1968 - Mark Kurlansky [199]
The demonstrations continued. On September 18 at 10:30 at night the army surrounded the UNAM campus with troops and armored vehicles and, using a pincer movement, closed in and evacuated buildings, rounding up hundreds of students and faculty, ordering them to either stand with hands up or lie on the ground where they were. They were held at gunpoint, bayonet point in many cases, while the army continued their siege of the entire campus, building by building. It is not known how many faculty members and students were arrested, some to be released the next day. More than a thousand were thought to have been held in prison.
On September 23, at the Polytechnic, the police invaded and the students fought them back with sticks. Then the army came—Obregón’s Army of the People—and for the first time fired their weapons at students. The New York Times reported forty wounded. They also reported exchanges of gunfire and one policeman killed, although there is no evidence of the students ever having possessed firearms. Unidentified “vigilantes,” probably soldiers out of uniform, started attacking schools and shooting at students.
The violence was escalating. Finally, on October 2 the government and the National Strike Council had a meeting. According to Raúl Álvarez Garín, one of the CNH delegates, the long-awaited dialogue was a disaster. “There was no dialogue with the government. We didn’t say anything.” One of the street posters that month showed bay-onets and the caption “Dialogue?” “The meeting ended very badly,” Roberto Escudero recalled, and the CNH moved on to the rally at which they were to announce a hunger strike for political prisoners for the next ten days until the opening day of the Olympics. Then on that day they would again try to negotiate with the government. The rally to announce the plan was to be at a place called Tlatelolco.
The students did not understand that a decision had already been made. The government had concluded that these students were not Pancho Villas—they were Zapatas.
If this story had been written by an ancient Greek tragedian, it would have played its final scene at Tlatelolco. It is as though it were fated to end in this place. Mexican stories often start out being about the threatening foreigner but always end up being about Mexico, about what Paz called “its hidden face: an Indian, Mestizo face, an angry, blood-splattered face.” Martínez de la Roca loved talking about American influences, about the Black Panthers and civil rights. But looking back on the speeches of the CNH, he was surprised to realize how nationalistic they were with their speeches about violating the constitution and the ideals of Zapata. And so their story turns out not to be about Che, or the Sorbonne, or Cohn-Bendit, or even Berkeley; it is about Montezuma and Cortés and Carranza, about Obregón and Villa and Zapata. It was played out in a place the Mexican government called La Plaza de las Tres Culturas, the Plaza of Three Cultures—but the event is always identified by the Aztec name for the place, Tlatelolco.
If a single place could tell the history of Mexico, its conquests, its slaughters, its ambitions, defeats, victories, and aspirations, it would be Tlatelolco. When Montezuma ruled an Aztec empire from the island of Tenochtitlán in the high mountain lake that is now the site of Mexico City, one of the small affiliated allies was the nearby kingdom of Tlatelolco, a thriving