The Tlatelolco massacre
Ten days before the Mexico City Olympics, soldiers and security forces open fire on a student rally in the Plaza of the Three Cultures, killing dozens and perhaps hundreds.
- La noche de Tlatelolco — Elena Poniatowska, Ediciones Era (1971)
- The Dead of Tlatelolco: Using the Archives to Exhume the Past — Kate Doyle, National Security Archive (2006)
- Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy — Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2004)
In the summer of 1968 a student movement in Mexico City, demanding the release of political prisoners and an end to police brutality, grew into mass marches. With the Olympics about to open, President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s government saw a threat to order. On the evening of 2 October, as several thousand people gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, flares went up and soldiers and plainclothes agents of the secret “Olympia Battalion” opened fire.
- Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy — Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2004)
- La noche de Tlatelolco — Elena Poniatowska, Ediciones Era (1971)
The government at first said about two dozen people died. Journalists and witnesses estimated several hundred. Researcher Kate Doyle of the National Security Archive could document 44 victims by name from the files opened after 2000, while stressing that the true number remains unknown; hundreds were arrested. The Olympics opened as planned on 12 October. Elena Poniatowska’s 1971 oral history La noche de Tlatelolco kept the memory alive when the press was silent.
- The Dead of Tlatelolco: Using the Archives to Exhume the Past — Kate Doyle, National Security Archive (2006)
- La noche de Tlatelolco — Elena Poniatowska, Ediciones Era (1971)
Why it matters today
"2 de octubre no se olvida" ("2 October is not forgotten") is chanted at marches every year. Tlatelolco shattered the PRI's image as the heir of a popular revolution and became the symbol of state violence and impunity, a wound reopened by later cases like the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students in 2014.