ABSTRACT
In the summer of 1968, on the eve of the Olympic Games, Mexico City high school and university students mounted a struggle for dialogue, transparency, and freedom of expression against an authoritarian one-party—the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)—state. On August 8, they organized the Consejo Nacional de Huelga (CNH), with representatives from the national university (UNAM) and Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN), their respective preparatory and vocational schools, and other institutions of higher education, public and private, both in the capital and elsewhere in the country. In response to weeks of state repression deployed primarily against high school students, themselves responding to government violence, the CNH drew up the Pliego Petitorio. This list of demands included the release of political prisoners, disbandment of riot police, indemnification of victims, resignation of police chiefs, and abolition of the law of social dissolution used to repress dissent. Their demands were not new, as the state had quashed several recent popular movements in the capital. New was the students’ insistence on public dialogue and the visible strength with which they pressed their demands—mega-marches and rallies that swelled to 400,000 people and the organization of brigades that traversed the city distributing information and talking to people on buses and street corners, in markets and workplaces. While the government gestured toward some form of dialogue, it was unaccustomed to negotiating with such a ballooning, unrelenting movement that challenged its authority and hierarchical norms and did so on the eve of an international event the government had elaborately prepared for all year. Nervous and divided, it responded with violence and encouraged the press, labor, and other associations it controlled to condemn the students as “rebels without a cause,” vandals, and dupes of international communism. Caught up in their own ethos and rules of engagement, the students likely missed opportunities for negotiation. They were crushed on October 2 when the army fired on a rally of 10,000 in the Plaza de Tlatelolco. At least 300 died at Tlatelolco, over 200 were wounded, and 2,000 arrested. The Olympic Games began on October 12. 1
