1968 - Mark Kurlansky [194]
There were many strikes and marches at UNAM before the famous 1968 events. In 1965 students supported the doctors’ strike for better wages. In 1966 UNAM students went on strike for three months against an authoritarian rector, Ignacio Chavez. In March 1968, after the big marches in Europe, Mexico City too had a march against the Vietnam War. But compared with those in the United States, Europe, or Japan, the Mexican student movement was minuscule—a few hundred students.
In 1968, for the first time, the small student movement became a concern of the Mexican government because it did not want any problems during the Olympics and because of President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s particular way of viewing the world. A world in which spontaneous movements spread without organizers across the world on the airwaves of television was something new and, for the Mexican president, very hard to believe. He was convinced there was an international conspiracy of revolutionaries moving from country to country, spreading chaos and upheaval. A key component in this conspiracy was the Cubans. So while the Mexican government defied the U.S. embargo and openly befriended Cuba, in reality the president had a paranoid dread of the Cubans and carefully monitored flights to the island, keeping and studying passenger lists. While publicly refusing to embargo Cuba, he did not let Mexico conduct trade with the island and consulted with American intelligence about “the Cuban threat.” While Díaz Ordaz had been minister of the interior, he had cultivated close relations with the CIA and FBI. It was in the nature of Mexican policy toward the United States to have this contradiction between public stance and private communication, the same way that in 1916 Carranza had pretended to oppose U.S. intervention while in reality encouraging U.S. president Woodrow Wilson to send troops to Mexico and attack the troublesome Pancho Villa.
Lecumberri, a black castle in downtown Mexico City, looks like the Bastille and is in fact a French-style prison, with a round central courtyard and cell blocks stretching out in spokes. The cells are about fourteen feet long and six feet wide. In 1968 this was the infamous dungeon into which political prisoners were thrown. Today, the National Archives documents that were state secrets in 1968 are housed in Lecumberri, where the bars have been replaced with large windows and well-polished parquet wooden floors have been installed. The cramped fourteen-by-six-foot cells are filled with files that have clearly been laundered. But they do paint a picture of the kind of state paranoia that was obsessing the Díaz Ordaz government.
The Ministry of the Interior had had a wealth of informants. Every student organization, even if it had only twenty members, had at least one who reported to the government, writing up records in tedious detail of meetings in which nothing happened. Communists of any kind were of particular interest, and of even greater concern were any foreigners who talked to Mexican communists. The government kept detailed reports on who was seen singing Cuban songs, who proposed erecting a Vietnamese statue and who supported the suggestion, and who were on flights to Havana, especially around the time of July 26, when Cuba had its annual celebration of Castro’s first uprising. The names of people participating in an homage to José Martí were also noted, even though the writings of the Cuban father of independence were admired by both pro- and anti-Castro elements.
Díaz Ordaz was also obsessively concerned about the French. This may in part have been because Mexican students had a fascination with the French May movement out of all proportion to its consequence. Though American and German and numerous other movements were older, more durable, better organized, and of greater