Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America

3. The Mexican Student Movement of 1968: National Protest Movements in International and Transnational Contexts

7 4 National Protest Movements in International and Transnational Contexts Sara Katherine Sanders Viewed from the perspective of other developing nations, Mexico’s 1968 student movement emerged from an era of stability at home and instability elsewhere in Latin America. The 1968 Summer Olympics bestowed international legitimacy on the Mexican state; by contrast, turmoil defined other parts of the Americas. The first Games hosted in a Latin American or Spanish-speaking country, the event was supposed to signal a reinvigoration of the “Mexican miracle,” a period of high growth beginning in the 1940s that made Mexico’s economy almost self-sufficient. Instead, the opening of the Games was abruptly disrupted by waves of lethal government-ordered violence against protesters assembled in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas—the Tlatelolco massacre—which revealed to the world that Mexico City, too, had been swept up in the same patterns of dissent and repression that were appearing in major urban centers on multiple continents. The “Spirit of Sixty-Eight” had arrived in Mexico, and, with it, the specter The Mexican Student Movement of 1968 3 T h e M e x i c a n S t u d e n t M o v e m e n t o f 1 9 6 8 7 5 of state repression. How the protests started and their relationship to those broader trends in global dissident politics are issues that form the subject of this chapter. Viewed closely and with hindsight, we can now see that, by the time of the 1968 Summer Games, Mexico had already traveled an increasingly ominous path with respect to its prospects for political and social stability. The postwar era, which soon became the Cold War era, started smoothly enough. Mexico’s strong security ties to the United States, formalized by the 1947 InterAmerican Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, pledged its leaders to an openly anticommunist stance following the 1948 International Conference of American States, which resulted in the formation of the Organization of American States (OAS). This period of international calm was to be short lived. Following the June 25, 1950, outbreak of Cold War hostilities on the Korean peninsula, geopolitical conflict came to Mexico’s doorstep in 1954 with the U.S.-led overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz’s democratically elected government in Guatemala. Later, in the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, U.S. attempts to consolidate control over Latin America intensified. With this intensification, however, also came a surge in student protests within Mexico targeting the state, U.S. business, and imperialism. The focus of student concern was national sovereignty—an issue that would come to define the movement in the moments leading up to, during, and after “Sixty-Eight.” As described in this chapter’s account of student political concerns during the Sixty-Eight movement, subsequent events of a broadly international character and significance reinforced a sense among Mexican students that change in their own political system was not only possible but likely. The death of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, killed by U.S.-trained Bolivian soldiers on October 9, 1967, was followed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. (April 4, 1968) and Robert F. Kennedy (June 6, 1968).These momentous political events, coupled with reports of guerrilla violence in Chiapas, dominated the international news media and further sustained student perceptions that a breakdown in the status quo might be imminent. In fact, some students and citizen political dissidents hoped to effect or precipitate that very breakdown through direct political action. The mix of national and international precedent that they cited in defense of their confrontation with state authority—described in detail in this chapter—suggest that they thus believed themselves to be taking part in a worldwide struggle against a moribund and vulnerable political order and that their actions were linked to those of a broader, global dissident community beyond Mexico’s borders.1 As the movement that became SixtyEight gained momentum, students exchanged letters with and released press statements directed at other members of this global and radicalized student 7 6 S a r a K a t h e r i n e S a n d e r s community. In some cases, they crossed international borders to make these connections in person.2 This heady brew of national concerns, coupled with international points of contact and even emulation, is difficult for contemporary historians to untangle . For many Mexican...