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by the military in the 1970s. But no mass graves have been found from Tlatelolco or any of the later killings. There were cases of whole families being threatened if they persisted in asking about a missing relative from 1968. Martínez de la Roca said, “Families don’t come forward about missing children because they have received anonymous phone calls saying, ‘If you say anything, all your other children will die.’ I understand. When I was a kid someone killed my father and told me if I didn’t keep quiet about it, he would kill my older brother. So I didn’t say anything.”

In the year 2000, Myrthokleia González Gallardo happened across a friend from student times who was amazed to see her. All these years the friend had assumed Myrthokleia had been killed in the plaza.

In 1993, for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the massacre, the government gave permission for a monument to be placed in the plaza. Survivors, historians, and journalists searched for the names of victims but could come up with only twenty names. There was another effort in 1998 that yielded only a few more names. Most Mexicans who have tried to unravel the mystery estimate that between one hundred and two hundred people were killed. Some estimates are higher still. Someone was seen filming from a distance on one of the high floors of the Foreign Ministry, but the film has never been found.

After October 2, the student movement dissolved. The Olympics progressed without any local disturbances. Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s chosen successor was Luis Echeverria, the minister of the interior who worked with him on repressing the student movement. Until he died in 1979, Díaz Ordaz insisted that one of his great accomplishments as president was the way he handled the student movement and averted any embarrassment during the games.

But very much in the same way that the invasion of Czechoslovakia was the end of the Soviet Union, Tlatelolco was the unseen beginning of the end of the PRI. Álvarez Garín said in a remarkably bold 1971 book on the massacre by Mexican journalist Elena Poniatowska, “All of us were reborn on October 2. And on that day we also decided how we are all going to die; fighting for genuine justice and democracy.”

In July 2000, for the first time in seventy-one years of existence, the PRI was voted out of power, and it was done democratically, in a slow process over decades, without the use of violence. Today the press is far more free and Mexico much closer to being a true democracy. But it is significant that even with the PRI out of power, many Mexicans said they were afraid to be interviewed for this book, and some who had agreed, upon reflection, backed out.

The tall rectangular slab erected for the twenty-fifth anniversary lists the ages of the twenty victims. Many were eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old. At the bottom it adds, “y muchos otros campañeros cuyos nombres y edades aún no conocemos”—and many more comrades whose names and ages are unknown.

Every year in October, Mexicans of the ’68 generation start crying. Mexicans have a very long memory. They still remember how the Aztecs abused other tribes and argue over whether the princess Malinche’s collaboration with Cortés, betraying the Aztec alliance, was justifiable. There is still lingering bitterness about Cortés. Nor is it forgotten how the French connived to take over Mexico in 1862. The peasants still remember the unfulfilled promises of Emiliano Zapata. And it is absolutely certain that Mexicans will long remember what happened on October 2, 1968, amid the Aztec ruins of Tlatelolco.

PART IV

THE FALL

OF NIXON

It is not an overstatement to say that the destiny of the entire human race depends on what is going on in America today. This is a staggering reality to the rest of the world; they must feel like passengers in a supersonic jet liner who are forced to watch helplessly while a passel of drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen fight for the controls and the pilot’s seat.

—ELDRIDGE CLEAVER, Soul on Ice, 1968

CHAPTER 20

THEORY AND PRACTICE

FOR THE FALL SEMESTER