Leticia Neria PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

In the previous administration, Mexico had won the bid to organise the 1968
Olympic Games, and it fell to the Díaz Ordaz administration to carry out the job. It was
important to make the event remarkable. 9 However, in the Mexican psyche, his
presidential term will be always be associated not with the Olympics but with a
massacre which occurred just a few days prior to the opening ceremony. During the
summer of 1968, a clash between students in the capital was strongly repressed by riot
police. This was the trigger for a series of demonstrations which brought together
students not simply from Mexico City, but around the country. 10 Their claims had
political overtones, and they worried the government, because they were unaccustomed
to responding to public opinion, 11 but these social movements showed that society was
transforming. The authoritarian system was cracking, and society was clamouring for
political change. 12 Yet, the PRI did not want active political participation from the
citizens. The president was convinced that it was a plot to destabilise the country.
Díaz Ordaz believed that the student movement was organised and supported by
communist countries, 13 although, according to the scholar Sergio Aguayo, it is
questionable whether Echeverría or Luis Gutiérrez Oropeza –the chief of the Estado
Mayor Presidencial- actually believed it or whether they simply used the specter of
communism to cause fear. 14 In fact, the student movement and the rebel groups in 1968
9 For more information on the 1968 Olympics, their political relevance and social participation around the
event, see Keith Brewster, ed., Reflections on Mexico ’68, Bulletin of Latin American Studies (UK:
Wiley-Blackwell, Society for Latin American Studies, 2010) and Claire Brewster and Keith Brewster,
Representing the Nation: Sport and Spectacle in Post-revolutionary Mexico (Oxon: Routledge, 2010)
10 A deep narrative based on oral testimonies about the origins, development and the massacre on 2
October 1968 was written by Elena Poniatowska, La noche de Tlatelolco, 2nd edn (Mexico: Ediciones
Era, 1998)
11 Rolando Cordera Campos, ‘Del desarrollo como crisis y de la crisis como transición’, in México a fines
de siglo, José Joaquín Blanco and José Woldenberg, Sección de Obras de Historia, 2 vols., (Mexico:
Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 2, pp. 266-308 (p.
268).
12 Loaeza, ‘Gustavo Díaz Ordaz…’, p. 287.
13 However, at the end of his term, he declared that he did not believe that communism could succeed in
Mexico because of the characteristics of the country and its ‘individualist’ society. Loaeza, ‘Gustavo Díaz
Ordaz…’, p. 304.
14 Personal communication with Sergio Aguayo, 26 November 2008.
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