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By Root 936 0

conspiring to undermine and take over. The Ministry of the Interior carefully watched American students who came to Mexico for the summer, when Mexican school is still open. They also watched the many Mexicans who attended Berkeley and other California schools and were coming home for the summer. And in fact, these Mexican students from California were influential in the Mexican student movement. Roberto Rodriguez Baños, who in July 1968 was chief of the national desk of AMEX, the first Mexican news agency, which began as an alternative to state-controlled news, said, “In 1968 Mexican students read with fascination about Paris, Czechoslovakia, Berkeley, Columbia, and other U.S. universities. Ever since the Watts riots in the summer of 1965, most Mexicans were convinced that the U.S. was in a state of civil war. They had seen on television a huge American neighborhood in a major city in flames. The government had seen what had happened in France, Czechoslovakia, and the United States and were convinced that the world was destabilizing. It saw in the student movement these same outside forces coming to destabilized Mexico.”

Mexico was one of the few countries in the world that did not condemn the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The Institutional Revolutionary Party did not like revolutions anymore. The government was ready to do whatever was necessary to stop the revolution from coming to Mexico. It was worried about the Cubans and the Soviets. It worried about Guatemala and Belize on the southern border, and worrying about Belize meant it also had to worry about the British, who still had military bases there. Porfirio Díaz had been famous for saying, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.” But now the world was getting smaller. To Díaz Ordaz it was “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to everyone else.”

What disturbed the PRI was that it was not sure how to control students who were not looking for food, land, work, or money. The PRI could form student organizations, the way it had formed labor unions, journalism groups, and land reform organizations, but the students had no incentive to join a PRI student organization. Student leaders were leaders only because they earned the support of the students every day. If a leader was co-opted by the PRI, he would no longer be a leader. Lorenzo Meyer said, “The students were as free as you could be in this society.”

By summer the government’s growing anxiety was becoming visible. Allen Ginsberg, on a family vacation before taking on Chicago, was stopped at the border and told that he would have to shave off his beard to enter. Just a few months before, sounding like the peacemaking moderate in a turbulent year, Díaz Ordaz had told the Mexican press, “Everyone is free to let his beard, hair, or sideburns grow if he wants to, to dress well or badly as he sees fit. . . .”

If all the student movements of 1968 had a contest to see which had the most innocuous beginnings, the competition would be stiff, but the Mexican student movement would have an excellent chance of being in first place. Until July 22 it was a small and splintered movement. Plans for the Olympics were proceeding well. Eighteen sculptors from sixteen countries, including Alexander Calder and Henry Moore, were arriving to set up their works. Calder’s seventy-ton steel piece was to be placed in front of the new Aztec Stadium. Others were arranged along the “Friendship Route” to the Olympic Village. Oscar Urrutia, who headed the cultural program, in announcing all this to the press quoted an ancient Mexican poem, which ends, “Yet even more do I love my brother man.” That was to be the theme of the games.

All that happened on July 22 was that a fight broke out between two rival high schools. No one is certain what caused the fight. The two groups were fighting constantly. Two local gangs, the “Spiders” and the “Ciudadelans,” may have been involved. The fight spread into the Plaza de la Ciudadela, an important commercial center in the city. The following day the students were attacked