Diaz Ordaz brought considerable experience to his position, having served as a judge, law professor, vice-rector of the University of Puebla, deputy, senator, and interior secretary. A 1964 CIA report observed, “Diaz Ordaz most nearly represents the PRI’s middle-class managerial and technical Groups.
When Diaz Ordaz took office in 1964, few anticipated significant social strife during his term. In a book published the year before he became president, U. S. historian Howard F. Cline noted, “The PRI is now so secure that it can afford to relax and does not need many of the repressive measures it earlier took in dealing with the opposition.”45
The chain of events for which Diaz Ordaz will always be remembered began in the summer of 1968. On July 23, there was a street fight between students from two high schools in Mexico City. Police broke up the fighting and chased the students into a school building, clubbing everyone in sight, including students and teachers who had nothing to do with the fighting. This produced a typical response—a march three days later to protest police brutality. Police, rather than ignoring the protestors, again waded in with clubs.
Figure 21.1
Poster from 1968 student movement
Source: Russell (1977: 133)
Before the day was over, students seized several city busses and occupied some high schools in protest. On July 30, police forcibly removed protestors from four high schools affiliated with the National University and one affiliated with the National Polytechnic Institute. At Preparatory School Number One, a bazooka was used to blow down the school’s 200-year-old wooden doors. On that day, 400 were injured and more than 1,000 were arrested. This repression resulted in still more protest.46
The National University, the National Polytechnic Institute, and their affiliated high schools went out on strike. On August 5, strikers issued six demands that reflected a belief that somehow, somewhere, democracy and social justice were still a part of the Revolution. Their demands were: 1) freedom for political prisoners; 2) the disbanding of the granaderos, Mexico City’s despised police riot squad; 3) the dismissal of Mexico City’s police chief; 4) the repeal of the statute making “social dissolution” a crime; 5) compensation for those wounded and for the families of those who had been killed by the police; and 6) the arrest and trial of public officials guilty of abuse.
On August 1, Javier Barros Sierra, the rector of the National University, led a 100,000-person demonstration that protested the occupation of the University-affiliated schools as a violation of university autonomy. A second demonstration on August 13 saw 150,000 march and chant insults to the press, the police, and the president. At a third demonstration on August 27, there were
200,000, including many non-students.
The vast majority of the activists were political neophytes with no ties to any political organization. They were largely sons and daughters of the middle class that had arisen in the previous decades. Operating through a National Strike Council (CNH), the movement functioned in each school or university faculty. As historian Enrique Krauze noted, “In total contrast to the usual methods of the PRI, everything was discussed between equals within the Movement, and everything was subject to a vote.”47
On September 13, 100,000 marched in complete silence to demonstrate that the movement was disciplined. To counter charges that they were unwitting stooges of international communism, the marchers left behind their Che Guevara posters and carried images of Hidalgo, Morelos, Zapata, Juarez, and Villa.48
Rather than making concessions to end the movement, the government continued to respond with force. Houses were searched without warrants, phones were tapped, and students were arrested without charge. Police smashed store windows during demonstrations to make the movement look irresponsible.49
On September 18, in a flagrant violation of its autonomy, 10,000 troops occupied the National University campus to prevent it from being used as the movement headquarters. On September 23, in a pitched battle, government forces occupied the National Polytechnic Institute, which had been fortified by dozens of hijacked city busses and felled telephone posts. By then, the movement had changed. It was no longer idealistic students questioning authority, but Molotov cocktails versus army tanks. In that confrontation, several were killed by police.50
By September 25, between ten and twenty students had been killed. Not surprisingly, the repression and the government’s refusal to negotiate changed the strikers’ views. They began to question the basic values of a system they had implicitly believed in only shortly before. For the first time in living memory, direct criticism was launched at an incumbent president, who was mercilessly caricatured. At the same time, students began to fan out into working-class neighborhoods, distributing leaflets, giving quick speeches, and fleeing before the police arrived. As the students’ radicalism increased, they added political rights, economic justice, and lessened dependency on the United States to the original six demands. The military’s continued occupation of university facilities aroused further outrage.51
Artists, writers, and intellectuals often met with the students and lent support. Not surprisingly, though, most of the establishment turned its back on the students. Official labor and peasant leaders as well as opposition political parties denounced the movement.52
A march scheduled for October 2 had been prohibited by the government, so strikers decided to hold a rally near the center of Mexico City “to avoid violence.” As 5,000 to 10,000 were peacefully listening to speakers in the Plaza of Three Cultures at the Tlatelolco housing project, 5,000 soldiers surrounded them. Then heavy gunfire broke out. As people tried to flee, they were cut down by bullets.
Estimates of the number killed at Tlatelolco run into the hundreds. Bodies were burned to avoid a politically embarrassing string of funerals just before the Olympics. Military Camp Number One, the main military base in Mexico City, became a virtual prison as hundreds of student activists were detained there. Ironically the 1968 Olympics—the first held in the underdeveloped world— were to have shown the great progress Mexico had made. The desire to establish peace before the opening of the Olympics, even if it were the peace of Porfirio Diaz, partially explains the brutal actions at Tlatelolco.53
In the aftermath of the massacre, the military claimed to have fired their weapons in response to incoming sniper fire. The military assumed the students were the only possible source of the incoming bullets. Student activists and the public in general assumed that the “sniper fire” was a lame excuse to shift blame from the military to students. However, documents drawn up by thenSecretary of Defense Marcelino Garcia Barragan and only made public after his death paint a very different picture.
The documents indicate that during the rally marksmen from the presidential guards stationed in adjacent apartment buildings fired on regular army troops monitoring the rally. This caused the regular army troops to fire on the students in what they considered to be self-defense, thus creating plausible deniability for military authorities while smashing the student movement. Forces Irom the Interior Ministry, the military, and the presidential guards were present. In theory, the chain of command for all three forces led back to the president. It remains unclear if Diaz Ordaz knew in advance of the positioning of the presidential guards to fire on the regular army or if rogue elements orchestrated the operation. Declassified U. S. Defense Department documents state that the firing by the marksmen resulted from military insubordination, with officers ordering the shooting without the knowledge or consent of the president or the secretary of defense.54
The attack at Tlatelolco marked the end of the student movement. According to a then-secret government security report, by the afternoon of October 3, 1,043 had been arrested. Arrests of activists continued for weeks. Students who only weeks before had believed in a democratic Mexico had no response.55
The 1968 student movement reflected the government’s inability to respond to the needs of the middle class. Protests also reflected dissatisfaction with Mexico’s skewed distribution of wealth, at a time millions were being spent on the Olympics. University budgets were declining as enrollments were burgeoning. By 1967, spending per university student had fallen to the 1959
In his state of the nation address following Tlatelolco, Diaz Ordaz thanked workers and peasants “who would not listen to sedition.” He also commented that the student movement had operated “without ideology or program, using disorder, violence, rancor, frightening symbols, and an alarming spontaneity. It tried to overthrow our society. . .” He also stated, “I fully assume personal, ethical, social, juridical, political, and historical responsibility for the decisions taken by the government in relation to last year’s events.”57
Octavio Paz commented on the impact of the Tlatelolco massacre:
At the very moment in which the Mexican government was receiving international recognition for forty years of political stability and economic progress, a swash of blood dispelled the official optimism and caused every citizen to doubt the meaning of that progress.58
While the students’ demands remained unmet, many participants in the movement later played leading roles in urban, peasant, and trade union movements that contributed to eventual democratic change.59
The economy grew at an annual rate of more than 6 percent during Diaz Ordaz’s term. This insulated the president from much of the criticism by students. In addition, government social spending increased under Diaz Ordaz, as it had during the previous two administrations. Social welfare spending and economic growth continued to be portrayed as the fruits of the more just, nationalistic order ushered in by the 1910—1917 Revolution.60
World History
