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Remember the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico on October 2nd

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Remember the  in Mexico on October 2nd

(New-Power.org)

From Dawn of the Red:

“On Oct. 2, 1968, 10 days before the opening of the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, police officers and military troops shot into a crowd of unarmed students. Thousands of demonstrators fled in panic as tanks bulldozed over Tlatelolco Plaza.

Government sources originally reported that four people had been killed and 20 wounded, while eyewitnesses described the bodies of hundreds of young people being trucked away. Thousands of students were beaten and jailed, and many disappeared. Forty years later, the final death toll remains a mystery, but documents recently released by the U.S. and Mexican governments give a better picture of what may have triggered the massacre. Those documents suggest that snipers posted by the military fired on fellow troops, provoking them to open fire on the students.

The Beginning Of A Movement

In 1968, student movements were breaking out all over the world — including in France, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Argentina, Japan and the United States.

Mexico, like many countries in the prosperous 1960s, had spawned a vibrant middle class that enjoyed a quality of life unimaginable in previous decades. These children of the Mexican Revolution that now lived in comfort were, for the first time, able to send their own children to university in unprecedented numbers.

The student movement got its start from a street fight between high school students after a football game. The students confronted the Mexico City riot police sent there to end the skirmish. After hours of student resistance, the army was called in to quench the violence. The siege ended when the soldiers blasted the main door of the National Preparatory School in San Ildefonso with a bazooka, killing some of the students in the building.

The National University oversaw the Preparatory School, so the involvement of university officials and students was inevitable. In the following hours, the students decided to organize and protest against the violence exerted by the riot police. Over the following months, Mexico City witnessed a series of student protests and rallies against repression and violence.

The Massacre

Students expected the government to give in to their demands, but they were greeted with a clear message from the president: “No more unrest will be tolerated.” The army proceeded in the following days to seize the National University, with virtually no resistance from the students, and later the National Polytechnic Institute, with active and violent student resistance.

After these events, the students rapidly called for a new gathering on Oct. 2 at the Three Cultures Square in the Tlatelolco housing complex. Thousands of students showed up to get firsthand knowledge of the movement’s next steps. As the gathering was ending, soldiers arrived to capture the movement’s leaders. They were greeted by gunshots from the buildings surrounding the square. The troops then opened fire, turning the evening into a shooting that lasted nearly two hours…”

The protesters at Tlatelolco not only spoke out against the crimes of capitalism and imperialism in Mexico, but also the crimes against peoples across the Third World, especially Vietnam. At the time, the United States was waging a genocidal war against the peoples of Vietnam that would cost the lives of over four million people. Even today, Vietnam has one of the highest birth defect rates in the world due to all the bombs and chemicals the United States dumped on the country. Vietnam, like Mexico, is a country that has been brutalized by US imperialism. The government of Mexico that attacked its people were agents of US imperialism. Many revisionists, including the social-imperial, social-democratic pro-Soviet so-called “communists” in the government supported the attack against the students. They supported the attacks against the Maoists who were among the students. Just as the Vietnamese bravely resisted, as the people of Mexico did in 1968, we must resist today. They martyrs of Tlatelolco paid with their blood for a better world. The Mexican masses still gather every year in Tlatelolco. We also must remember their sacrifice. We must live and die for the revolution, for Leading Light Communism. We can build a better world.


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