October 2.

Tensions had been building throughout the summer of 1968. Mexico’s authoritarian government, controlled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, used a clash between students from schools affiliated with UNAM and the National Polytechnic Institute as justification for intervening in educational institutions across the capital. The riot police known as the granaderos beat, tortured and detained students and, at times, teachers. As the students organized against the repression and demanded the release of political prisoners, every new protest brought further arrests. The government accused them of trying to sabotage the Olympic Games, and the conflict escalated when the Army entered UNAM preparatory schools with tanks, military trucks, artillery and a bazooka.

In the United States, some press coverage repeated unsubstantiated allegations that Fidel Castro and communist agents had infiltrated the protests. These claims reflected the Cold War obsession with preventing the alleged spread of Cuban communism throughout the continent.

What the public did not know in 1968 was that President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz was one of the CIA’s highest-level contacts in Mexico and had been assigned the cryptonym LITEMPO-2. His government shared information about the protests, student leaders and political opponents, while the agency closely monitored the movement. Documents declassified decades later also showed that Mexican officials misled the CIA about the origins of the violence and the government’s responsibility for it.

By mid-September, approximately 10,000 soldiers had occupied University City, UNAM’s main campus, while the arrests of high school and university students continued. UNAM Rector Javier Barros Sierra publicly sided with the students, infuriating Díaz Ordaz. Under intense government pressure, he submitted his resignation in late September, although the university’s Governing Board refused to accept it.

Much of the mass media had been co-opted by those in power. Newspapers, television programs and magazines were expected to follow the government’s version of events. Only a handful of journalists dared to criticize its actions, particularly after October 2, knowing that doing so could lead to censorship, persecution or even death.

International progressive movements, feminism, the counterculture, foreign music, the Cuban Revolution and protests against the Vietnam War were also influencing young Mexicans. This was a generation awakening to its dissatisfaction with an established order controlled by a repressive party that elected and reelected itself through processes bearing little resemblance to democracy. Those who questioned the system were branded as enemies and persecuted.

On September 30, the Army withdrew from UNAM’s main campus, leaving destruction behind. Students then prepared for an October 2 rally at the Plaza of the Three Cultures, followed by a march toward the Polytechnic’s Casco de Santo Tomás campus.

The Day

Despite the peaceful nature of the gathering, the Plaza of the Three Cultures had become a trap. The esplanade was enclosed by the Church of Santiago and the tall buildings of the housing complex. Government agents had infiltrated the crowd in civilian clothes, while troops, tanks and armored vehicles surrounded the area. The gathering included not only students but also families, children, teachers, workers and Mexican and international journalists. Estimates place the crowd at as many as 10,000 people.

Two movement leaders spoke briefly, but tense and cautious. The second announced that organizers feared a provocation and had therefore decided to cancel the march. The gathering would disperse as soon as the speakers had finished.

Above them, two menacing helicopters circled the plaza. Flares were fired into the sky.

The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who was present that day, later recalled that her experience covering the war in Vietnam taught her to recognize the flares as an unmistakable signal that an attack was about to begin. She was alarmed, but it was already too late.

Troops moved into the plaza carrying machine guns and high-caliber weapons. Gunfire erupted from the surrounding buildings, and the soldiers opened fire. Armed men in civilian clothes, identified by a white glove or handkerchief, moved through the crowd and entered the Chihuahua building. Some belonged to the Batallón Olimpia, which had been assigned to capture the student leaders; later evidence indicated that a separate group of snipers linked to the Presidential General Staff fired on both the crowd and the Army. Amid the confusion, plainclothes agents shouted, “Batallón Olimpia! Don’t shoot!” to keep soldiers from killing members of their own side.

People ran into the surrounding buildings and pounded desperately on apartment doors, begging residents to hide them. Some did. But hiding proved futile. Security forces forced their way into the apartments, violating the homes of residents and killing or detaining people who had simply been going about their daily lives. Photographs documenting some of these acts would not become widely known until decades later.

Decades Later

It was not until 2000, when the PRI lost the presidency after more than seven decades in power, that Vicente Fox came to office promising to clarify what had happened. By then, writers, journalists, intellectuals and filmmakers had spent decades pursuing the same questions: How many people were killed? Where and under what circumstances did they die? How many disappeared? Was it possible to remove the bodies in a single night and then claim that only 20 or 30 people had died?

The Díaz Ordaz government never officially acknowledged the Batallón Olimpia’s role. For years, the evidence consisted mainly of survivor testimony and fragmentary footage, as government agents had confiscated film from some journalists. In 2002, journalist Sanjuana Martínez anonymously received an archive containing 35 previously unpublished photographs taken by Manuel Gutiérrez Paredes, who had worked for the government. The images showed detainees, torture, bodies, weapons and men wearing white gloves, further undermining the official account and its implausibly low death toll.

Fox knew the wound Mexico was carrying. By then, the slogan “October 2 will not be forgotten!” had echoed across the country for decades, particularly during the annual march commemorating the massacre. The demonstration traditionally begins in Tlatelolco and proceeds to Mexico City’s Zócalo. High school students, university students, young people and workers gather every year, with some traveling from other states to participate.

A presidential decree issued in 2001 ordered federal agencies to transfer records concerning past political repression to the General Archive of the Nation. The following year, Mexico’s intelligence service delivered more than 4,000 boxes containing approximately 58,000 files produced by the former Federal Security Directorate and the General Directorate of Political and Social Investigations. The Defense Ministry transferred a separate military collection.

International correspondents who had arrived to cover the Olympic Games inevitably noticed what was happening to students, teachers and workers. Despite government censorship, the information crossed Mexico’s borders. Díaz Ordaz may have feared that the country would be portrayed as sliding toward communism; instead, he became internationally associated with authoritarianism and grave human rights violations.

We remember the date because public protest is a right.

Because the declassification and opening of government archives happened only recently.

Because photographic and documentary evidence can expose lies repeated for decades.

Because alarms go off whenever military convoys, soldiers or armed deployments appear on streets where they do not belong.

Because police forces are not supposed to enter university campuses, and when they do—as they still have—it must be regarded as reprehensible and unacceptable.

Because, in theory, no event as grand as the Olympic Games should ever be considered more important than human rights.

And because when students from other states organize and travel to the annual October 2 commemoration, their lives should not be placed in danger—as happened to the 43 students from Ayotzinapa who were forcibly disappeared on September 26, 2014. Mexico, you could say, has an extraordinary capacity to remember.

Estefanía Camacho Jiménez is a freelance Mexican journalist working across media and digital magazines. She is a specialist in gender, SMEs, economics, and business.