Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

168 Rubén Gallo
Tlatelolco student massacre. On October 2, 1968, the Mexican army opened
Wre on a peaceful student rally in what became the bloodiest episode in postrevolutionary
Mexican history. Several hundred students were killed and hundreds
more were imprisoned. The government of President Gustavo Díaz
Ordaz tried to blame the students for the shootout, suggesting that communist
agents at the service of the Soviet Union were attempting to subvert
the Mexican government—a bogus charge that CIA and FBI reports quickly
disproved. 6
But Tlatelolco was not the last act of violent repression against
peaceful protesters. Three years after the massacre, there was a second confrontation
between students and the military. On June 10, 1971, an elite
army unit known as Los Halcones (The Falcons), whose members had been
trained abroad, opened Wre on another group of students in Mexico City’s
downtown district. Fifteen students were killed and several hundred were
wounded. The rest of the 1970s were marked by an increase in police brutality.
Radical guerrillas sprung up in the countryside around Mexico City,
and the government reacted by launching a “dirty war” against students and
activists. Suspected “radicals” were arrested, tortured, or imprisoned, and
hundreds “disappeared” after being detained for questioning. 7
Ironically, these acts of repression were undertaken by a government
that presented itself as an heir to the Mexican revolution, and that
ofWcially embraced socialist ideals. Police repression was most widespread
during the governments of Luis Echeverría (1970–76) and José López Portillo
(1976–82), the two most left-of-center presidents since the 1930s. While
these two men ofWcially embraced socialist causes—they were strong supporters
of the Cuban revolution, expanded ties and cultural exchanges with
the Soviet Union and the nations of the Warsaw Pact, denounced the U.S.backed
military coup in Chile, and granted political asylum to Chilean and
Argentinean dissidents—their administrations had little tolerance for dissent
at home and were quick to torture and imprison suspected radicals and
activists.
As often happened during the PRI’s seventy-one year rule (it
governed Mexico uninterruptedly from 1929 to 2000), there was a complete
disconnect between the party’s ofWcial rhetoric (committed to furthering
the utopian, social-minded goals of the Mexican revolution) and its actions,
which during the 1970s were identical (though not in scale) to those practiced
by the ofWcially viliWed dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. Indeed
the PRI was so successful at concealing its repressive tactics that it was not
until 2000, when the PRI lost the presidency to Vicente Fox, that the government’s
archives on Tlatelolco and the dirty war were opened and the
details about the 1970s’ violence became known.