'68 Read online

  The clearing of the protesters from the Zócalo was not a rout, but a glorious withdrawal in which the armored vehicles pressed forward and the students fell back little by little, conceding ten or fifteen meters, slowing down, waiting until they almost touched the bayonets of the front rank of infantrymen. Things went on like this, block by block, as far as the Paseo de la Reforma, with car horns sounding in the night. And thousands of faces of residents in pajamas and nightdresses disappeared at their windows: witnesses to national history in the making. As the retreat proceeded, the protesters would stop from time to time to hold meetings for the sole benefit of the occasional night stroller. And so we went, street by street, each of us resisting the temptation to turn and run, backing up but never turning our backs on the soldiers, and singing. If heroism was defined by the capacity to stand firm in face of one’s own fear, then . . .

  The government’s justifications for that night’s action initiated a long catalog of cheap lies that still provoked derision years later. We were accused of ringing the cathedral bells, of insulting the national flag, of profaning the gates of the palace. They were lying like crazy. The eagle on the flag, which captures the serpent and accuses it of taking bribes, was smiling at us. We were true Mexicans now; and they, for the first time, even if they did occupy the presidential palace, were less Mexican than we were.

  The next morning a rally of civil-service employees was organized in the Zócalo; the authorities obliged the workers to file out of their offices in strict order. These proceedings did not sit well with the bureaucrats, many of whom began shouting, “We are being carted about like sheep by Díaz Ordaz!” A few student brigades infiltrated the rally, and in the end the army had to be called in again to break things up. For the second time in twenty-four hours armored vehicles rumbled across the flag-stones of Mexico City’s main square. The little tanks buzzed madly through the Zócalo like bumper cars at a fair.

  The streets were beginning to close. Brigadistas were arrested, schools were fired on. Yet the wave of mobilization was not slowing. Groups of workers started showing up at the schools, and workers’ committees for solidarity with the students started to form. The first of these were in the semipublic sector: oil refining, railroads, electricity. There were not many, barely a few hundred. Massive flash rallies were held. Sometimes the police intervened to break them up, more often they arrived too late. City buses could no longer be used by the brigades—the risk of arrest was too great. On the other hand, the number of schools on strike across the country increased as classes began in other states of the Republic.

  On 1 September, in his annual message to the nation, Díaz Ordaz pooh-poohed the Movement’s demands and threatened to use the armed forces. At some point in his speech he apparently mentioned the navy. The next day a Movement leaflet, distributed citywide, petitioned the authorities to keep submarines out of the lake in the Bosque de Chapultepec.

  Topilejo

  Then came Topilejo. An accident in which a bus toppled down an embankment on the road to Cuernavaca and killed a whole lot of locals, it mobilized the small village, whose inhabitants demanded compensation for the injured and for the families of the dead, and the building of a hospital. The accident had enraged the community, and students went out there to organize, to extract restitution from the bus company, and to back up these desperate villagers living by the Cuernavaca exit ramp. The movement thus brought to Topilejo the students’ experience with grassroots democracy, mobilization, brigades, direct action and . . . the commandeering of buses.

  Toño Vera told me the story over and over, convinced that I didn’t believe him. Next to him, nodding vigorously in agreement, was his faithful friend and comrade, a kid from Economics known as “Filemón, the Meek Guerilla.”

  Refinery- and electrical-workers’ committees in solidarity with the Movement were emerging, small groups of a couple of dozen activists. In working-class sections of the city the first underground organizing committees were likewise coming into being. Was it conceivable that the Movement might expand beyond ourselves? Brigades from the more radical schools began searching for more aggressive forms of agitprop. Vans full of activists descended on the General Motors plant, singing and handing out leaflets, entering the inner courtyards in defiance of the security guards. The workers looked at us with a mixture of sympathy and bemusement, reminding me of how people used to look at Mister Ed the Talking Horse on television.

  But still, the propaganda drive in the factories continued to grow. The brigades pressed forward, exploring the industrial areas, finding out what time the factories let out, and identifying those who, judging by the way they accepted a leaflet or stopped to listen to a speaker, might be future allies, possible friends.

  Absolutely No Telephoning

  The government refused to engage in a dialogue on the students’ terms. They wanted nothing to do with a public dialogue, only secret negotiations in which there would be absolutely no loss of governmental prestige and absolutely nothing legal, just the same old trickery, empty talk, and opacity. For our part, crazy as we were, we demanded transparency. The only transparency on offer was the clarity of their repressive measures. The right wing of the Movement sought to retreat; the rector of the University called for a return to classes. This proposal was rejected massively in the assemblies. As each school voted against the proposal to end the strike, its students marched to the esplanade of the Ciudad Universitaria to announce their decision.

  Handbills with a crossed-out telephone and bearing the message “This is not public dialogue” closed the door on the idea of secret negotiations, which we considered a trap. What happened next? The days were long, and many things happened. But liaison was their job now, not ours. Every day the street rallies multiplied, every day the propaganda brigades grew in number.

  With La Quinta in Parque Hundido

  We had set up an underground group with comrades from here and there—just to keep our hand in and not lose our old activist reflexes. We used cigarette brand names for pseudonyms: one guy was Lark, another De Prado, another Camel. Arlette, since she was Paco Quinto’s girlfriend, was called simply “La Quinta.” She was a girl from Tabasco with an arsenal of the crudest insults I had ever heard in those days.

  Arlette and I planned to meet one day in Parque Hundido to pay a visit to a friend of ours, the son of a stationery-store owner, who had offered to help us steal 150,000 sheets of paper from his father’s shop. When I spotted Arlette in the distance I started to shake. The park was full of riot police, at least two companies of the blue bastards, complete with rifles and grenade launchers. Some of them were lying on the grass, killing time; others loafed around on the sidewalk. They made you think of Capone footsoldiers, bored stiff as always from the waiting. The government had posted them here to close off Insurgentes to the north—heaven knew why, because no demos were planned, and anyway the brigades could easily slip through the holes in their net whenever they wanted to. Likewise there could have been brigadistas just two blocks away, holding a rally in Veiga, and those blue apes would have been none the wiser.

  But I wasn’t trembling on account of the riot police, I was trembling because Arlette, the irresponsible idiot, had come dressed in a cute little outfit, a miniskirt and white jacket, and here she was coming along on the same side of the street as the police, happy as anything and eating a mango on a stick. She walked past the first trio of them, provoking remarks that I couldn’t hear from across the street, though I could see rapist written all over the guys’ faces. She walked through a knot of about fifteen of them fiddling with their rifles. Was it just obliviousness, or had she decided to taunt them, to show them, true to some secret pact with herself, that she wasn’t afraid of a bunch of goons? As for me, I could feel my hair turning white from fear. In those days violence would erupt in the most unpredictable ways, and the riot police were on edge, considering the forty-eight-hour stints, days on end without sleep, confrontations with students, and absurd advice from the
ir commanders. Take, for example, the words of one who was overheard telling his men, just before they got out of a truck in front of the Poli: “These are Communists; they want to take the Virgin of Guadalupe away from Mexico.” These footsoldiers were frightened—infected by their superiors, and their superiors by their own superiors. As always, you fear what you know well or what you know nothing about at all.

  La Quinta passed among the riot police without looking at them, or, for all I know, she looked daggers at them, her eyes flashing like cut glass and sending shivers down their spines. I saw her go on for another ten meters before one of the men left the group and came up behind her, grabbing her backside with his free hand—the one that wasn’t clasping his Mauser. Arlette wheeled around and swiped the guy across the face with her mango. The man staggered. I closed my eyes. I could hear nothing from so far away. I counted to ten, then opened my eyes again. Arlette was crossing the street, looking around for me. I didn’t dare raise my arm to greet her. When she got to me, wiping the last traces of mango from her hands with a Kleenex, she said she was sorry for being ten minutes late. We didn’t so much as mention what had happened. Everyone had their own madness back then. And if there was one thing we respected, it was everyone’s own particular madness.

  The Sound of Marching Feet

  We were still fighting, but we had returned to the markers of reality. The euphoria of mid-August had given way to a stubborn resistance that was growing in all of us. The Movement still had many assets to deploy, much strength in reserve. Despite the pressure, the immense activity of the brigades continued: a massive propaganda effort, thousands of walls painted night after night, growing contacts with the population of Mexico City, the slow process of learning a lost language in which we could converse with the rest of the people. Every day more troops were moved within the city. Every day mass action became more difficult, but there were still ways to pull it off: the surprise convergence of different action brigades on a factory or commercial area, flash demonstrations, and the blocking of streets by four brigades acting in unison to create a mass rally. New sectors, or at least their vanguard elements, contacted the Movement: primary-school teachers, general-hospital doctors. A strange kind of warfare pitted the mobilized repressive forces against the operational agility and speed of their opponents. Our losses amounted to fifty or so people arrested per day. More than half were released after being treated to threats, rebukes, and sometimes blows; the rest joined the ever-growing mass of political prisoners, prey to beatings and torture. On the other hand, the enemy was quite unable to prevent the two or three thousand rallies held daily. On 13 September the Movement erupted onto the streets once more in a demonstration that left its mark forever on the wet asphalt of Mexico City’s streets. This was the Great Silent Demonstration.

  I remember the rain, and I remember the faces of the demonstrators, their mouths sealed with insulating tape or bandages to show that the silence was their choice, not one imposed by the enemy. That, whichever way you cut it, our power was beyond words. I confess that I had been utterly opposed to a silent demonstration; the idea had come from the center, which at that time was leading the Movement, and besides, in those years I had no grasp of the power of spectacle. I remember the succession of silent countenances but also the eloquence of the gestures, the V-for-victory sign flashed over and over again, the raised fists outside the United States embassy, and the cheering from the endless wall of support along the route provided by parents, by onlookers, by what at the time was referred to as the people, protecting the flanks of the march for kilometer after kilometer. I remember faces. Unforgettable expressions among the Preparatory 8 contingent. I also remember that I was thoroughly despondent that day, haunted by a broken love affair. I strove to combine my sadness and the silent joy around me into a single feeling. I was sad, but proud to be part of this multitude whose silence was only accentuated by the sound of marching feet. We had taken over the street, a street that led to other places, to points of no return, to the end of the world.

  On 15 September we celebrated by throwing a big party in the Ciudad Universitaria. Paloma reminds me how different the national anthem sounded that night from when we had been made to sing it in primary school. We ate tacos and sopes, we tossed confetti-filled balloons, we danced with fifty-year-old ladies we didn’t know, the mothers of Preparatory 7 comrades, and we drank punch to our heart’s content. Heberto Castillo felt his role as master of ceremonies entitled him to marry a few hotheads, thus anticipating reality by a few months but earning himself more jail time down the line.

  The next day all the schools voted once again on whether to continue the strike; not one voted against it. We kept up the pressure despite the approach of the Olympic Games, but you could sense that the government’s final onslaught was coming soon. A few mimeograph machines were spirited out of the Ciudad Universitaria; our night patrols increased—as did our moments of panic; we organized a replacement coordinating committee designed to take over the control and organization of the brigades in the event of a repressive attack; we began holding some meetings in private houses off campus; we placed Movement archives in secure storage; and in the assemblies (with trembling voices, much nervousness, and not a little naïveté) we discussed our options in the face of repression. We expected the blow, but we did not know how brutal it would be.

  Wherein We Learn That the Tanks Have Arrived

  In memory, we tend to associate individuals with a single moment in the past. In memory, René Cabrera is not the enigmatic anthropologist of today but the first to call for a general strike in Zapotec, while Juan Gabriel Moreno is not an excellent mime but the prodigious driver of a Renault that made it from the IPN’s Santo Tomás campus to the Ciudad Universitaria in thirty-seven minutes. Paco Pérez Arce is not the economist who later wrote a thesis proposing that cows be fed sugarcane so that they would give malted milk (thus foreshadowing the novelist he is today), but the guy who suggested distributing leaflets by means of miniparachutes. And Héctor Gama is not the journalist and photographer we know now but the man who saw the tanks.

  From the roof of the café at Political Sciences, Héctor, better known as “El Chilito,” saw the tanks arrive. To him belongs the small glory of being the first student of Political Sciences to see a tank on the lawn of the University esplanade. From the Philosophy Department, the loudspeakers were transmitting a poem by León Felipe, and we could hear it from where we were. Héctor started shouting, and even though I heard what he said, I did not believe it. I shouted back at him to quit his bullshit, and as he yelled, his face grew red. Then I heard the sound of the motors. We hurtled out onto Avenida Copilco. Romeo stopped to help a sister with a skirt so short she couldn’t decently climb over the fence. Suddenly, from behind him came the sound of a weapon being pumped and loaded. Wordlessly, a soldier was pointing his gun at him. I slipped down the wall and off into the night down Copilco, along with Marco, one of the best Go players in the country. The girl in the miniskirt was an infiltrator; Romeo pulled two years of prison time.

  El Chilito made it out. A few hours later we were in his house in Contreras printing up leaflets. I don’t remember now whether it was then or a year later that the sound of the machine was accompanied by the barking of the dogs on the hill and the cries of his recently born daughter.

  In Which the Virtues of the National Anthem Are Rediscovered

  There were many who couldn’t get out. They were trapped on the esplanade or in classrooms where they had gathered. The army moved through the University with bayonets fixed. Some of the soldiers broke windows with their rifle butts. They wrecked laboratories in Chemistry and projection rooms in Architecture. They hauled down the Mexican flag, which had been at half-mast. They were bringing those arrested to the esplanade and making them kneel down in a big group on the grass, when suddenly this mass of people threatened by rifles began to sing the national anthem: “Mexicanos al grito de guerra . . .” (Mexicans at the cry of battle . . .) Some o
f the students got to their feet and flashed the two-fingered V-for-victory sign. When exactly did the student movement recuperate this most worn-out of symbols? And when exactly did it appropriate that obligatory, rhetorical song, with Bocanegra’s pompous lyrics and Nuñó’s rhythmical air? If the anthem was ours, and it surely was, then who were they? Who were these foreign-born invaders? Years later I wondered what those soldiers must have felt. I knew what we felt, both those who managed to get away and those who were captured: a mixture of fear, rage, and impotence. They had deployed ten thousand troops to arrest six hundred unarmed students. It was the eighteenth of September.

  In the next few days the Movement responded to this extraordinary attack. The National Strike Council continued to meet in Zacatenco, and the brigades continued their actions despite the arrests. Many massive rallies were called, organized by the school assemblies, but most of them were broken up by the police. Vocational 7 was assaulted by the riot police, but the students responded with Molotov cocktails; the Colegio de México was fired upon; and the police shot at various Poli schools in Zacatenco. Magically, brigade activity was kept up. I remember that the brigade committee had installed a portable mimeograph machine in the trunk of a car belonging to the daughter of a Distrito Federal functionary. The car would come to someone’s garage, where stencils and paper had been readied and where flyers would be printed and left for pick-up soon after by a brigade; the car would then set off for another house, where the process would be repeated. We were living under the continual threat of arrest. Coordination with the brigades from Philosophy collapsed when the police busted our contact in Coyoacán—just because of the way he looked.