1968: Lessons Learned

History has issued a definitive verdict on the events of October 2, 1968, in the capital city of Mexico, at least for its horrendous moral significance.

Although we will never know the exact number of those killed on that afternoon in the Plaza of Tlatelolco (a site—it should be remembered—where human sacrifices were performed in pre-Hispanic Mexico) there is no doubt that what happened was mass murder, a useless and unpardonable sacrifice, an act of state terrorism against a student movement that had launched radical demonstrations but never resorted to the politics of violence. The Mexican political system had been widely praised during the early 1960s, as a supposedly "miraculous" mechanism, combining economic growth with a "very light" variety of political authoritarianism based on patronage and a measure of corruption but nevertheless with authentic social roots. The Tlatelolco Massacre revealed the true face of the system and pointed toward the eventual end of the Institutional Revolutionary Party's long-standing one-party rule. A government that murders its civil dissidents is a dictatorship pure and simple. Though the process would unfold across three decades, the government's actions in 1968 were the real beginning of the end for the vaunted "Mexican political system."