'68 Read online

  We were strangers, too, in history. We did not come from the national past. We didn’t know why, but for us the past was an international realm that produced novels and revolutions, not a local realm belonging to the people. We were barely aware of the railroad-workers’ movement and its jailed leader Demetrio Vallejo; we had heard vaguely of Rubén Jaramillo, but we could not have told his story. We felt absolutely no connection to Morelos, Zapata, Villa, to Vincente Guerrero, Hidalgo, Leandro Valle, to Guillermo Prieto, or to Mina. They were characters from a foreign history that bored preparatory teachers, really just bureaucrats, strove to misteach us; or, at best, more street names.

  Foreigners in our own country; foreigners in our own history.

  We weren’t the only ones. We shared the university with a twin generation, one that did watch television and loved mariachi music. That reveled in the feats performed on the soccer field by the Guadalajara Chivas and the UNAM Pumas, and read books out of obligation and as by birthright. They thought their studies were simply a stepping stone to a job, but had begun to question the attraction of leaping into a society in which there were more suicides than parachutes. A society whose doors were slamming shut. We shared with them a fondness for torterías (sandwich shops), a unanimous endorsement of the miniskirt, and a passion for the Beatles. We were no better than they were, though we probably thought we were at the time; we were simply different. We had not yet found each other in the only possible place where that meeting could take place: Mexico City, the most Mexican Rancho Grande of all, history past and history yet to come. For the moment, without knowing or recognizing it, we shared the country in which we had happened to be born, a country that was about to turn real right in our hands.

  Where It Is Revealed That We Materialists Are Not, As Is Commonly Thought, Heavy Trucks1

  It is generally agreed that the Movement was ignited on 26 July 1968, but as always in real history, the igniters did not know at the time what it was they were igniting. There had been straws in the wind, to be sure, a distinct restlessness among the students, but small-scale activity was still the rule, fairly traditional in form, with old-style leadership and an old-style approach to political action. Here and there something new was stirring, but it was hard to see the signs precisely because of the speed with which things were happening: the Vietnam solidarity demonstrations gave birth to brigadismo—mobile action groups of five or six comrades that would hold flash rallies anywhere in the city; the 1967 student strike in the technical colleges; the demonstration against the Hanoi bombings, when doves were released from garbage cans all over the Zona Rosa to blow the minds of the riot police guarding the gringo embassy; Demetrio Vallejo’s hunger strikes in support of freedom for political prisoners, and the parallel hunger strike it sparked at Political Sciences.

  Come 26 July we Reds went into the street, about seven or eight thousand of us, perhaps a few hundred more than a month earlier at a demonstration in solidarity with the Cuban revolution that extended down San Juan de Letrán. A more or less routine left-wing demonstration. The usual.

  I marched with Santiago Ramírez and a couple of guys who said they were Costa Ricans, though years later I found out they were part of what would become the Sandinista movement. Foreign elements even more foreign than us, they had pegged us as potential guides.

  When the demonstration rounded the corner onto La Alameda, we could hear the chanting of other groups some distance away. Whether because Santiago and I had New Left leanings and were less orthodox than most, or because he was the son of a psychologist and I of a journalist, we left our demonstration, whose climax of soporific speeches could easily be foreseen, and joined the bystanders on the sidewalk. We covered ten or more blocks with the ticos, the supposed Costa Ricans, following along behind. We quickly found ourselves in the midst of a march of Poli students protesting the progovernment groups on their campus and attacks by youth gangs. They were heading down toward the Zócalo and heaping shit on the National Front of Technical Students (FNET)—a government-supported student organization used to maintain discipline at the Poli—as they went. They seemed much more convivial than us, considerably less uptight. More genuinely pissed off. More innocent.

  All at once, the metal shutters of the stores along the street began to come down. From the head of the march came shouts and the paff, paff of exploding tear-gas canisters. Seconds later we were surrounded by riot police who, giving no order to disperse, set about beating us, taking advantage of the fact that we were now trapped in the narrowness of Calle Palma. Doors were quickly shut. I clearly remember the blood flowing down the forehead of someone who came up beside me and the shoes lost by people running where there was no space to run as they strove to escape the front line. There was the feeling that you would never get out of this without getting beaten up. As the riot police closed in the crowd grew denser. You heard screams and grunts, and blows to the head delivered without mercy, indeed with hatred. The sense that there was no way out and that the beatings would be endless created panic. One of our ticos started to pull out a pistol, but Santiago and I stopped him: if he fired a shot, we would be massacred for sure. The riot police had guns, not just batons. They pressed in upon us, and more of us fell bleeding to the ground. By good fortune a gap appeared in the barrier of blue. We raced through the breach but fell straight into the clutches of three or four cops in a parking area not far away. I remember Santiago heroically throwing himself upon a policeman who was about to club a vocational-school kid in the head and his rolling over on the ground with the cop clutched tightly in his arms. Then we were running again, through streets in the city center that, as I recall, were unlighted. I remember reaching Preparatory 3 and breaking in on a film-society screening, jumping onto the stage, yelling for lights, and announcing that the riot police had gone mad, that the repressive government of Díaz Ordaz, etc., etc. Feeling so certain that something new was happening. The images that clung obstinately to the retina on their way to the memory. Ending the night together at the house of a friend who had just had a baby son. The news that the Cuba demo had also been put down with gas and clubs. Had they really gone crazy?

  This was not the first time we had been beaten up by the cops. It was one of the Mexican state’s demented customs to give the students a bit of stick every now and again, just to show them who was boss. The year before, police had assaulted Vocational School 7, and the 1965 Vietnam demo had been broken up with batons, wounding fifty people. I was one of them, earning myself a three-inch gash over the left eyebrow, where a plainclothesman slugged me with a metal bar rolled up in a newspaper. In Sonora, too, the year before, the army had been sent in, and all of us had heard stories of what had occurred two years earlier at Morelia University. All the same, this was different: what were they cooking up now?

  In the meantime, we ended that night at a christening, summing up with difficulty the events of the day but happy to find ourselves still in one piece. We showed each other our cuts and bruises. Fear, for now, was gone.

  A Weekend When Everything Began

  Could the government see further than us? Did they anticipate the emergence of a vast student movement, and were they out to strangle it in its infancy? Was one faction of the government using this as a stick with which to beat another in the presidential race? We had, ourselves, spoken of something known as “the Movement.” And we had seen signs that such a thing might exist, but this would be confirmed in our minds only if they—the invisible enemy—believed in it too. The May events in France had made headlines in all the papers, as had the Prague Spring, the student mobilization in Brazil, the occupation of Columbia University in New York, and the Córdoba uprising in Argentina. Did these idiots really think that some sort of international contagion was at work? Could they believe in the virus that we believed in (sort of)? Unlikely. This was Mexico, gentlemen. It would never go that far here.

  The next day we found out from the box and the papers that one of Mexico’s many secret-police agencies
had raided the Communist Party’s headquarters overnight and arrested several Communist student leaders visiting the editorial offices of the party’s daily. A few hours earlier there had been a roundup of foreigners, most of them onlookers picked up on the fringes of demonstrations because they looked like hippie or student types—quite consistent, of course, with the hallowed Mexican political and police custom of rounding up a few aliens as proof of an international plot.

  The ball was rolling—and rolling into the most unlikely places. We still didn’t know what the Movement was, but it was growing. In the student quarter in the center of the city a strange spontaneous mobilization now began: students from the preparatory schools ringed the area, stopping trucks and confronting the riot police, who were eager to bust some more heads. The more politicized IPN schools began the day with assemblies, demanding the abolition of the FNET and the release of those arrested. It was Saturday, and the University was quiet. All weekend long the skirmishing in the city center continued, which must have made the mafiosi in the Palacio Nacional a little antsy: the new Vandals were a bit too close for comfort. Meanwhile, the old commie left met in their boy-scout club rooms to consider sixteen-point agendas on which the new movement probably occupied the third or fourth place, somewhere below the usual threats of expulsion for nonpayment of dues.

  The Shattered Door

  By Monday we were on strike. Initiated in some of the IPN schools, the strike was total and simultaneous within the humanities wing of UNAM—the National Autonomous University of Mexico—in the wake of enormous rallies. And it was effectively total in the preparatory schools in the center of the city, which were surrounded by police. Slowly but surely, it was gaining ground. So close were developments to a text of Trotsky’s that we could barely believe it:It seemed as though the strike had wanted to make a few random experiments, only to abandon them in short order and move on; but that was merely the appearance. In reality the strike was about to unfurl to its fullest extent. . . . The strike takes charge of the situation and, feeling itself to be on firm ground, annuls all decisions taken hitherto in a spirit of moderation. . . . As the number of strikers grows, the strike gains in confidence.

  The various schools met in assemblies, voted to strike, and organized marches within the precincts of the University to bring the strike to other departments. The decisive argument was invariably the appeal to unanimity: if others are on strike, why shouldn’t we be, too? Science was striking, Orthodontics also, Engineering was on board, as was Chemistry.

  At Political Sciences we waited on nobody. We had been on strike for a week already, demanding the release of political prisoners. So far from trying to get in step with the Movement, we felt we were the Movement. Spectators at this hour of truth, we were disconcerted by the idea that our little strike would no longer be the only one: was the role of the vanguard to shine like a beacon in the depths, or wasn’t it? The School of Agriculture joined the stoppage, and the Normal School students backed them up. Skirmishing continued in the city center, with clashes between students and riot police. Rumor and the information brigades that ventured outside the Ciudad Universitaria, the UNAM campus, in search of contacts, told of burning buses and brickbat wars, of policemen stabbed and students savagely clubbed.

  On Tuesday, blinded by their overweening arrogance, the authorities launched the army against Preparatory 1. The school’s entrance, dating to colonial times, was struck by bazooka fire; there was shooting, and hundreds of arrests. A group of students took refuge on the roof as the soldiers, with bayonets fixed, entered the courtyards of their school, where there are murals by Orozco, Revueltas, Siqueiros, and Rivera. For a time everything took on symbolic force. They had blasted the historic doorway of the preparatory to pieces. With bazookas. The famous door. But then we were beyond symbolism, thanks to the photos, which showed blood pooled amid the splintered wood.

  Meanwhile, a program was being drawn up that addressed issues arising from the situation while also incorporating the demands of the most radical sector: free political prisoners, abolish the riot police, dismiss the police chiefs. In the University a council of representatives of the striking departments began meeting. We were now governed by a Stakhanovite inner clock: the mimeograph machines worked overtime. The paper stores of the university press and the department of social services were duly raided; propaganda brigades started collecting money in the street and on city buses. The Movement was being born, and it used the most advanced forms of action learned over the preceding months.

  The press was lying: the door of Preparatory 1 had not been destroyed by bazooka fire but by Molotov cocktails thrown by the students themselves; those clubbed to death had not been clubbed, they had died from eating a tainted cheese sandwich, a torta de queso, hours earlier; the student assemblies were organized by provocateurs . . . We couldn’t have cared less: they lied because that was who they were, and their lies strengthened our convictions. For our part we knew the truth; we got our news by word of mouth. Eyewitness accounts were told and retold: everything had been seen by someone, heard by someone, and was recounted by everybody.

  In the university assemblies a few liberal professors got to their feet, and for the first time we heard the provocation theory, according to which we ought to demobilize because we were the victims of a gigantic provocation: the State was manipulating us. But shit! Those dead were our dead. We were the ones who had been clubbed. The real provocation was the call to demobilize. So—long live the strike!

  We didn’t care about “the beautiful colonial doorway of San Ildefonso.” What we cared about was the blood visible in the photos behind the destroyed door; what we cared about was the disappearance of the bodies. We had plunged head first into the land of the real. Almost a thousand people had been arrested. Who were they? In the first place there were members of the Communist Party, seized in all innocence, and then there were the anonymous (and hence presumably unpoliticized) Poli and preparatory students who had taken the brunt of the first clashes. The future cadres of the Movement were as yet untouched, busy with the organizational tasks of a tidal wave that just kept growing and growing. The more conservative schools joined the strike one after another; the government’s cheering section in the University, the porristas, were routed and isolated; and the PRI vanished from the departments, rubbed out by an immense eraser that obliterated everything. We painted graffiti on the doors of the lecture halls, the fences, the windows, the buses—even the roofs of the school buildings to send a message to the police helicopters.

  It was mindblowing. Bazookas or no bazookas, we learned from the information brigades that the clashes were continuing in the city center. The prime movers were the younger students of the vocational and preparatory schools: the “others,” the ones who a week ago had never read a page of Lenin, and who now, swept into the whirlpool, would not need to. Others—but just like us.

  One brigade of left-wing militants from the Department of Sciences found itself surrounded by a group of vocational students who had learned to pelt the riot police with stones using slingshots, then take refuge in the courtyards of their school. The militants taught the vocational students how to produce fliers and organize propaganda brigades. And the militants in turn learned that even bricks need to be aimed high and that Molotov cocktails should have very short fuses.

  What was going on? For those of us who had got our politics out of books, political reality was a completely new school. All we knew was that there was a Movement and that it had to be defended against those who sought to destroy it with clubs and bazooka fire, and protected from those who wanted to suffocate it with words, slow it down, and halt it. We knew that we had to make it grow, nourish it, and take it beyond itself. The State had come into our lives as the face of evil: the president’s perverse monkey features, so often caricatured, personified it perfectly. The riot police, seen dragging a bloodied student by the hair in a photograph in ¿Por Qué?, were the immediate enemy. All those guys who lied, who kept
us down, who kissed ass, who threatened us—they were the real Mexico. But then we, the new we, made from the many that we had been, decided that, fuck it, we were also the real Mexico.

  Concerning a Reorganization of Life and a Reduction of Sleeping Hours for Want of One’s Usual Bed

  Because it was carpeted, the anteroom to the director’s office became the first dormitory for our striking department. Alejandro Licona opened the door with a karate chop. The laws of 1968 were replacing the laws of the University. We put padlocks on the file cabinets.

  As he was bound to, Alejandro would eventually become an unforgettable character for me. He was ugly and wore the thick glasses of the myopic; tall and scrawny, he was the department’s official and ever-amazing pick-up artist, the one who made out with the summer-school gringas. Which was no doubt why he was sent by the strike committee to tour North American universities and publicize our struggle and collect funds. Every now and then he would call the tapped department phones to recount solidarity meetings in schools with such exotic names as New York or Kansas, Chicago or California. His return to Mexico, halfway through the Movement, was even more spectacular. He was picked up by government agents at the airport carrying a couple of black briefcases stuffed with dollars, the haul from his collecting in the gringo colleges. He was unshaven, red eyed from lack of sleep. They placed him under guard in a private room and spent half an hour threatening him with death. But he escaped from his captors and led them on a wild chase through the corridors of the airport. Eventually he ran into a brigade out on propaganda duty, who bundled him into a car and deposited him with us at Political Sciences. His tale was so incredible that we all believed him.