1968 - Mark Kurlansky [191]
It seemed the changing of presidents was forever threatening the national stability. The Mexican solution was the PNR—the National Revolutionary Party—formed in 1929. Through this institution, a qualified president could be chosen and presented to the public. For six years this president would have almost absolute power. There were only three things he could not do—give territory to a foreign power, confiscate land from indigenous people, and succeed himself as president. During World War II, in an attempt to appear more stable and democratic, the PNR changed its name to that uniquely Mexican paradox, the Institutional Revolution Party.
That is what Mexico had become, not a democracy but an institutional revolution—the Revolution that feared revolution. The PRI bought out or killed agrarian leaders, all the while paying verbal homage to Zapata and carrying out as little land reform as possible. It bought out the labor unions until they became part of the PRI. It bought out the press, one newspaper at a time, until it completely controlled them. The PRI was not violent. It tried to co-opt. Only in those rare situations where that did not work would it resort to killing.
In 1964 the PRI chose the former minister of the interior, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, as the next president. Of all possible candidates, he was the most conservative. As minister of the interior, he had managed unusually good relations with the United States. He seemed the right choice to lead Mexico in the dangerous 1960s.
Díaz Ordaz was eager to put Mexico on display. It was at one of its best moments of economic expansion, with annual growth rates between 5 and 6 percent, up to 7 percent for 1967. In January 1968 The New York Times reported, “Steady economic growth within a framework of political and financial stability has distinguished Mexico among the major Latin American countries.” Octavio Paz wrote with a tone of incredulity about this period, “The economy of the country had made such progress that economists and sociologists cited the case of Mexico as an example for other underdeveloped countries.”
The 1968 summer Olympics was the first large international event hosted by Mexico since 1910, when as three decades of dictatorship was crumbling, Porfirio Díaz attempted an international celebration of the centennial of the beginning of the independence movement. The 1968 Olympics was the first time the Mexican Revolution was to show itself to the world with all its accomplishments, including an emerging middle class, the modernity of Mexico City, and the efficiency with which Mexico could run a huge international event. It would be televised to the world that Mexico was no longer backward and strife-torn but had become an emerging, successful modern country.
But Díaz Ordaz also understood that the world was having its 1968 and there would be troubles. The most apparent controversy on the horizon, the U.S. race conflicts, had the potential to politicize the games the same way the King assassination had politicized the Oscars. The idea of a black boycott of the Olympics first emerged in a meeting of Black Power leaders in Newark after that city’s riots during the summer of 1967. In November, Harry Edwards, an amiable and popular black sociology instructor at San Jose State College in California, again raised the idea at a black youth conference. Most athletes and black leaders did not think a black boycott would be effective, but one of Edwards’s first adherents to the idea was Tommie Smith, a student at San Jose State College and an extraordinary athlete who already held two world records in track and field events. Lee Evans, another champion sprinter at San Jose State, also said he would boycott. In February