MEXICO CITY JOURNAL
By SAM DILLON
MEXICO CITY -- The protest rally here on Oct. 2, 1968, began
like many others across the world in that era of campus revolt and
rock-and-roll.
Thousands of demonstrators huddled in a drizzle to hear
student leaders
with bullhorns denounce the army occupation of a
university.
Then the sky
over downtown Mexico City crackled with flares and
Tlatelolco Plaza
exploded in gunfire. Shooting at the panicked crowd,
troops and the
police turned the plaza into an inferno of carnage and
screams. When
the firing stopped, 2,000 demonstrators were beaten and
jailed, scores
of bodies were trucked away and firehoses washed the
blood from the
cobblestones.
Like the killings
outside Tiananmen Square in China in 1989, the
Tlatelolco massacre
seared the conscience of an entire Mexican
generation.
Government officials have resisted every attempt at
investigation,
insisting that students had provoked the bloodshed by
attacking security
forces.
But now, 30 years
later, the official version of the events is under attack
as never before.
In a new book, a prominent academic argues that the
violence erupted
when government snipers, not armed students, opened
fire not only
on the crowd but also on the army's own troops.
The president
at the time, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, orchestrated the violence
and blamed its
victims to justify a broad crackdown on a democracy
movement that
he considered embarrassing on the eve of the 1968
Olympics here,
says the author, Sergio Aguayo Quezada.
Aguayo's book,
"1968: The Archives of Violence" (Grijalbo/ Reforma),
one of six by
Mexican authors on Tlatelolco scheduled for publication this
year, is part
of a broad effort to clarify the massacre.
Opposition politicians
have used their growing powers to pry open some
long-secret
government files. Newspapers have published new details. A
television network
has broadcast previously unseen film of the repression.
Mayor Cuauhtemoc
Cardenas has ordered that Mexico City flags be
flown at half-staff
for an anniversary memorial on Oct. 2.
Photos recently
surfaced showing Ernesto Zedillo, the current president,
being roughed
up by the police as a student in 1968. But his government
continues to
cite national security concerns in denying congressional
requests for
access to army and other files that could shed light on the
events.
"The 1968 student
movement was the beginning of Mexico's fight for
democracy, but
it was interrupted by the massacre," said Pablo Gomez,
who as a student
was jailed after 1968 and who now, as an opposition
legislator,
is a leader of a congressional committee investigating the event.
"We're advancing
again, but the authorities still want this history secret."
The cover-up
began immediately. Recently uncovered documents show
that newspaper
publishers worked closely with Diaz in 1968 to present a
sugar-coated
version of Tlatelolco and that the police closed and
ransacked the
office of a magazine that published stunning photos of the
events.
In 1993, the
25th anniversary of the massacre, intellectuals who formed a
Truth Commission
gave up trying to reconstruct the 1968 events because
the government
refused to open its archives.
Enrique Krauze,
a historian, helped shatter the inertia in a history of
Mexico published
last year, "Mexico: Biography of Power"
(HarperCollins).
Using Diaz's
memoirs, Krauze showed how the president's insecurities led
him to view
the demonstrators as participants in a worldwide conspiracy
plotting to
undercut his authority. "The president's account is riddled with
fantasies and
lies," Krauze concluded.
After the opposition
won control of Congress last year for the first time
and demanded
access to the long-secret files on Tlatelolco, the
government released
3,000 boxes of papers stored in the National
Archives, mainly
from the Interior Ministry. Although many key
documents appear
to be missing, some are useful and will form the basis
of a congressional
report.
But the government
continues to hold on to the most important
documents. A
deputy interior minister, Salazar Toledano, this year
declined to
give Congress even an inventory of Defense Ministry papers
related to Tlatelolco,
saying, "Those files will not be opened for reasons of
national security."
Among the missing
materials are about five hours' worth of 35-millimeter
film, shot by
government movie crews sent to Tlatelolco hours before the
massacre by
the interior minister at the time, Luis Echeverria Alvarez, who
later succeed
Diaz as president. He refused to submit to congressional
questioning
earlier this year.
Still, many new
historical materials are turning up. Aguayo, a professor at
the Colegio
de Mexico, has reviewed not only the Mexican archives but
also those in
the United States and Europe. He has also interviewed
scores of officials.
Aguayo says Diaz,
following a script he had used earlier against smaller
crowds, wanted
just enough violence to crush the 1968 democracy
movement.
"He didn't order
up a massacre, but he was ready to sacrifice the lives of
a few soldiers
and civilians," Aguayo said during a walk through Tlatelolco
Plaza one recent
afternoon.
"But the violence
flared out of control," he said, gesturing to the apartment
buildings towering
over the site, "after the snipers opened fire from the
rooftops."
Aguayo argues
that the army, ordered to disperse but not shoot at the
demonstrators,
was not told that there would be sniper fire. The soldiers
opened fire
themselves, he said, after a general in command of a
paratrooper
battalion was among the first to be wounded.
The government
originally insisted that 27 people died, but others put the
body count far
higher. Robert Service, who was a diplomat at the U.S.
Embassy in 1968,
estimated for Aguayo that "nearly 200" had died.
"This year a
lot of new information is coming out," Aguayo said. "But this
wound isn't
going to heal."