LatinaLista — In 1968, ten days before the start of the Olympic games in Mexico City, several hundred students were slaughtered during a peaceful protest they had been staging for three months against the government’s stifling rule.
Mexican student protester being beaten by military troops.
(Photo: Roberto Sánchez)
Eyewitnesses say that Mexican military troops shot into the unarmed group of students for over two hours. Afterwards, the plaza where the students died was washed off, along with, the truth of what happened that day.
Since that historic moment in Mexican history, forever known as the Massacre of Tlatelolco, the search for the truth has been carried on by families, friends and historians. The latest look at what happened during that time can be found in the radio documentary Mexico ’68: A Movement, A Massacre and the 40-year Search for the Truth.
Produced by the Radio Diaries production team, Mexico ’68 incorporates audio, archived photos and video, along with unclassified documents scanned online, to recreate a well-rounded picture of what was happening in Mexico at that time and what about it would stir thousands of students and Mexican citizens to stand up against their government.
From the transcript of the radio documentary Mexico ’68:
And so you had these wildly varying accounts that anywhere from two hundred to two thousand people had died at Tlatelolco. And that gives you a sense of the dimensions of this mystery.
DENISE DRESSER: Forty years after 1968, there has never been a truth commission, the perpetrators have never really been called into account, former Presidents have refused to speak. So there’s been this non-spoken pact to leave things as they were.
There will come a point in which people like me will move on to other things and people who lost family members that day, will die, and perhaps we will never know the truth.
SERGIO AGUAYO: And that’s why we are still fighting the same battles of 1968. It is one of those rare moments that went beyond a group of students challenging a paranoid President. What was being fought, was something more fundamental. The power to control the truth.
