"Mexico: Conflict on the Campus"

News article

By: Latin American Newsletters

Date: August 11, 1972

Source: "Mexico: Conflict on the Campus," as published by Intelligence Research.

About the Author: This news report was originally published as part of the Latin American News series from Lettres, U.K. (now Intelligence Research, Ltd.), a London-based news agency. Established in 1967, the Latin American Newsletters were written by Latin American specialists in London, writing about political and social events throughout Latin America as they unfolded. Printed in both English and Spanish, the Latin American Newsletters were a compilation from a variety of sources, without author attribution.

INTRODUCTION

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mexico was rocked by a series of protests by middle-class university students, who joined with labor organizers and a small number of peasants to form a fluid movement that argued for greater democratic reforms in Mexican government. The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) had controlled Mexican politics as the ruling party since 1929. By the mid-1960s, a series of economic problems led to unrest in the populace, especially among the poor, middle-class students, and labor organizers.

As protestors took to the streets in gatherings as large as 500,000 people, the PRI, unaccustomed to such opposition, instituted security crackdowns. The 1968 Summer Olympics were being held in Mexico City, and student protestors sought to use the international exposure to gain attention for their cause. In September, one month before the Olympics, President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz ordered the Mexican Army to occupy Latin America's largest university, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

On October 2, 1968, more than 15,000 students had protested throughout the day. By evening, their numbers had dwindled to 5,000 students and workers, some with spouses and children present. As the protestors gathered in Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlaltelolco section of Mexico City, they chanted "Mexico! Liberty! Mexico! Liberty!"

Security forces, with armored tanks and guns, surrounded the protestors. What happened next remains a source of conflict to this day. Eyewitnesses among the protestors report that at sunset, the security forces began firing on the crowd indiscriminately, killing as many as three hundred protestors. The police claim that armed protestors began firing, and that the police returned fire in self-defense. An official report in 2002 set the death toll at thirty-eight, although some protest groups claim the figure is much higher.

The "massacre at Tlaltelolco" gained international attention. It also led to the PRI's launch of the "Dirty War," with security forces secretly targeting suspected insurgents, university activists, labor organizers, and many political opponents of the PRI. The covert campaign, which lasted roughly from 1971 until 1978, led to accusations from abroad of widespread human rights abuses in Mexico. Throughout the 1970s, other Latin American countries, such as Chile and Argentina, experienced their own "dirty wars" against suspected leftists. Under military dictators such as Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Argentina's Leopoldo Galtieri, tens of thousands of desaparecidos (disappeared) protestors were arrested, imprisoned, and remained missing after the military was granted broad, sweeping powers in an effort to stop all leftist activity.

With the election of Luis Echeverria as Mexican president in 1970, it was thought that a fragile peace might develop between protestors and the government. As this dispatch from Latin American Newsletters shows, by 1972, tension was again on the rise as right-wing paramilitary groups, suspected of having links to the Mexican government, began to fight against leftist protestors.

PRIMARY SOURCE

Tension is growing on university campuses, with right-wing paramilitary groups becoming more aggressive, and left-wing students trying to establish links with peasants and workers.

Mexican university students, who have suffered heavy losses in clashes with the authorities over the past few years, once more seem to be set on a collision course with the powers that be. It is less than four years since several hundred students were gunned down by the army in the "Tlaltelolco massacre" of 1968, and only just over a year since 30 or more were killed by paramilitary bands of thugs during a Corpus Christi day demonstration. It would surprise no one if a similar massacre were to occur again at any moment.

Tension has been rising as a result, more than anything, of the growing aggressiveness of these right-wing terrorist groups, known in general as Las Porras, though sometimes sporting a particular name, such as Los Halcones in Mexico City. The latter are armed, trained for street fighting, and have the use of radio-equipped cars similar to those used by the police. In Puebla, some 65 miles southeast of the capital, these bands are trained by serving army officers, and march through the streets, often carrying Nazi flags. Nobody doubts that they are all linked with one or another government agency, but the mystery is always: which, and by whose authority?

The left-wing militants, on the other hand, have realized that one of the student movement's greatest weaknesses has been its lack of support among workers' and peasants' organizations. This is hardly surprising, since in the first place students are almost all from middle class families, and in the second, workers' and peasants' organizations are strictly controlled by some of the most conservative members of the "establishment." Furthermore most peasants, particularly in the more populous parts of central Mexico, are deeply imbued with the conviction that all left-wingers are communists, and that communists are agents of the devil—thanks to the anti-communist proselytizing action of parish priests.

Although militant students have so far made little headway in obtaining the support of workers and peasants, they have made a start. In Mexico City, students from the National University (UNAM) seized a number of buses and held them in a campus car park as security for compensation which they demanded from the city's bus company, on behalf of the family of a worker run over by a bus. A group of Porras then attacked the faculty of law and history in an apparent attempt to recover the buses, but the attempt failed, although a number of students were wounded. The atmosphere in the university remains highly charged.

In Culiacan, capital of the northwestern state of Sinaloa, two students were killed, many wounded and 200 arrested in demonstrations which followed four months of agitation on the campus. This was a result of attempts by police, with the help of the local Porras, to reinstate the unpopular rector, Armienta Calderon, who had been expelled by the students last April. In the end, the federal minister of education Victor Bravo Ahuja had to intervene with the state authorities to secure the release of the gaoled students, while such normally staid bodies as the local chamber of commerce, the chamber of manufacturing industry and the employers' association protested publicly against police brutality.

But the most inflammatory incident recently took place in Puebla, where the left-wing director of the university's preparatory school, Joel Arriaga Navarro, was gunned down one night at the end of last month as he drove home from a party. The reaction was explosive. Students organized a joint demonstration of protest with railway and electrical workers, employees of the local Volkswagen factory, teachers, and the Confederacion Campesina Independiente (CCI), which Echeverria has been surreptitiously encouraging as a counterbalance to the more conservative, but official, Confederacion Nacional de Campesinos (CNC).

The position of President Echeverria in this growing conflict remains obscure. He is undoubtedly sincere in wanting a "dialogue" with students, and knows this cannot happen without the "democratic opening" he has repeatedly spoken of. Equally, he wants to avoid at all costs the use of the army against students, as at Tlaltelolco. Last year Echeverria and his aides put the word out that the Los Halcones had perpetrated the Corpus Christi day massacre, and indeed were operating as a group, without his authorization or knowledge. It hardly seems likely, however, that this could still be true for all the universities where these terrorist bands are still active 14 months later. Either the President is not strong enough to challenge those in the "establishment" who control these groups, or he does not want to. The growing tension in the universities may soon smoke him out of this ambiguous position.

SIGNIFICANCE

The killings of student protestors in 1968 and 1971 weighed heavily on the minds of political observers, government officials, and students. In response to the leftist protestors, a backlash developed, resulting in the formation of right-wing terrorist groups.

Echeverria's secret "Dirty War" had just been launched, and the right-wing paramilitary groups were a public display of these private activities. While observers noted the mystery of the paramilitary's backers, the assumption of the government's involvement was a given.

In addition, the conflicts involved a wide crosssection of the population, including middle-class students, peasants, right-wing paramilitary groups, parish priests, and labor organizers. As the article notes, the peasants distrusted the left-wingers, believing them to be communists and "agents of the devil—thanks to the anti-communist proselytizing action of parish priests." One of the major sources of protestors' anger was the government's seizure of ejido lands, land collectively held by peasants in the countryside. One reason for the students' failure to bring more peasants into their cause was the priests' involvement; church teachings have a strong role in the daily life of Catholic peasants. The students' inability to reach these peasant groups in a meaningful way, and to communicate their role in trying to fight the land reform, was a crucial failure that led to a lack of support for the protests among the Mexican peasantry.

By 1972, the spotlight was on Echeverria's actions in handling the conflicts between students and right-wing paramilitary groups. Behind the scenes, the PRI and Echeverria conducted the dirty war against protestors and suspected leftists, with Mexico's Federal Security Directorate in charge of operations. The PRI's goal of eliminating the leftist opposition led to widespread human rights abuses and the stripping of legal protections for the accused. In 2000, Vicente Fox's election to the presidency of Mexico ended the PRI's seventy-one-year reign. In 2001, a 2,000-page report on the "Dirty War", written by Mexico's human rights ombudsman, detailed the documented disappearance of 275 detainees during the 1970s and the torture of 523 persons, with as many as thirty-seven different government agencies implicated in the disappearances and human rights abuses. President Fox appointed special prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo to investigate the disappearances and human rights abuses; on June 19, 2005, four former government officials were charged with the 1974 disappearances of six peasants from the Mexican state of Hidalgo.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Preston, Julia, and Samuel Dillon. Opening Mexico: TheMaking of a Democracy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.

Web sites

George Washington University NSA Archives. "Mexico: An Emerging Internal Security Problem?" State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, secret intelligence note. <http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB105/Doc2.pdf> (accessed June 21, 2005).