Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Covering up the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre

Despite its proximity to the U.S., for many reasons Mexico's massacre of upwards of 700 students in 1968 has gotten lost in the narratives of state-led mass murder by Pinochet, in Nicaragua, in El Salvador and (to a much lesser extent) in Argentina in Brazil. This story reminds us one of those reasons why - in 1981, 13 years after the fact, the state police were still silencing anybody who dared to mention the possibility that the state murdered hundreds of peaceful activists (not a couple "subversives", as the Ordas Diaz government, with later-president Luis Echeverria as titular head of the police, maintained in 1968). Recently, charges have been brought against Echeverria, but it's not hard to understand why Americans seem to have forgotten (if they ever knew in the first place) how the PRI operated as a "one-party dictatorship" that was not immune to state-led terrorism.