'68 Read online

  From the slammer, Víctor had put his finger on the new focus of the debate that was taking place in the assemblies, in strike-committee meetings, among brigadistas, and in the National Strike Council. How far was the Movement going to go? Time smoothes out furrows, harmonizes discrepancies, homogenizes everything. Now it almost seems as though we were a bloc of unanimous voices, a unified mass without dissension. But, as Marx’s housekeeper and Lin Piao (who died in a plane crash—in his kitchen!) can testify, we detested one another. No love at all was lost; small wars were legion. In the bosom of the Movement discussion was bitter—often far more violent than it had to be. The Movement had rid itself of infiltrators, and the FNET, the conservative teachers, and the paternalistic school principals had all been sent packing. The vanguard was divided into three distinct tendencies (the differences being far less clear among the broad mass base). In the first place, there was a right wing, headed by the University rector, which could count on the support of a good portion of the administrative staff, which influenced not a few UNAM and IPN teachers, and which sought to confine conflict to student-related and defensive issues. These limits, thankfully soon extended, represented the sane side of the system itself. The original demands of this tendency were a return to normal, autonomy for the University and freedom for university students taken prisoner. The attitude of the State and the turn of events meant that the right wing had the leadership role during the first week after the bazooka attack; thereafter, thanks to its mobilizing efforts and its composition, the National Strike Council took over. The Council and the teachers’ coalition embraced the movement’s other two clear tendencies: a center, represented by UNAM’s Department of Sciences, most schools of the IPN, and several of the preparatories; and a left, represented by the Humanities schools in the Ciudad Universitaria, by Chapingo, by part of the IPN’s Physics-Mathematics and Economics departments, the UNAM Architecture School, and Preparatories 6 and 8. Differences between left and center became manifest over almost any issue: the main rationale for the mobilization of brigades, whether to take Radio UNAM over completely, march routes, or the correct response to the government’s first hints of willingness to negotiate. It is still very hard for me now to analyze the respective positions, for it involves disentangling them from the sectarian fantasies that enveloped them at the time. Underlying the debate was a confrontation between the Communist Youth organization and its most recent dissidents on the one hand and all the groups to its left on the other. The attitude of the center was founded on the idea of pushing for negotiations. We on the left spoke up for a public dialogue, but we did not want any direct dialogue with Díaz Ordaz. They wanted to restrict the Movement to student action and felt the essential thing was to ensure a student victory. On the left we felt that the Movement must be carried beyond the universities and, in accordance with Rico’s message from prison, brought to the people as part of a quest for something further. With the benefit of twenty years’ hindsight, I daresay we were all rational (such an elusive quality) to a degree. Were we crazier than the centrists? Was the revolution, of which we spoke only in whispers, in the realm of the impossible? Could the repression to which the Movement was destined have been obviated by means of negotiating skills?

  In Political Sciences and Chapingo we urged that the brigades go into industrial neighborhoods to get our message out there and, by promoting democracy for all, ensure that demonstrations yet to come would head not for the Zócalo but for Glorieta de Camarones, the center of the industrial park in the north of the Distrito Federal. Sometimes we didn’t just talk about going there—we actually went there.

  But things were more complicated, because the small political groups were not masters of the Movement, nor were they even masters of their own militants, transformed overnight into leaders of a mass movement answerable to its assemblies. I am tempted to forget this part of the story, the part that tells how often I screamed at Pino, now my friend, that he was a reformist prick, which gave him the chance to retort that I was an adventurist jerk.

  And of course this whole debate was inextricably bound up with the necessity of responding to the government day in and day out. What about us? Did we want a victory? We surely did, but we could not define it beyond the six points . . . Meanwhile, much verbal vitriol was exchanged and countless insults covered the walls and filled our leaflets. In the end, though, we all found ourselves in the same trench with bullets really whistling through the air, because in the real Mexico the true “others”—enemies under the command of a malign president—were killing real people.

  Radio Rumor

  If the media’s submission to the power of the government has become a suffocating reality in our modern society, in ’68 it was terrifying. Radio, television, and the printed press voiced a consensus worthy of the most banana-driven of banana republics: they pushed the official version every time, cooking numbers, manipulating content and images, and voicing the opinions of some while denying a voice to others.

  This was the context in which Radio Rumor was born.

  Radio Rumor was a jungle telegraph of untraceable origin that effectively counteracted official sources.

  It was anything but objective, but it was governed by a relative loyalty to the truth: it was partial, prone to exaggerate, alarmist, and sensationalist. And this in the most primary way, because Radio Rumor was uncontrollable.

  The Movement had thousands of street orators, hoardings, and spray-painted buses at its disposal, as well as millions of handbills and countless nightly conversations in which to propagandize family members, girlfriends or boyfriends, or neighbors—this being the outer fringe of activism. From all this emerged Radio Rumor, a territory held by everyone and no one, frequently irrational, quintessentially Mexican.

  The army fired repeatedly on a student brigade at the gates of the Atzcapotzalco refinery, clashes had occurred with the workers, and before long the word on Radio Rumor was that a strike had broken out in the refinery, and cars were already lining up at all the gas stations. . .

  But there were times when Radio Rumor did not exaggerate, when it was quite accurate. For example, the press reported that a student from the UNAM Business School had died after eating a tainted cheese sandwich. Radio Rumor knew that he had died of a concussion after being clubbed by a riot policeman. Radio Rumor was imprecise, vague, it didn’t know the student’s name or age, but on the other hand it conveyed the remarkably precise information that he had been wearing a yellow sweater.

  Radio Rumor might be incoherent, absurd, disjointed, but it was on target when it retaliated and rigorous when it passed judgment.

  The official account claimed that the president had been operated on for a detached retina. Radio Rumor was aware of the cause and, despite official silence on the matter, was able to inform us that it was a twenty-cent piece, thrown by some anonymous avenger amid the confetti of 16 September; it knew, even, that it was a copper twenty-cent piece, and not a five-cent piece, or a peso. Radio Rumor could be dead-on when it wanted to.

  The official account said that those arrested were being held in Military Camp 1. Radio Rumor knew more: it knew that they were being tortured.

  Radio Rumor waged a permanent information war with the Mexican state over statistics; figures were its favorite battle-ground. When the official account was that 6 schools were on strike, Radio Rumor gave the correct figure: 26 ½—the half because at Preparatory 7 the students of the afternoon session had not gone on strike. The newspapers echoed the bulletins of the interior ministry, which said that 70,000 students had gone on strike. Radio Rumor gave the correct figure: 500,000.

  In the absence of reliable information from other sources, Radio Rumor hyped and invented: on the day of the bazooka attack, it dreamed up a coup d’état, despite the objections of those of us who pointed out that a palace coup had been a fait accompli since the beginning of the Díaz Ordaz presidential term.

  Radio Rumor favored items of secondary importance but always showed a k
een sense of drama. At times you felt it must come from the same people who brought us photo-novels. We learned exactly what breed of dog accompanied the riot police and bit students during their eviction from the National Theater School, but we never found out the number of the military unit that mounted the assault with fixed bayonets.

  Only Radio Rumor knew about the killings in Tlatelolco, telling us that the dead had been laid out in a hangar in the military part of the airport, telling us, too, of the flight over the Gulf of Mexico from which the bodies of murdered students were tossed into the sea. Only Radio Rumor counted the victims and gave them names—the beginning of real resistance to forgetfulness.

  When Maricarmen Fernández Grabbed My Ass

  A bus from the Juárez-Loreto route started showing up in the department parking lot. The driver would arrive at seven in the morning, knock on the door of one of the lecture rooms, and ask us to paint slogans on his vehicle, then he would go off on his regular run through the Distrito Federal. Normally, buses would get painted up by brigades all over the city and would proudly broadcast our message until the forces of the enemy, in the shape of the sanitation teams of the Distrito Federal, took them off for un-painting. The Juárez-Loreto driver didn’t want to waste all that time, nor did he care to run the risk of running into a group of brigadistas, so he came early to get his bus painted. That way he could also suggest slogans and take part in the decorating. On the third day of this we decided to enlist him. It was agreed that his story, if we were stopped, would be that we had commandeered his bus. Then we organized the first monster brigade: thirty students with a big pile of red flags, two megaphones, and a guitar began to make incursions into the industrial areas of the city. Once we went into the General Motors plant, to the stupefaction of the police guarding the gates, who didn’t risk stopping us. We filed through the inner courtyards singing, went into the workshops and held flash rallies and handed out fliers even in the manager’s office. But this kind of thing remained an isolated phenomenon, for, truth be told, the Movement was going around in circles.

  But going around in circles at a surprisingly high speed. Our days were twenty-seven hours long, lengthened by pure magic. Sixty-two-minute hours, and minutes that lasted forever. Manuel told me during one of those nights of insomnia that he had driven a van over to Biological Sciences at the IPN to deliver the Gaceta Universitaria (University Gazette), and that in the forty-two minutes he had spent there (after twenty years I still remember that he was there for exactly forty-two minutes—what better evidence of magic could you ask for?), he had fallen in love with eleven girls. And he described them all, one by one: a beauty mark on the neck of one, blue fishnet stockings, a green velvet hair ribbon, a very short lab coat, a pair of legs, two of them, fabulous legs . . .

  I remember that I used to go home to our house in Roma Sur only occasionally, mainly to eat properly and engage in anguished conversations with my father, who fervently supported the Movement but thoroughly expected one day soon to have his son’s corpse delivered to the front door. I would change my socks frantically, wrenching them from my feet, take a bath three times in a single evening, stow a couple of books in my sheepskin jacket, stuff my pockets with sugar lumps, and leave home dying with fright. I would walk as fast as I could to get to Insurgentes and find a truck that would get me closer to the University and my other home, where my fear would vanish once I was among my comrades. You couldn’t reach the Ciudad Universitaria by bus, since public transport was curtailed. Street lighting was also nonexistent for the last couple of kilometers. So you had to rely on the underground railroad of hitched rides, on car-assisted solidarity to get you to the promised land. Arrival was frightening, too, because the University was under surveillance by secret-police patrols out on the prowl. The nights were getting longer now, and the days much shorter.

  I remember Eligio Calderón and Adriana Corona eternally cloistered in the printing room with a couple of well-oiled and efficient mimeograph machines that produced thousands of fliers per hour. There they rediscovered Taylorism and the assembly-line rhythm of a Swiss watch factory. I remember how one day José González Sierra decided to extend a gallon of red paint with a gallon of white (which we didn’t generally use for painting on walls) and ended up with a horrible pink that sparked a mutiny among the brigadistas, who refused to work with such shit. I remember Venadero squinting from lack of sleep as he glossed the first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital for Gloria Astiz. I remember Héctor Gama up on the school roof enjoying the sun and singing Mexican folk songs as he painted a message visible only from the helicopters. I remember my best street rally, opposite the Bank of Mexico: I had climbed up a lamppost and kept my balance thanks to the chaste hand of Maricarmen Fernández, the unchallenged leader of the brigades from Sciences, whose firm grip on my ass was the only thing that keept me from falling. I remember how we led the invasion of the Azcapotzalco market and the interminable applause of the women who sold vegetables there. I remember the day they let us into the streetcar and trolley-bus repair shops, and we painted up about a hundred of them in four hours.

  I could never say it as well as Monsiváis: “Days without sleep, unforgettable dreams.”

  Throwing Corncobs

  August was on the way out. Some high points. There were festivals. There were the challenges issued to parliamentary deputies to take part in a public debate, which the most wimpish of them declined because they were scared to come to the university. The first attempts to get a dialogue started, initiated by the government, were pettifogging proposals for negotiation that were swiftly aborted by the insistence on “public dialogue.” The destruction of the statue of Miguel Alemán and the appearance in its place of a transient mural painted on the side of the metal casket containing his remains. Rallying for the liberation of a policeman who had denounced the corruption of his superiors. The discovery of a hundred or so keys in a strongbox belonging to the administration and our surprise at this, considering that during a month of occupation we had never needed a single key. A memorable sentence found in one of the books I had in my bag, a novel by Thornton Wilder, to the effect that anybody, once having lived, has lived an unbroken succession of unique situations. The rallies in San Juanico, the discovery of poverty-stricken neighborhoods, labyrinths of half-naked children, wasted pet canaries in reed cages, and standing water in the courtyards.

  And, finally, the demonstration of 27 August, which started out from the Museum of Anthropology, filling the streets with the half-million that we were. It no longer mattered if the Movement was defeated, if they killed us all, and scattered our ashes across the Gulf of Mexico; this moment, now, was forever.

  When the torches began to be lit that day in Mexico City’s main square, the Zócalo, we still did not know how to weep. Unhappily for us, our delusions of victory were far too strong. The proposals approved at the last rally, namely, that students mount a permanent guard at the Zócalo and that there be a public dialogue on the day of the president’s yearly speech to the nation, were a reflection (as justified as they were) of our inflated idea of our power. We were demanding unconditional surrender from the Mexican state. When the rally was over, a subdemonstration of three or four thousand people set off toward the “Black Palace” of Lecumberri, the jail where the political prisoners were held. We approached the prison and marched around it with torches flaring, yelling out to the prisoners inside, “We’re going to get you out!” The jail was in darkness; we could see only the silhouettes of policemen high on the towers with their guns outlined against the sky. Someone hurled an old corncob at one of the guards, and he stepped back out of sight. Oddly enough, it never occurred to us to storm the jail. Many years later someone told me that our shouts were clearly heard in the cells.

  Memo to Amnesiacs on How to Dent the Armor of a Tank with a Metal Pipe

  Hours later that night the government counterattacked. Armored vehicles emerged from the gates of the National Palace, and soldiers with bayonets fixed advance
d upon the three thousand students who had stayed to guard the Zócalo. Heroism at that time was closely akin to madness, as witness David Cortés, “El Ruso,” who picked up a piece of metal pipe from the ground and went to meet one of the approaching light tanks. He was soon face to face with the fucking thing, which kept on roaring toward him. The soldier on top, manning a machine gun, and David locked eyes in a staring match. Suddenly, David leaped forward and began raining blows with his pipe on the tank’s carapace, as though he really thought he could dent it. The tank came to a halt. We got our guy out of there, we had to drag him away, and the soldier never took his eyes off him for a second. Naturally, David lost all memory of this crazy moment. He asked us to tell him what happened, laughing sardonically. “Do I look like an idiot to you?” he wanted to know. “The kind of guy that would do shit like that?”