Elena Poniatowska

1968 was a year of student revolts in many places, but as Elena Poniatowska reminds us in her 68th prologue by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, the only city in which they massacred hundreds of people was Mexico. The chapters in the book are short, in them we know how everything was created: "We lived surrounded by the magic of the Cuban revolution and the Vietnamese resistance", but also stunned by the death of Che, and drunk with cinema, music and poetry. The protagonists did not surpass the circle of a dozen of university schools and faculties, and militated in all the tendencies of the extreme left, although they did not know much of the real working class.
July 26, Friday, is when the movement explodes. Thousands of young people demonstrate in
the streets and are fiercely beaten by the police. The following week, the unemployment is extended by the university and a council of representatives of the faculties in strike is constituted, that tries to go gestating a program with requirements for the negotiation. The list of deaths due to police brutality is growing and there are almost a thousand detainees, while the press lies and friendly voices advise prudence. On the 31st, a demonstration of one hundred thousand students with the rector at the front goes out to the street in defense of university autonomy. Taibo tells us about his enthusiasm at a time when "there were no nights or days, only actions, street and vibrations".
At the beginning of August, the strikers draw up a six-point program that requires, above all, the cessation of repression and the purging of their responsibilities. In the demonstration on August 27, half a million people raise their arms to the impossible: they occupy the Zócalo and demand a public dialogue with the president of the republic. In September, the right wing of the movement is claudicating, but the assemblies ratify the strike. Enthusiasm transforms into resistance and stubbornness. Thousands of rallies and demonstrations continue every day, in addition to other sectors, while the number of detainees grows. The strategy of the government, incapable by nature of any negotiation, can only be repression, and a blow is expected, although nobody thought it would be so brutal. On September 18, tanks and ten thousand soldiers with fixed bayonets assault the faculties, there are six hundred detainees. On October 2, troops attack the Tlatelolco rally, the official version says that the students started firing, but everyone knows that there were infiltrators among them.
After the massacre the masses are contained and a truce is imposed that lasts until the end of the Olympics. At the end of October, there are three uncontainable demands: freedom of the prisoners, return of the schools, cessation of the repression. The strike is stubbornly ratified at the beginning of November, but lasts only one more month. Taibo tells us the deaf distaste of those days without light. From the student movement is born an urban guerrilla that will be fiercely fought, and also attempts of new political struggles, looking for wider frameworks, which proved tremendously fruitless.
68 is a homage of its author to all his companions of those days, remembered generously. The movement had the depth of solidarity, horizontal discussion and democratic construction, but it was limited to the student milieu: "We needed time to be real Mexicans at all". Taibo talks about the massacre as a founding event, forger of an incorruptible collective soul, descent into hell, but also sees it as one more episode in an endless history of struggles, explosions of a people that endures the unspeakable, but never comes to bend completely.