1968 - Mark Kurlansky [200]
In the 1960s the Mexican government added its own presence in this spot of conquest and destruction, a high-rise Ministry of Foreign Relations and a huge, sprawling, middle-class housing project made up of long concrete blocks each given the name of a state or an important date in Mexican history. The buildings went on for miles—good apartments at subsidized rents for loyal PRI families, a PRI stronghold in the center of town. Not that there was any opposition. But the buildings stood as proof that PRI delivered. In 1985 this exemplary construction proved not to be of the quality that PRI had claimed, and it was a whispered scandal when most of the buildings tumbled, faltered, or collapsed in an earthquake. The Aztec ruins and the Franciscan church, on the other hand, were barely damaged.
Tlatelolco consists of a flagstone-paved plaza surrounded on two sides by the black stone and white mortar walls of a considerable complex of Aztec ruins. The church also faces the plaza on one of these sides. In the front and on the other side are housing projects. The building in front, the Edificio Chihuahua, has an open-air hallway on the third floor where people can stand in front of a waist-high concrete wall and look out at the plaza.
It is the kind of place an experienced political organizer would not choose. The police had only to block a few passageways between buildings and the plaza would be sealed off. Even the army operation at UNAM allowed a few quick students to slip out. But from Tlatelolco there would be no escape.
The rally was scheduled to begin at 4:00. By 3:00 police were already stopping cars from entering the downtown area. Determined people came on foot—couples, families with small children. Only between five thousand and twelve thousand people went into the plaza, depending on whose estimate is believed—one of the smallest showings since the troubles started in July. It was a rally to make an announcement and not a mass demonstration.
Myrthokleia González Gallardo, a twenty-two-year-old CNH delegate from the Polytechnic Institute, went despite her parents’ pleas not to; they feared something terrible would happen. But she felt that she had to go. Progressives in Mexico were just beginning to think about women’s rights, and she was one of only nine women of the three hundred delegates. “The CNH did not listen as much when a woman spoke,” she recalled. But she had been chosen to introduce the four speakers, which was an unusually high-profile role for a woman.
“As I approached Tlatelolco with the four speakers I was to introduce,” she recalled, choked with tears thinking about it thirty-four years later to the month, “we were warned to be careful, that the army had been seen nearby. But I wasn’t afraid, though we decided to make it a short meeting. There were workers, students, families coming into the plaza, filling it up. We didn’t see any army in the plaza.”
They went up the elevator to the third-floor balcony of Edificio Chihuahua, a commanding perch from where they could address the crowd in the plaza. “We took our place on the third floor and started the speeches,” she said. “Suddenly, off to the left, over the church, were helicopters with a green light. Suddenly everyone down in the plaza started falling. And then men with white gloves and weapons appeared, maybe from the elevator. They ordered us down to the ground floor, where they began beating us.” In the background she heard the tap-tap-tap of automatic weapons fire.
The Mexican army had two chains of command, the regular army, which reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Ministry of Defense, and the Battalion Olympia, which