New Worlds for the Deaf: the story of the pioneering Lakeside School for the Deaf in rural Mexico by Gwen Chan Burton (Sombrero Books, 2020)

In 1982, Gwen Chan Burton, who had previously taught in government secondary schools in Australia and Canada for 12 years, was faced with a big career decision.

Burton (whose name at the time was still Chan but that would become part of her adventure as well) had recently been certified as a teacher for the deaf and hard of hearing. She could either continue to teach in Canada, albeit in her new specialty, or move to Jocotepec, a small village in the Mexican state of Jalisco where several years earlier two retired Canadian women— Jackie Hartley and Roma Jones—had started a small school for children who couldn’t hear. The impetus for the school came about after meeting a young deaf boy in the plaza of the town where they were living.

It was quite an undertaking, particularly considering that Hartley and Jones had never taught deaf students and spoke little Spanish. Add to that, they had no building to house their school nor did they have the money to fund it.

For Hartley and Jones these were just mere details and within 15 years their Lakeside School for the Deaf, which started off with classes in an upgraded chicken coop, would become an internationally acclaimed success. The term Lakeside is the term used by local English-speaking expats and tourists to refer to the general area along the north shore of Lake Chapala where thousands of expats live; Lakeside stretches from the city of Chapala, through Ajijic to Jocotepec at the western end of the lake.

But when Hartley and Jones recruited Burton and another Canadian teacher of the deaf named Susan van Gurp, it was still very early days indeed: a project that promised hard work in an unknown environment for barely subsistence pay.

“As a student at Melbourne University in the late 1960s, I had dreamed of volunteering as an English teacher in the wilds of Papua New Guinea, then administered by Australia,” says Burton.  “However, after I learned that the government required three years teaching experience before applying–I ended up in Toronto instead of PNG. I guess Jackie Hartley’s offer re-awoke my dream of volunteer teaching and since I was single and debt free, my main concern was how to learn basic Spanish in the three months before we flew south.”

Within a few years, Burton would become the school’s director, a position she held from 1985-1994. The school’s enrollment grew as did the number of teachers, resulting in scores of disadvantaged deaf children and youths finding life-changing communication, free education and friendship at the Lakeside School.

Burton, who now lives on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, recounts the story of what is now The School for Special Children (CAM Gallaudet, Special Education Centre) in her awe-inspiring book, New Worlds for the Deaf – The story of the pioneering Lakeside School for the Deaf in rural Mexico (Sombrero Books 2019).

“The book describes the school’s much loved teachers, first Canadian then Mexican, who opened new worlds for those atypical students, with specialized teaching methods and amazing special events,” says Burton. “Also described is the school’s unique home-based boarding program that allowed many children from distant villages to attend classes.”

In between all her work, Burton met geographer Tony Burton at an Octoberfest celebration in Guadalajara. After the couple married and had children, life became even more hectic especially when Tony was away leading field studies courses and eco-tours around the country.

“Thankfully a wonderful Mexican grandmother was willing to care for our children whenever needed and from her they learned the local customs, the Spanish language and a love of Mexican food,” says Burton. “She was also a generous boarding mother for two adolescent deaf brothers from a distant rancho for several years.”

One of the main challenges faced by Burton was juggling her time: the time needed to make new ear molds for students using the classroom FM amplification systems, the time needed to attend a morning meeting of the school board 20 kilometers away, or the time needed to show English-speaking visitors and former teachers around the classrooms and answer all their questions. Many challenges were unexpected; these included the sudden unannounced arrival of new students, sometimes impoverished and in clear need of immediate care and accommodation.

But the rewards were many, such as seeing the positive changes in new students as they learned to communicate using Mexican sign language and were able to ask questions and understand the answers for the first time in their lives; then seeing their enthusiasm and their parents’ pride as they learned to write their own name, and later began to read.

Asked to share a story from the book about one of the school’s students, Burton takes time to think—there were so many—before deciding to talk about Juan Luis who, after being abandoned by his mother, was sent out to beg in Guadalajara by his next caregiver.

“He was rescued by an aunt who sent him with a truck driver to the home of Rita, one of our staff,” recalls Burton. “The young boy, profoundly deaf, was called Carlos by the truck driver and spent his first week at school as Carlos. When his aunt visited Rita the next weekend we found out his real name, and the following Monday at school we needed to erase Carlos from his workbooks, and create a different sign name, because he was actually Juan Luis, nearly nine years old, bright and personable but unschooled and unable to recognize or express his own name… or count to nine.”

For those deciding on such an adventure, Burton offers the follow advice:

“Go, with an open mind and positive attitude about the people and customs you will encounter,” she says. “Preferably have a good friend with you at least for a long settling-in period, unless you are joining a well-established group of like-minded people. Be able to carry on a basic conversation in the local language and learn whatever you can about your host nation before you arrive. But definitely go if you feel you have skills, knowledge or a harmonizing philosophy to contribute, and accept that it will undoubtedly be a pivotal experience in your life.”

Editor’s note: In the 1980s, The Lakeside School was the only school for the deaf located outside Mexico’s largest cities with a unique home-based boarding program for rural students. A talented Mexican staff taught using sign language, amplified speech and out-of-class learning experiences. The school was in the vanguard of education for the deaf in Mexico.

The book celebrates how the local expatriate and Mexican communities helped fund the school, and how international support enabled the school to grow and flourish. It also includes anecdotes about the traditions and culture of rural Mexico that remain true today, and the engaging, sometimes unbelievable, background stories of individual students, and how the school opened their eyes to new worlds.

New Worlds for the Deaf: the story of the pioneering Lakeside School for the Deaf in rural Mexico by Gwen Chan Burton (Sombrero Books, 2020) is available at select stores in Ajijic and via Amazon.

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Roosters crowing, church bells clanging, dogs barking, street vendors broadcasting their products, brass bands serenading wedding parties in the streets… the soundtrack to life in Mexico is not the reality for every Mexican. In Mexico the most prevalent disability is deafness. Three out of every 1000 babies are born with some degree of hearing loss. These numbers increase to six in 1000 because people acquire it after birth, owing to diverse causes such as heredity, illness, accidents, and certain medicines. The families of many deaf and hard-of-hearing children cannot afford even the most modest treatment/rehabilitation interventions. Deafness poses significant challenges. 

Fortunately for families facing these challenges in Oaxaca, there is a place to turn. The Centro Oaxaqueño de Rehabilitación de Audición y Lenguaje (the Oaxacan Centre for the Rehabilitation of Hearing and Speech), or CORAL, has been around for more than thirty years. It’s a full-service hearing clinic and education center, providing testing, therapy, clinical services, advocacy, family support, education and hearing aids to some of the poorest families in the state of Oaxaca. It is the only resource of its kind in all of southern Mexico.CORAL currently serves more than 3000 people with hearing loss and their families annually.

At CORAL, hearing and language therapy programs are offered for children up to 12 years of age. All therapy sessions are held in the company of the child’s mom or dad, so that parents can learn communication tools with their child. The Total Communication Method includes LSM (Mexican Sign Language) classes, each lasting 45 minutes. Children aged 3-5 attend CORAL’s preschool program (3 hours a day, 5 days a week), in which therapists help the children develop language, cognition and motor skills.

The story of CORAL goes back to 1987, when an Oregon couple, Drs. Richard Carroll and Nancy Press, began to spend months at a time away from their medical practice in the US, visiting indigenous and mestizo communities with the social worker, Silvia Torres Zurita. In their travels they witnessed the shortage of services for children with hearing loss in Oaxaca. They began sending hearing aids to the newly created team of Silvia Torres and an audiologist, which later became a full-service audiological health care program. While there was perhaps only one audiologist in the entire State of Oaxaca when the doctors began, there is now a team of professionals to identify the hearing impaired, and provide aid.

As with so many organizations, CORAL has seen the impact of the global pandemic. In March, CORAL was forced to close its facility. They adapted quickly to providing services online by Facebook, email, telephone or WhatsApp.

This important work is funded through a variety of sources. Some Canadians donate to the Speech and Signing Therapy Project of CANFRO, Canadian Friends of Oaxaca. CANFRO engages the services of trained speech and sign language therapists to offer programs for hearing-impaired children and their parents at CORAL. In addition to treatment for the children, CANFRO hopes to be able to employ the part-time services of a psychologist-counselor who can help the parents understand and support the emotional needs of their deaf-hard of hearing children. Donations made by Canadians through CANFRO receive a Canadian income tax receipt, meaning their generosity can go even further thanks to the tax savings.

Additionally, donations directly to CORAL though its website help support screening tests, language therapy, and hearing aids. Other partners and sponsors include foundations in Europe, the US, and Mexico. Thanks to contributions from individuals and foundations, CORAL can focus on its mission to “seek a world without barriers, a place where hearing loss is not an impediment for people to develop their full potential and to incorporate into the social, educational and emotional life to which all human beings are entitled.”

Want to help?

• Visit the CORAL website.
• CANFRO (Tax receipt for Canadian donors)

Author Wendy Robbins is a former radio producer whose retirement has been enlivened by visits to Mexico and volunteer work with CANFRO.

[Editor’s note: A heartwarming book published in 2020 by Gwen Burton — New Worlds for the Deaf: the story of the pioneering Lakeside School for the Deaf in rural Mexico — tells the story of a similar project to help deaf children in western Mexico.]

Text © Copyright 2021 by Wendy Robbins. All rights reserved.

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Amid the reconstructed pyramids of Monte Alban, a pageant is performed commemorating ancient legends of how the sun and the moon and the Earth were born, and were set free to roam the heavens. Designed with help from the Dragon Theater of Maine, and performed by local singers, dancers and musicians, “Sol y Luna” will, hopefully, become an annual event.

“Curar”: to cure; thus Curandera(o): one who cures. Curanderas are “white witches”: practitioners of a medical system older than Hippocrates and as new as megavitamins and herbal teas sold at Safeway or Cub Foods. Many Mexicans (and others) believe that curanderas are at least as good as medical doctors, and it is not unusual for someone to consult both.

Last month, a new friend E-mailed me from the States, looking for a curandera. My friend, who suffers from a chronic, painful, but not fatal ailment, works as a health care provider. Because of her own combination of fear (am I going to be in the hands of a charlatan, or a “black” witch?) and skepticism (how can this be real?), she wanted to interview her practitioner before turning herself over for treatment. Her search piqued my interest, and I agreed to help.

Before you can use a curandera, you have to find her. Curanderas don’t hang out their shingle, especially not in a Catholic country, where claiming to have “powers” comes fairly close to heresy. Nonetheless, they are not hard to find. I asked my friend Yolanda, a bilingual Mixtec woman from a nearby village, to find me a curandera of high reputation. She immediately came up with three, in her village alone.

Her first choice was an “anciana” (old one); a woman with so extensive a reputation that people come to her from as far away as San Francisco, California. Her office hours are from noon until eight at night, and no-one may join the queue after 4 pm. Her business is so brisk that her husband acts as her business manager, controlling all aspects of her practice outside the consultorio. Although it had been set up for weeks, hubby decided at the last minute that while a treatment would be ok, an interview would not.

Second choice was a woman who had been practicing for “only” forty years, with a reputation that at this point extends only to Mexico City. She has no office hours, treating people as they come to her. Her husband is a farmer and leaves her business to her. It was to their house that Yolanda led us one February morning.

“Maria” (not her name) lives with her husband and children in a cement and adobe structure, on a side street in a small village not far from Oaxaca. The street is barely graded, and unpaved. There are at least eight dogs playing in the yard, along with three children. The consultorio is at the far end of a row of rooms along one side of the structure. When we arrive, the room is full of smoke from burning incense. One wall is decorated from floor to ceiling with images from the Catholic religion, tending toward illustrations of the Virgin Mary and the bleeding heart of Jesus. On the table (altar?) set against this wall are figurines and reliquaries. Some appear to represent deities more ancient than those brought by the Spanish. There is a table and two chairs for patient and curandera, and a bench for guests.

Maria is in her forties, plump, sparkle-eyed, relaxed. Like almost all village people I have encountered, she is open, generous and without guile. She answers our questions like she has done this thousands of times, yet she probably has never been interviewed before. She tells us she manifested her gift from earliest childhood, when her mother saw “a light” in her bedroom, which no-one else in the family could see (her great grandmother was said to have the gift, her grandmother not at all, and her mother only this small insight). She does not remember when she performed her first healing, but her mother told her she was around 6 years old. Her father disapproved of her gift, and warned her that people would think she was crazy and would be afraid of her. She understands now that he was just expressing his own fears, which ended when she cured him of cancer last year.

As we interview Maria, I keep an eye on my friend. Her body language is changing: from sitting back with her legs together and her hands folded in her lap, she is leaning forward, arms open, barely perched on the bench. There is a yearning in her eyes. She is ready to be cleansed. If it wasn’t for my own curiosity, the interview would have been terminated much sooner (more of Maria’s story another time).

My friend asks Maria if she will cleanse her (“limpia”, a cleaning, is the traditional word for the healing process, the theory being that sickness comes from a “bad wind” that enters the body and must be cleaned out). Maria agrees and asks me and Yolanda to leave. We go out to the courtyard, where Maria’s husband is shucking corn for tortillas, and chat about the weather.

About twenty minutes later, my friend emerges. She tells us that “something” took place which she can’t explain, but it left her feeling “giddy”. She is to return the next day. Yolanda agrees to accompany her. We part company, each to his or her own concerns. Through happenstance and error, my friend does not return to complete her treatments. I am allowed, therefore, to retire from the experience with my skepticism intact.

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Tony Burton’s Mexican Kaleidoscope is a whirlwind trip through some of the underpinnings of Mexican culture, told with humour, affection and well-documented facts. This readable compendium of little known stories made me want to revisit many places I’d already seen. How much richer my experiences would have been had I been able to take this user-friendly and easily carried tome of gems with me when I was in Mexico.

Obtain your copy on Amazon!

Mexican Kaleidoscope is divided into five sections:  Before the Spaniards, Spanish rule, Independent Mexico, People and society, Culture and beliefs. Each section contains six enlightening essays given over to a special topic pertaining to that category. The headings may sound like heavy reading, but don’t be fooled. If history books were written with the light touch Burton gives to each chapter, more students would opt for a major in history. He is a consummate story teller and concise distiller of information, getting to the heart of a story in three succinct pages. One can open the book anywhere and have a satisfying read. I treated the book as a box of truffles where I could pick and choose at will whatever pleasure suited me, knowing the whole box was too good to leave even a crumb behind.

The book left me hungry for more. There are a number of places I’d like to revisit after reading Mexican Kaleidoscope.  My travels with back story from Burton’s book would have made many of the places I had been to so much richer than they were when I was there. A few of the chapters made me regret places I hadn’t been to, and it stimulated my desire to return to Mexico to visit those areas I had overlooked.

Burton’s benign affection for Mexico brought back warm memories. In one of his chapters he writes about the birth of the Mexican railroad. Before reading Burton’s book, I hadn’t given much thought to the often stately railway stations that varied so much in style from place to place, and have since morphed into other uses or have been abandoned altogether. But I will never again be able to walk past one of these buildings without thinking of the rich history that they hold. The section brought to mind a train ride I had taken from Mexico City to the Yucatan in the mid-sixties. The journey was so rich in sensory experiences that the memory is still vivid. I remember the locals at every station plying their food and wares through the open train windows. The dining tables with their pristine white table cloths in the elegant dining cars made me think of art deco European cafés. But mostly, it was the terrain the track passed through that captured my imagination and fed the senses.

It’s a loss that the train ride to the Yucatan no longer exists, though the history of its recent transformation interests me. Burton writes that Jalisco is reconstituting 75 miles of former rail routes as Green Route Trails for hikers and cyclists. The tracks of the Mexico railroad were built through beautiful country, places that the highways haven’t been able to duplicate, so I imagine these newly opened trails will pass through much of Mexico’s natural beauty.

If I had the stamina of my youth, I’d be eager to hike along those trails, remembering how the vegetation grew wild along the tracks, reminding me that Mother Earth still had the upper hand in Mexico. It’s sad that the railroad has lost out to the airplane – so much lost to the senses. Behind the exotic train ride that I had taken are fascinating stories intertwined with the history of the country, and they make for good reading in Mexican Kaleidoscope. Had I read Burton’s book 50 years ago, I would have gotten so much more out of the journey I took.

Mexican Kaleidoscope not only tackles historical events in a unique and refreshing way, it also brings in fascinating and colourful characters that have left an indelible imprint on the culture. For instance, the cross dressing maid Conchita Dorado who gave an appropriate meaning to the concept of alternative reality long before Donald Trump picked up the torch, though in the case of Cohchita, there was subtle wit and an owning up of dastardly deeds to dull whatever damage she might have done.

Another fascinating character was Eulogio Gregario Clemente Gillow y Zavalaza, the first Archbishop of Antequera, so different from Conchita Dorado, but just as individualistic in his ability to shift perception. These personalities as well as the Mexican violinist Julian Carillo who changed our perception of musical notation, and the painter known as Dr. Atl, who did the same for art, are given their due in Burton’s book. They are so representative of the out-of-the-box thinking that has always defined the Mexican people and the creativity inherent in the culture.

Though Burton’s book is filled with fascinating tidbits of history, I liked the fact he also touched on current concerns, especially where it affects the Tarahumara and Huichol people. The Huichol, a tightly-knit community held together by their strong spiritual beliefs and cultural isolation, are at risk of losing their rich heritage through integration with the outside world. Their creative work, an integral part of their spiritual world, has undergone commercial deterioration due to its popularity with tourists. I’m fortunate to have several works of art done by the Huichol from a time when the culture’s creative output was less commercially driven. They are powerful and uplifting, and I never tire of them. I appreciated Burton mentioning where authentic pieces are available for purchase, and encourage people to pay the asking price so that the work can maintain its integrity. As for the Tarahumara, it’s heartening to know their voices are finally being heard in the Mexican courts, though the fight for their rights has been ongoing for a long time and still has a ways to go.

On a lighter note, a perusal of Burton’s book will enlighten you on the number of lives of a Mexican cat and give you insight into the country’s whistling tradition as well as a slew of expressions that have no equivalent in another language. I was especially intrigued to learn that one of the world’s best known popular songs, translated into 20 languages, was written by a Mexican woman, Consuelo Velasquez, long before women’s liberation.

I also enjoyed reading about Mexico’s early cross pollination with the black and Filipino population. I had wondered about the origin of certain words as well as certain food stuffs, but now have a better perspective of the cultural evolution of the country. There are also hints that Romans may have had contact with the country long before the coming of the Spaniards, and they too, have left their footprint, or more literally their imprint as seen on the bricks of Comalcalco’s pyramids in the coastal plain of Tabasco. The Mexicans have taken the best of many countries and incorporated them into their culture, and have still managed to keep the flavour of their indigenous roots.

Last but not least, I want to offer a word of appreciation for the drawings by Enrique Velazquez scattered throughout the book. I’m already familiar with his work and still have a reproduction of a watercolour painting he did of my home in Ajijic many years ago. I arrived too late to buy the original, the piece having been purchased on the spot by someone renting my house when I was in Canada. I still regret its loss. Seeing the work of Enrique Velazquez in Tony Burton’s book brought back some good memories of the years I had spent in Mexico. He was an excellent choice for the artwork in Mexican Kaleidoscope.

Tony Burton’s book is a celebration of Mexico. It’s written with a genuine love and appreciation of the country, making it a delightful treasure for anyone who has fallen under the spell of its rugged mountains, vast deserts, lush jungles and cultural diversity. Aside from what it has offered me as a sentimental journey into a culture where I’ve spent a good deal of my life, it is a keepsake for my next trip to the country. Mexican Kaleidoscope is an easy to carry travel guide to both known and lesser known places. Unlike travel books that are mainly an overview of “how to navigate” this is a book of “how to appreciate.”

•   Buy your copy from Amazon!

Published or Updated on: April 11, 2020 by Rita Pomade © 2017

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Did You Know…?

Did You Know? More than 190 countries, including Mexico, have now signed up to the UN Millennium Development Goals, originally agreed in the year 2000.

There are eight key goals (see table) and Mexico is well on its way to meet most of them. Specific targets that Mexico has not yet reached include an increase in the proportion of GDP that corresponds to the poorest 20% of the population (goal 1); an increase in the number of women in government (goal 3); a further decrease in maternal mortality (goal 5); an increase in forested area (goal 7) and an improved employment rate for young people aged 15–24 (goal 8).

There are many possible indicators of quality of life. One measure commonly used is life expectancy at birth. How long do Mexicans live? The 20th century brought dramatic increases in longevity. Average life expectancy rose from under 30 years at the beginning of the 20th century to 38 by 1930. From there it went up to 50 by 1950 and reached 62 by 1970. By 2000 it was 72, almost double the 1930 value. Women live longer than men. Today, life expectancy for Mexican women is about 77; that for men is roughly 71 years. In the future, Mexican longevity is expected to increase at about 2.5 years per decade. This is not as rapid as in the past, but still a significant rate of increase.

It is much harder to find a reliable indicator of a population’s overall health. The most common indicator is infant mortality, the percentage of babies born who die before their first birthday. In respect to this indicator, Mexico has made impressive progress: its infant mortality rate dropped from 7.5% in 1970 to 2.0% by 2005. More improvements are expected in the years ahead.

These indicators suggest that Mexicans are living longer and healthier lives than they did in past decades. How does Mexico compare to other major countries? Though Mexico trails Canada, the USA, and Argentina, it is slightly ahead of Brazil, China, and the weighted average for Latin America. Mexico is significantly ahead of Russia, the world average, and its southern neighbor Guatemala.

The Millennium goals give us a useful framework for assessing improvements in several key aspects of development but they don’t tell the whole story.

For instance, the first UN development goal concerning poverty and hunger clearly involves programmes to counter malnutrition, or more accurately to counter under-nutrition. While malnutrition is commonly associated principally with people not getting enough to eat, potentially resulting in them suffering from vitamin-deficiency diseases and facing an increased risk of starvation, the concept of malnutrition also includes, at the other end of the spectrum, over-nutrition and issues related to obesity.

So, just how prevalent is malnutrition in Mexico? A National Nutrition Survey in 1999 of 23,000 households found that the type and incidence of malnutrition in Mexico had changed dramatically in a single generation. Rates of under-nutrition (insufficient intake of calories and/or vitamins for good health) have declined. This has helped Mexico meet one of the key UN targets — that of a 50% reduction between 1990 and 2015 in the proportion of children suffering from hunger (under-nutrition) with several years to spare. Other figures support Mexico’s progress in reducing undernutrition. Severe undernourishment (as defined by the World Health Organization) among children fell from 6% in 1988 to 2% in 1999.[ii] The proportion of children under 5 years of age identified as underweight has been reduced from 14% in 1988 to 5% in 2006.[iii]

However, the 1999 National Nutrition Survey simultaneously revealed that rates of overweight and obesity, differing degrees of over-nutrition defined by an individual’s body mass index (a measure of weight adjusted for height) had soared. The percentage of women considered obese rose 160% between 1988 and 1999. In 1999, 59% of women and 55% of men were either overweight or obese; by 2008, the figures were 64% and 60% respectively. Only the USA has higher rates of obesity. If trends persist, Mexican health officials believe that Mexico could actually overtake the USA in obesity rate within a decade. Equally alarmingly, the rate of childhood obesity in Mexico is also increasing rapidly. A 2002 study found that 30% of elementary school children in Mexico City and 45% of adolescents were either overweight or obese.

This increase in over-nutrition has led to rapid rises in diet-related chronic diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The overall effects of diseases on a country’s population can be assessed by working out the disability-adjusted life years (DALY), the years of expected life lost through disease or premature death. In Mexico, the DALY lost to diseases normally thought to be more typical of the developed world — such as diabetes, heart attacks and strokes — is estimated to be three times greater than the DALY stemming from childhood and maternal under-nutrition.[iv]

Mexico has passed rapidly through a “nutrition transition”. The traditional Mexican diet was based on corn and beans, supplemented by fruits and vegetables, with relatively little meat and dairy products. Over a 15-year period, the average Mexican ate 29% less fruits and vegetables and 6% more carbohydrates, while consuming 37% more soft drinks. In fact, Mexicans enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world’s second greatest consumers of soft drinks (after USA), downing 150 liters a year on average. White bread is replacing tortillas, fast food is replacing home cooking.

This nutrition transition, together with a more sedentary lifestyle, has fuelled a “disease transition”, characterized by a shift from high mortality due to infectious diseases to high mortality from non-communicable chronic diseases. Mexico has the highest rate of diabetes in the world, more than 11%.[v] The total number with diabetes has risen seven fold since 1990. Diabetes is now the leading cause of death, and costs the country more than $300 million annually, one-third of the total public health care budget.

Sources

• [i] www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/hea.
• [ii] Lloyd Mexican Economic Report, August 2000.
• [iii] Gabinete de Desarrollo Humano y Social / Comisión Intersecretarial de Desarrollo Social. 2006. Los Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio en México: Informe de Avance 2006.
• [iv] Jacoby, E. R. 2004. PAHO regional consultation of the Americas on diet, physical activity and health. Food and Nutrition Bulletin 25 (2): 172-174
• [v] Elisabeth Malkin. Mexico Confronts Sudden Surge in Obesity, New York Times, 29 June 2005.

This article is based on a chapter in a forthcoming book about the geography of Mexico jointly written by Dr. Richard Rhoda and Tony Burton.

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Charitable foundations
—both in Mexico and worldwide
—need to lay their groundwork on the Web

It’s a curious thing. While many foundations provide some information over the Internet, few take full advantage of the Web. Most give only a “just the facts” introduction to their operations. The absence of online grant applications and the inclusion of obsolete calendars and news sections describe the worst of the lot. When documents are provided, some sites deliver them only in PDF format instead of giving readers an option of seeing it on the Web in HTML.

Luckily, some foundations are learning that providing the answers to questions online reduces the number of phone calls and mail queries. By showing what they do—and who they fund—they can develop more sophisticated relations with their donors in a public forum. This promotes not only transparency, but accountability as well.

Ashoka

www.ashoka.org/

Ashoka is a foundation that makes good use of the Web. For example, making news on the front page in January was Mexico’s Ashoka Fellow Martha Isabel Ruiz Corzo ( www.ashoka.org/viewprofile1.cfm?PersonId=1052) whose Sierra Gorda Ecological Group secured US$7 million from the United Nations/World Bank Global Environmental Facility (GEF). The grant is part of a seven-year, US$28-million plan to consolidate and expand the group’s efforts. This site goes beyond typical foundation coverage and provides timely features that put Ashoka’s work into a wider context. Look for all of Ashoka’s Latin American programs online: www.ashoka.org/global/aw_latin_america.cfm.

Ford Foundation

www.fordfound.org/

What started as a local Michigan philanthropy in 1936 expanded into an international foundation that has provided more than US$10 billion in grants and loans. The Ford Foundation sports offices around the world, including one in Mexico City. This easily-navigable website boasts a useful search engine ( www.fordfound.org/search/search_general.cfm) and provides current news about its operations, which you can also read about via its online magazine. The foundation also gives links to guidelines for grant seekers and a grants database. What could make the site better? Links to the donor websites and more status reports of the projects it has funded. A text-only version of the site is said to be “under construction.”

W.K. Kellog Foundation

www.wkkf.org

This U.S.-based foundation also dates back to the 1930s when the cereal magnate first developed this charity. The mission statement reads that the foundation “has learned that comprehensive, integrated, community-based efforts toward change are most effective for solving complex problems.” That said, it’s difficult to find out much about what community efforts the foundation has supported. Programming initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean are indexed online ( www.WKKF.org/LAC/English/Default.htm) but the coverage is rather superficial. A program information and guidelines document is available in PDF format.

Other Foundations Working in Mexico:

Angelica

www.angelicafoundation.org/
This California-based foundation provides environment and social-justice grants.

Avina

www.avina.net/
This foundation sees itself as a partner to leaders in business and civil society working toward development.

Centro Mexicano para la Filantropía

www.cemefi.org/
Spanish-language site for Mexico’s own Philanthropic Center

This article originally appeared in Business Mexico magazine.
For subscription information,
visit their website at https://www.amcham.com.mx
or e-mail busmex@amcham.com.mx

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TLATELOLCO MASSACRE:
DECLASSIFIED U.S. DOCUMENTS ON MEXICO
AND THE EVENTS OF 1968

Mexico’s tragedy unfolded on the night of October 2, 1968, when a student demonstration ended in a storm of bullets in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco, Mexico City. The extent of the violence stunned the country. When the shooting stopped, hundreds of people lay dead or wounded, as Army and police forces seized surviving protesters and dragged them away. Although months of nation-wide student strikes had prompted an increasingly hard-line response from the Diaz Ordaz regime, no one was prepared for the bloodbath that Tlatelolco became. More shocking still was the cover-up that kicked in as soon as the smoke cleared. Eye-witnesses to the killings pointed to the President’s “security” forces, who entered the plaza bristling with weapons, backed by armored vehicles. But the government pointed back, claiming that extremists and Communist agitators had initiated the violence. Who was responsible for Tlatelolco? The Mexican people have been demanding an answer ever since.

Thirty years later, the Tlatelolco massacre has grown large in Mexican memory, and lingers still. It is Mexico’s Tiananmen Square, Mexico’s Kent State: when the pact between the government and the people began to come apart and Mexico’s extended political crisis began.

To commemorate this thirtieth anniversary, the National Security Archive has assembled a collection of some of our most interesting and richly-detailed documents about Tlatelolco, many recently released in response to the Archive’s Freedom of Information Act requests, all obtained from the secret archives of the CIA, FBI, Defense Department, the embassy in Mexico City and the White House. The records provide a vivid glimpse inside U.S. perceptions of Mexico at the time, and discuss in frank terms many of the most sensitive aspects of the Tlatelolco massacre which continue to be debated today: the political goals of the protesting students, the extent of Communist influence, Diaz Ordaz’s response, and the role of the Mexican military in helping to crush the demonstrations.

But while the declassified U.S. documents reveal new details about Tlatelolco, perhaps most important is the challenge their release poses to Mexico today. Thirty years after the massacre, the Mexican government continues to deny its people basic facts about what happened — refusing to open Army and police records to public scrutiny on the grounds of “national security,” denying Congress the right to hear testimony by agents of the state who were present at Tlatelolco. The valiant investigative efforts by reporters, scholars, historians, and an official congressional committee have helped clarify the events of 1968 enormously. But Mexico’s secret archives are also critical for a full understanding of Tlatelolco — and until they are opened, doubts about the truth of the Tlatelolco massacre will linger on.

  Go to the documents 

Kate Doyle , Analyst, directs the Guatemala and Mexico Documentation Projects for the National Security Archive. For the past seven years, Doyle has served as a foreign policy analyst in charge of Archive projects on Central America, the “drug war” in the Americas, “low-intensity conflict” and other aspects of U.S. policy in Latin America. She supervises the Archive’s ongoing collaborative effort with the Historical Clarification Commission of Guatemala, and assists on the Freedom of Information Act lawsuits against the U.S. government brought by the Archive and others on behalf of Jennifer Harbury and Carol DeVine. She was project editor for the Archive’s document publication, El Salvador: War, Peace and Human Rights, 1980-1994, and co-authored the 1994 report of the Washington Task Force on Salvadoran Death Squads. Doyle received her BA from Brown University in 1984 and her MA from Columbia’s School of International and Public Policy, where she was an Alice Stetton Fellow. Her articles have appeared in The Boston Globe, World Policy Journal, Current History and The Nation among other publications.

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Document 1
3/28/68
CIA Special National Intelligence Estimate
Security Conditions in Mexico
Secret
In preparation for a visit to Mexico City by Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the CIA issues a special assessment of security conditions in Mexico. Written several months before the first serious wave of student demonstrations began, the document describes the country as a model of stability, with President Diaz Ordaz firmly in control and a ruling party which “virtually monopolizes Mexican politics.”

Document 2
7/19/68
CIA Weekly Summary
Student Unrest Troubles Mexico
Secret
When students launch a series of country-wide protests in July, initial U.S. reporting out of Mexico alerts Washington to several issues that come up again and again in subsequent documents: the potential danger posed by the strikes to the Olympic Games, their political significance, and the role of the “international” left. This CIA analysis discusses Cuban influence on a student strike at the University of Veracruz. Demonstrators seek to disrupt the Olympic games, although the PRI electoral fraud in local and gubernatorial elections also may serve as cause for further unrest.

Document 3
7/31/68
White House memorandum
Student Disturbances in Mexico City (7/30/68 U.S. Embassy cable attached, untitled)
Secret, Bowdler to LBJ
Mexican authorities claim to have “solid evidence” that the Mexican Communist Party, with Soviet complicity, engineered the July 26 riot. The U.S. Embassy does not have corroborating evidence, but suggests that Moscow may have ordered riot to counteract impact of events in the Czechoslovakia.

Document 4
8/2/68
CIA Weekly Summary
Students Stage Major Disorder in Mexico
Secret
The July 26 riot provides a classic example of Communist agitation techniques. Document questions Mexican claims of Soviet complicity, however, as USSR does not want to undermine its good relations with Mexico.

Document 5
c. 8/15/68
DIA Intelligence Information Report
Troops Used to Help Quell Mexico City Student Riots
Confidential
Report provides a chronological account of Mexican military involvement in disbanding student protests in Mexico City during the week of July 29. While the report states that the military performed “creditably,” it also notes some charges of “over-reaction,” such as the alleged “hazing” of students inside one school. The Mexican Government denies reports that 4 students were killed during the disturbances. Generals Mazon and Ballasteros head a special military “Task Force” to deal with the situation of unrest.

Document 6
8/23/68
CIA Weekly Review
Mexican Government in a Quandary Over Student Crisis
Top Secret
CIA says the Mexican Government may be underestimating students’ ability to continue large-scale, disciplined demonstrations. The present impasse is due to the Government’s belief that a) giving in to students would invite further demands and b) ignoring situation most likely will lead to further disruption. Document claims that Communist youths are involved in the crisis. CIA says that further violent outbreaks can be expected.

Document 7
8/29/68
White House message
Student Situation in Mexico (8/29/68 U.S. Embassy cable attached, Student Situation)
Confidential, Rostow to LBJ
Rostow reports to President Johnson that the Mexican Government’s conciliatory strategy has not quelled student disturbances, and a return to a “get-tough, no-nonsense posture” is inevitable. Rostow claims that while the violence is not likely to affect Diaz Ordaz’s administration, it will no doubt affect the Olympics in a negative manner.

Document 8
8/30/68
CIA Intelligence Information Cable
Mexican Military Alert for Possible Cuban Infiltration of Arms Destined for Student Use
[Classification excised]
CIA source claims that Cuba is prepared to smuggle arms to students for September demonstrations in Mexico. In response, Mexican Navy and army troops along the coast are put on high alert.

Document 9
9/6/68
CIA Weekly Summary
Mexican Government Stalls Student Movement
Secret
While the Mexican Government has made minor concessions to protesting students, the approach of the Olympics will most likely lead the Diaz Ordaz administration to meet further demonstrations with very tough measures.

Document 10
9/9/68
CIA Intelligence Information Cable
Situation Appraisal: Status of the Mexico City Student Movement
[Classification excised]
Cable states that students are increasingly organized, and able to exercise some influence on national affairs. The Mexican Government has not been unified in action against the protesters, and President Diaz Ordaz continues to avoid becoming personally involved. While no hard evidence exists that Cubans or Soviets masterminded the student demonstrations, the Mexican Government continues to inspire such rumors. Cable concludes that “the old order is passing” and the PRI has lost control over public behavior.

Document 11
9/13/68
CIA Weekly Summary
Mexican Students Still Spar with Government
Secret
CIA refers to the Mexican Government’s “behind the scenes maneuvering to divide the students,” including efforts by the officially-inspired “committee of the authentic student body” to quash future student strikes.

Document 12
9/19/68
White House message
Untitled
Confidential, Rostow to LBJ
Rostow alerts President Johnson to the military’s decision to occupy UNAM in response to the student strike and take-over of university buildings.

Document 13
9/24/68
DIA Intelligence Information Report
Army Intervenes on Additional Occasions in Mexico City Student Situation
Confidential
Report states that Mexican Army troops were again employed to disperse protesting students, from 8/28 into the month of September. The period marked the first known involvement of troops from outside Mexico City, indicating the increasing seriousness of the matter. The September 18 occupation of UNAM also indicates that the position of the Mexican Government is hardening.

Document 14
9/26/68
FBI memorandum
Olympic Games, Mexico City, Mexico: October 12-27, 1968
Confidential, Sullivan to Wannall
FBI goes on alert for movement of “U.S. subversive elements” into Mexico, which the agency believes may try to disrupt Olympics and participate in student uprisings.

Document 15
9/27/68
CIA Weekly Review
Violence Grows in Mexican Student Crisis
Top Secret
CIA reports “stresses” on and within the Mexican political establishment stemming from student unrest and the increasingly violent confrontations between protesters and the Mexican security forces.

Document 16
9/27/68
White House memorandum
Security Considerations in Mr. Nixon’s Planned Visit to Mexico (9/26/68 CIA intelligence estimate attached, with cover memo)
Secret, Rostow to LBJ
CIA expresses concerns about security conditions in Mexico and suggests that Nixon cancel his plans to visit Mexico during the Olympics. If he does go, the CIA document warns, Mexican security forces would have hard time protecting him, and “anti-U.S. extremists” would cause “some nasty incidents.”

Document 17
c. 10/1/68
FBI letter
Olympic Games, Mexico City, Mexico – October 12-27, 1968
Confidential
Document discusses potential threats to the Olympic games. These include individual US citizens with histories of subversive activity and anti-Castro Cubans, who are expected to try and harass Cuban athletes during the games. The FBI urges that information about potential subversives be provided to the U.S. and Mexican Governments.

Document 18
10/4/68
CIA Weekly Summary
A Renewed Violence in Mexico
Secret
New violence (Tlatelolco) puts Government of Mexico’s ability to safeguard Olympics in jeopardy. All military zone commanders have been granted the authority to “move against disorderly students.”

Document 19
10/5/68
White House memorandum
Mexican Riots – Extent of Communist Involvement (10/5/68 CIA memorandum and 10/5/68 FBI cable attached)
Secret, Rostow to LBJ
CIA concludes that recent student unrest was sparked by domestic conditions. Cuban and Soviet involvement was limited to moral and some financial support. The FBI reports Communist/Trotskyist groups formed the Olympia Brigade, a “shock group” which allegedly initiated the shooting at Tlatelolco on 10/2.

Document 20
10/8/68
FBI cable
Olympic Games, Mexico City, Mexico, October Twelve – Twenty Seven, Nineteen Sixty Eight
Confidential, Director FBI to LEGAT Mexico City
To protect U.S. athletes during the Olympics, the FBI must establish a liaison in the U.S. Embassy for channeling information to U.S. Olympic team officials regarding safety concerns. Cable emphasizes the necessity of concealing the FBI’s role to avoid jeopardizing ongoing FBI operations in Mexico.

Document 21
c. 10/8/68
CIA report
Answers to Questions Raised by White House Concerning Student Disturbances in Mexico (10/9/68 White House cover memorandum attached)
Secret, Lewis to Rostow
CIA addresses issues raised by FBI sources and concludes a) no evidence exists of significant foreign influence in riots, b) external influences included moral support and some financial support, but not the supply of weapons, and c) the Trotskyist “Brigada Olympia” was developed with the intentions of interfering with the Olympic games.

Document 22
10/12/68
Department of State telegram
Untitled [Mexico Riots] (10/14/68 White House cover memorandum attached)
Confidential
The U.S. Embassy states that, contrary to official Mexican reports, direct foreign involvement in the student uprisings has been “essentially negligible.” Rather, newer and more extreme student elements are responsible for the continued unrest and riots such as that which occurred at Tlatelolco on 10/2. The Mexican Government has increased military pressure with the intention of seizing the leaders of the extremist student groups. Document states that the foreign influence argument has been used by the Mexican Government to divert attention away from deep local problems.

Document 23
10/18/68
DIA Intelligence Information Report
Army Participation in Student Situation, Mexico City
Confidential
Report provides a chronological account of the Army’s role in controlling student uprisings from 9/24 through 10/18. With regards to Tlatelolco, report states that on 9/30, troops withdrew from the UNAM campus, which they had occupied since 9/18. Also on 9/30, the Mexican Defense Minister instructed military zone commanders throughout the country to move against student disturbances “without waiting for instructions.” Report provides a key overview of the events of 10/2 at Tlatelolco and the days immediately following.

Document 24
10/22/68
DIA Intelligence Information Report
Mexican Army Preparations to Cope with Future Student Disturbances in Mexico City
Confidential
Following the close of the Olympic games and the expected return of students to classes, the Mexican military expects a resurgence in student protest activity. To counter possible future violence, the military is training two special 1,500-man units, one of which carries the name “Brigada Olympia.”

Document 25
10/23/68 DIA Intelligence Information Report
Status of Brig. Gen. Jose Hernandez Toledo
Confidential
Gen. José Hernández Toledo, wounded at Tlatelolco, is recovering at a Mexican military hospital. A source tells the DIA that the Mexican Army “had taken good care” of the 18 foreigners (including some Cubans) involved in the events at Tlatelolco. When asked to clarify, the source said “good care” meant detention.

Document 26
11/1/68 CIA Weekly Summary
Mexican Government Readies for More Student Trouble
Secret
Although it is unclear whether students will continue the strike, this document suggests that the “new left” (extremists) within the student movement seek to prolong the unrest and continue their provocations against the Mexican Government. Mexican officials are preparing for future violence.

Document 27
c. 11/15/68
INR Working Draft (extract)
Student Violence and Attitudes in Latin America
Confidential
According to this draft analysis of student unrest in Latin America, the disorders in Mexico are the worst in the hemisphere. The continued violence demonstrates a deep and widespread dissatisfaction with the Government of Mexico, and has severely damaged Mexico’s reputation as being the “most stable and progressive country in Latin America.”

Document 28
12/6/68
CIA Weekly Summary
Mexican Student Strike Apparently Waning Secret
Document states that despite intermittent attacks by extremist groups, the student strike in Mexico is nearly over. In the wake of a student vote to end the strike, class attendance is rising.

Document 29
1/17/69
CIA Weekly Summary Special Report
Challenges to Mexico’s Single-Party Rule
Secret
As students return to classes, the “authentic context” to student strikes is becoming clear: the demonstrations of 1968 represent a strong warning to the Government of Mexico. Although Mexican officials claimed “outside agitation” was the basis of the unrest, document states that most reports linking the student movement to subversion remain unsubstantiated. Finally, document states that the events at Tlatelolco caused severe political damage to the Mexican Government.

Document 30
c. 3/24/69
DIA Intelligence Information Report
General Officers in Disfavor with Secretary of Defense
Confidential
Generals Ballesteros Prieto and Luis Gutierrez Oropeza are both out of favor with the Minister of Defense because they ignored his orders to keep troops out of Tlatelolco. According to source, soldiers were merely supposed to surround students and observe with the intention of confining the demonstrators to that part of the city.

Return to the Introduction

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When the Tlatelolco Women Boiled Water–
But Not for Dinner

(Part 1: The Youth Revolt)

As battles between youth and security forces became more and more pitched–and as supporting the movement became more risky–more sections of the masses stepped in to join them. This happened most especially in the Tlatelolco complex, a huge, mainly middle-class project which also housed many workers and poor families in its rooftop flats. One press report estimated that 12,000 residents participated in the movement on the side of the students.

On September 21, 1,000 police attacked Voca (Vocational) 7, a high school within Tlatelolco. Students held them off in a fierce battle in which police set fire to two buildings, fired round after round of gunfire into the school, and launched clouds of tear gas into apartments.

Tlatelolco housewives spent that night boiling water to throw out the windows onto soldiers or hunting for rags, bottles, and fuel to make molotov cocktails for the students. Children lined the roofs aiming rocks and sticks on the uniforms below. Hundreds of youths from Vocas in surrounding poor barrios broke through the police cordon by blowing up police cars. Newspapers reported that “gangster youth” from Tepito also joined with the student fighters. Even after calling in reinforcements from the army, the security forces were often driven back. They finally gave up at 2 a.m.

A baby girl and at least three students were killed and many hundreds arrested during this battle. Twenty granaderos (antiriot police) were injured. Four more were shot–one fatally–by an army lieutenant who saw them beating his mother.

The police seized Voca 7 two days later in a fierce exchange of gunfire. In response, a woman representative of Tlatelolco residents called for a rent strike, to continue as long as the student conflict did.

On September 24-25 a similar but even more ferocious battle pitted 1,500 police and soldiers against up to 2,000 students at the Casco de Santo Tomás vocational school near the refinery district. The students, some armed, barricaded the neighborhood, cut trenches, set up a command post and runners, and fortified themselves on rooftops. The Washington Post reported that students commandeered an oil truck to firebomb police cars and that perhaps 15 students were killed.

It is no accident that the government forces chose Tlatelolco as the site of the massacre and that bystanders, even small children, were targeted. The participation of Tlatelolco residents showed the potential for the student movement to unleash an even more powerful wave of mass rebellion against the ruling class.

At 6:10 p.m.

On the evening of that fateful October 2, 10,000 students and residents filled the Plaza. Almost every rally in the previous two weeks had been broken up by police, with up to 1,000 arrests a day. Many more residents leaned out from their windows. Speakers had told the crowd that a planned march on the Casco de Santo Tomás campus would be canceled to avoid “provoking” a fight and that the rally was about to end. But the government didn’t need an excuse to launch what it had planned as a show of ruthless power. About 300 tanks, jeeps, and armored cars, 5,000 soldiers, and hundreds of police had crept up to surround the Plaza.

At 6:10 p.m. green signal flares burst in the sky. Police helicopters opened fire from above. Immediately the undercover Olympia Battalion (elite police in charge of security for the Olympics) seized speakers from the CNH (National Strike Council, the leadership of the student strike movement) on a balcony of the Chihuahua apartment building. The police beat the CNH speakers and forced many into the line of fire.

Other Olympia Battalion members and plainclothes police began to fire on people from the balcony and from inside the crowd. The Olympia Battalion police wore white gloves so that other security forces could tell them apart from the masses. These police provocateurs not only added to the terror against the people; later the government would blame “student snipers” for starting the massacre. At the same time, soldiers with fixed bayonets began to advance from two sides while raking the crowd with machine guns. Waves of people ran from one side of the Plaza to another where they met up with more gunfire which forced them back.

Autopsies showed that most of the officially recognized dead were shot in the back at close range or bayoneted. Hundreds banged on the doors of the church which blocks one side of the Plaza, begging priests to let them in. But the church remained closed–the archbishop had ordered the priests not to let any demonstrators in.

The tanks opened fire against the Chihuahua building, and its first three floors caught fire. So many bullets hit the building that the pipes and the boiler burst. Thousands of residents crouched for hours in wrecked apartments as bullets zinged around them. Heavy automatic fire lasted between 60 and 90 minutes and continued on and off into the early morning hours.

The shooting was so indiscriminate that the soldiers and police shot 12 of their own, killing two. An ambulance attendant was killed and a nurse injured as they tried to remove the wounded. Police sealed the Red Cross Hospital to arrest the wounded and to prevent any more ambulances from arriving on the scene. Even in the middle of this hellish scene, people struggled to fight fear and panic and protect one another. At the risk of their lives, many residents opened their doors to hide fleeing students.

There has never been an accurate count of how many people actually were murdered at Tlatelolco on October 2. Police admitted to only 32. The British newspaper Manchester Guardian reported that after careful investigation it found that 325 probably died and that the number could be much higher. There were reports that army trucks sneaked out hundreds of corpses and that bodies were burned or tossed into the sea.

About 1,500 people were arrested. Many were stripped naked and forced to stand in the rain for hours with their hands up while being beaten and stabbed with bayonets. In the streets outside the Plaza a wider ring of police fired tear gas at the angry crowds and arrested anyone who tried to enter. Soldiers rampaged through Tlatelolco, looting and tearing up apartments in search of weapons and escaped students. Remaining leaders were hunted down and jailed. Some disappeared.

Made in the USA

Many of those arrested were tortured. In the book Massacre in Mexico, a prisoner reports that a U.S. agent joined Mexican officers in the prison torture chambers. A policeman threatened another prisoner during his torture: If you don’t talk now, we have gringos here who know how to make you. But U.S. interrogation experts didn’t have to be physically present for “Made in the USA” to be clearly stamped on the crackdown.

The U.S. imperialists are very worried about the security of their southern border. By enforcing a bloody law and order, the Mexican regime helps protect the economic and political stranglehold of the U.S. over Mexico. But this repression is often directly supervised and coordinated by agencies of the U.S. government. Mexico is the only foreign country where the FBI openly operates, and the CIA’s Mexico City station is the largest in the hemisphere. Many Mexican military officers and police of strategic agencies are trained under the CIA or at U.S. police institutes.

Philip Agee, a former CIA agent who is now a critic of the CIA, was sent as a spy to Mexico in 1968 under the cover of organizing cultural exchanges during the Olympics. In his book Inside the Company, CIA Diary, Agee wrote: “In Mexico the government keeps our common enemy [the left and Soviets] rather well controlled with our help–and what the government fails to do, the [CIA] station can usually do by itself.”

Agee probably was not in on the most sensitive operations in Mexico City, including those which might tie the U.S. directly into the massacre. But he does report that the CIA exchanged intelligence reports daily with its most important liaison contacts. One such contact was President Díaz Ordaz. According to Agee, Díaz’s relationship with the CIA was “extremely close,” and he received expensive gifts.

Another important contact was Luis Echeverría, who as Interior Minister was directly in charge of carrying out the massacre and who later became president. The CIA’s intelligence on left and student organizations and activities, says Agee, was vastly superior to the Mexican government’s. The information gathered by the CIA helped the Mexican police carry out raids and arrests.

After the massacre, there were no statements of condemnation from the U.S. State Department or President Johnson. This silence amounted to complicity with the killings, if not outright approval. On October 3 the executive board of the International Olympic Committee met in emergency session to decide whether to go ahead with the Games in spite of the massacre. Led by the American chairman of the committee, Avery Brundage, a narrow majority voted to continue. Brundage explained that Mexican authorities had assured him “nothing will interfere with the peaceful entrance of the Olympic flame into the stadium on October 12, nor with the competitions which follow.”

So 10 days after Tlatelolco, the Games opened in an atmosphere of brutal hypocrisy. As streets rumbled with tanks, billboards grinned in a dozen languages: “Everything is possible with peace.” The Mexican government decked out young women in miniskirts to serve as “Olympic hostesses” to the athletes. One hostess, still in her bullet-shredded Olympic uniform, lay in the police morgue, where thousands of parents filed through hunting for their missing children.

The massacre shocked thousands out of the illusion that the government would not commit so inhumane an act or that it would be held back by public opinion in Mexico and worldwide. As Mao Tsetung said, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”–and the imperialists and their henchmen proved it one more time at Tlatelolco. In an oppressed country like Mexico, whatever facade of democracy they may find convenient in “normal times” is ripped away very quickly when their rule is threatened.

Democratic Opening–
Cover for More Repression

Despite the lockdown atmosphere after the massacre, the student strike continued for two months with much support. In over a dozen cities in Europe, Latin America and the U.S., Mexican embassies were immediately hit by furious student actions protesting the massacre. Four hundred were arrested in Paris confrontations. Many protested the bloody hand behind the regime’s slaughter; for example, the U.S. embassy in Chile was stoned. Students in many countries demanded that their national teams withdraw from the Mexico City Olympics.

However, the arrests of most strike leaders and the government’s tactic of holding out the promise of negotiations while threatening more murder did have some effect. The student strike was increasingly dominated by the “soft-liners” who wanted to compromise with the government. In late November the council announced the end of the strike. The majority of students at the large and tumultuous meeting stormed out, shouting strike slogans. Several schools were briefly taken over by striking students to prevent a return to classes. But the movement was unable to continue in the face of mounting government threats and a leadership that had declared surrender.

Still, a deep disgust and outright hatred for the ruling regime had spread broadly throughout society. The true nature of this brutal, neocolonial state had been laid bare for all to see, and many illusions about the possibility of any real progress without its overthrow had been shattered. Clearly shaken by this situation, the U.S. and the Mexican regime launched some new initiatives to try and control the damage of ’68.

Interior Minister Echeverría, who became president in 1970, was just the man to carry out these initiatives. The man identified by Philip Agee as a top CIA liaison now put up a show of standing up to the Yanquis. Meanwhile, his administration relied on more U.S. loan capital than any administration had up to that point and used U.S. military assistance to eliminate armed opposition movements. The man who had been directly in charge of the Tlatelolco massacre now declared an amnesty for many political prisoners. Wages and services for some workers improved, and university attendance was also allowed to increase.

Under this “democratic opening,” parties which renounced violence and foreign ties were promised funds and seats in the powerless Congress. This “opening” was a chance for opportunists to stomp on the struggle of the masses while they asked for favors from the comprador bourgeoisie. Today this “democratic opening” is upheld by the electoral left as a major, or even the main, fruit of the ’68 struggle.

In fact, these initiatives under Echeverría were both a continuation of the old repression and a cover for the new. On the one hand, the ruling class desperately needed to renew illusions about the state’s legitimacy among sections of the urban middle classes. They hoped that the willing cooperation of members of the left, including some who had been leaders of the student movement, would help accomplish this. At the same time, other sections of the population and the movement which were considered more of a threat were isolated and viciously attacked. During the “democratic opening” period, Echeverría directed a harsh repression against Guerrero peasants and the “disappearances” of hundreds of people accused of being urban and rural guerrillas.

On June 10, 1971 a beginning renewal of the student movement was nipped in the bud by a new massacre. This time the murders were carried out by rightist paramilitary gangs brought to the scene of a demonstration by government trucks and given free rein. They killed at least 42 students, maybe many more, and injured over 100.

But the 1968 massacre continued to burn in the memory of students. When Echeverría attempted to speak on the campus of the Mexican National Autonomous University (UNAM), he was forced to take to his heels, bleeding from a hail of stones thrown by enraged students.

Part 3: Mexico 30 Years after the Tlatelolco Massacre

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This is the final part of a three-part series. Part 1 described the rising movement of the students and others in the days before the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. Part 2 was an account of what happened on October 2, 1968 at the Plaza of the Three Cultures in the Tlatelolco apartment complex in Mexico City. Blood flowed that evening, as troops and police fired upon the people and carried out a brutal massacre.

This October 2, more than 100,000 people marched in Mexico City in honor of the martyrs of 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre. They included students from UNAM and the Poli, Tlatelolco residents, veterans of the ’68 struggle, and people from all over. They shouted with anger, “October 2nd is not forgotten!” and “We won’t forget, we won’t forgive!” There were mass protests in eight states. In San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, demonstrators burned a portrait of former President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz and said, “Mexico today is exactly the same as in 1968… Repression continues throughout the country.”

This year’s commemorations also included roundtable discussions at the Poli, an exhibition of images of the 1968 movement and a series of film showings. One of the films was Rojo Amanecer (Red Dawn), starring Maria Rojo and Hector Bonilla, a powerful exposure of the massacre which was banned in Mexico for many years. Other cultural events included plays and performances by the Poli Symphony Orchestra. There are six books by Mexican authors on the Tlatelolco Massacre scheduled for publication this year.

The ’68 upsurge has continued to inspire and challenge people down to today. And there continues to be a great deal of debate and contention over the causes and meaning of the ’68 events and who is to blame for the massacre.

The Official Story
Has Not Changed

Even today, the butchers of Tlatelolco still defend the massacre. In the words of one intellectual, “The official story with regard to the student movement of 1968 has not changed in 30 years.” This official story goes like this: The students provoked the violence, there was no pre-planned police/military assault on the movement, the military and the government committed no crimes. Despite repeated protests and investigative commissions over the years, the key documents in the government’s long-secret files on Tlatelolco are still under lock and key. The Defense Ministry refuses to release even an inventory of what it has, saying, “Those files will not be opened for reasons of national security.”

Earlier this year it came to light that the government is also withholding many hours’ worth of film–120,000 feet of film to be exact–shot by movie crews sent to Tlatelolco by the Interior Minister at the time, Luis Echeverria. Six hidden cameras filmed the horrific events from different angles around the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, beginning at 2 p.m. on October 2.

In February of this year Echeverria–who was overall in charge of executing the massacre and went on to become Mexico’s next president–told politicians and the press gathered in his mansion, “I have a clean conscience and sleep well.” He went on to issue a not-so-veiled threat against today’s rising people’s struggles: “Suppose that there is the threat of revolution, that they are preparing to attack the National Palace. What should be done? What should the supreme commander of the Armed Forces do if there is another Tlatelolco, which is not desirable, but is possible, given so much injustice, poverty and the concentration of wealth in so few hands? Or if there is another Chiapas? Chiapas could happen again. It is not desirable, but it is possible. And what would the president do, send in the Army or order a retreat?”

“Peace” Talk and
Bloody Repression

Echeverria was referring to the January 1994 armed peasant uprising in the state of Chiapas under the leadership of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). Thousands of indigenous campesinos with guns stormed out of the hills and jungles to bring their demands for justice, democracy, autonomy and land front and center.

The Chiapas rebellion touched off an upsurge in the campo which continues today. In addition to Chiapas, the Mexican states of Guerrero, Oaxaca, Veracruz, Nuevo Leon, Baja California, Tabasco, Morelos, and the Huasteca region have seen militant peasant struggles. In the rugged municipios of Chiapas as well as other states, peasants armed with sticks, stones and other rudimentary weapons have defied armed troops. All across the Mexican campo, those who used to live and die in humble obscurity, those whose daily struggle for survival and frequent death at the hands of the army and caciques (rural strongmen tied to the ruling PRI) went largely unnoticed, are stepping out of the shadows and are taking heroic action to try and change things.

In the cities, there have been continuous protests and strikes as well as massive outpourings of support for the struggle of the Indian campesinos.

The government’s response has been predictable–talk “peace” and wage war. They are applying the “Made in USA” doctrine of low-intensity warfare. The talks between the government and the EZLN led to the San Andres Larrainzar agreements which called for greater autonomy for indigenous people and made other promises. Although the EZLN refuse to lay down their guns, they have viewed their armed strength and the territory they control as a means to pressure the Mexican government and the political establishment for various reforms. Their goal and strategy are different from the Maoist road of seizing revolutionary state power through waging people’s war.

But the government has violated the San Andres Larrrainzar accords shamelessly and systematically at every turn. Large sections of the countryside have been militarized with patrolling troops and checkpoints along rural highways; the arming of paramilitary squads to carry out murder and mayhem; and psychological warfare designed to terrorize and demoralize the people. In the cities there have been increased repressive measures such as the hiring of more police, building of more prisons, and campaigns to discredit and attack all kinds of social activists.

Right now one-third of the entire Mexican army–some 70,000 troops–are stationed in Chiapas. These troops work hand-in-glove with the local police and paramilitary groups to brutalize the peasant masses. Some of the crimes committed by these reactionary armed forces in the past few months include:

• Acteal, Chiapas, December 22, 1997: 70 members of a pro-government and pro-landlord paramilitary armed with AK-47 and AR-15 combat rifles gunned down 45 men, women and children who were attending church. The official state police were just outside the village–close enough to hear the gunfire–but they did not intervene in the bloodbath.
• Ocosingo, Chiapas, January 12, 1998: As more than 6,000 people marched in protest of the Acteal massacre, Chiapas state police fired on the crowd. The gunfire killed Guadalupe Mendez Lopez, a 38-year-old Tzeltal Indian, and injured her two-year-old daughter and a young man.
• Taniperlas, Chiapas, April 11: 500 Mexican soldiers, police and immigration agents raided a peasant cooperative, the pro-Zapatista autonomous village of Flores Magon. (Over 30 towns and villages in Chiapas have set up such local governments independent of the Mexican state.) They arrested some 20 people without legal warrants and deported about a dozen foreign human rights activists and supporters.
• Nicolas Ruiz, Chiapas, June 3: 1000 army troops and police surrounded the town and proceeded to search 100 homes, breaking down the doors of the houses and arresting 164 people, without any warrants or charges. The governor of Chiapas said that the purpose of the raid was to bring its autonomous local government “into conformity with the law.”
• El Charco, Guerrero, June 8: The army arrived with 26 armored vehicles and two helicopters and surrounded a school in this small Mixtec village. According to press reports, guerrillas of the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) and peasants were sleeping in the school after a political meeting. The troops called on those inside to give themselves up, and then opened fire. Eleven people were killed, some of them executed after surrendering. Five others were injured and 21 arrested.
• El Bosque, Chiapas, June 10: 1,200 federal troops with tanks, bazookas, mortars and high caliber weapons laid siege to the municipality, killing at least seven peasants, injuring many others and arresting dozens of people. The troops went on a rampage of looting–breaking into houses, destroying furniture, taking what little belongings and money people have, stealing livestock and eating their food. Hundreds of villagers were forced to seek refuge in the nearby hills.

The government has plastered the walls of Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of Chiapas, with their slogan: “Let peace speak.” This brings to mind the slogan that appeared on billboards all over Mexico City when the 1968 Olympic Games opened, 10 days after the Massacre of Tlatelolco: “Everything is possible with peace.”

This is the “peace” of the graveyard. The “peace” that the big Mexican capitalists and the landowning classes want so they can continue their brutal exploitation of the people. A “peace” backed by the U.S. imperialists, who dominate Mexico and who want to keep their southern border “safe.”

Why is it that those whose hands are covered with the blood of the people always talk of “peace” and insist that violence is not the answer?

False Friends of the People

In this intense situation, the PRD–one of the main bourgeois opposition parties in Mexico–is trying to claim the mantle of the 1968 student movement. The PRD claims to be working in the interests of the people–but they are false friends of the people.

PRD leaders say that the lesson for today is that “repression can be avoided” as long as people rely on the system and opposition politicians and limit their struggle to “acceptable” aims and means. According to them, the greatest fruit of the ’68 struggle is that the PRD leader Cuauhtemoc Cardenas was elected as mayor of Mexico City earlier this year. (Cardenas is the first non-PRI politician to hold that post in the history of Mexico.) And they say that they now have a chance to win the presidential elections in the year 2000 and end 88 years of PRI presidents.

Mayor Cardenas declared October 2 an official Day of Mourning in the capital this year, and flags were flown at half mast. However, the city government has stipulated that they are honoring “all those who died that day in Tlatelolco, without exception.” In other words, those who died on the side of the forces of repression were also included among the “honored.” Cardenas went so far as to exonerate the Mexican Army as a whole. Speaking at a forum at the Universidad Iberoamericana, he said that it was “unjust” that the Army “be held responsible for the massacre.”

Another current PRD leader, Porfirio Munoz Ledo, was a prominent PRI politician in 1968 and praised the whitewash report on the Tlatelolco Massacre by then-president Diaz Ordaz. (Later, under President Echeverria, Munoz Ledo became the chairman of the PRI.)

This past May a furor erupted when it was revealed that the Subdirector of Security for the city government under Cardenas, General Hector Careaga, was an officer in the Olympia Battalion, the police unit that was at the center of the Tlatelolco Massacre. Careaga was recognized for “acts of valor at Tlatelolco” and promoted to the rank of major. Far from taking decisive action to remove him, the city government defended him and said he had been chosen for the post due to his military experience and “his experience with police matters.” He was finally forced to resign.

This spring, it was reported that Cuauhtemoc Cardenas was bringing an FBI team to Mexico City to train an elite unit of 50 police and 50 judicial agents, as well as supply them with the latest in computers, technology and arms. Cardenas reportedly has held talks with the police departments of New York City and Los Angeles, and wants to adopt important elements from N.Y. Mayor Giuliani’s “anti-crime” program. The LAPD is known around the world for the Rodney King beating. Amnesty International criticized the NYPD for brutality and compared it with vicious dictatorships in the Third World. What does it say about Cuauhtemoc Cardenas that he wants to learn “crime control” methods from these two police departments?

And Cardenas has proposed a “beautification” campaign for the Zocalo involving landscaping it with trees. This central plaza of Mexico City was claimed by the 1968 student movement as a center of protest, and it is the scene of literally hundreds of demonstrations each year. Cardenas’ tree-planting project appears to be an attempt to make the Zocalo off limits for huge public protests.

From 1968 to Today

The student struggle of ’68 and the Massacre of Tlatelolco laid bare the true nature of Mexican society before the eyes of the world, shattering the false showcase image of imperialist-sponsored economic growth and prosperity. The glitter, splendor and Olympic gala was for a handful. It was built on the oppression of the majority, the peasants and working class, and defended by means of bloody repression.

But far from proving the invincibility of the government, the Tlatelolco Massacre and the ’68 movement exposed the profound weakness of the comprador regime–its lack of popular support and its fundamental reliance on brute force. The students and broad masses who rose up in 1968 struck deep blows at the system, and Mexico’s rulers still have not recovered fully. By unleashing people’s rage and hopes, the 1968 upsurge rolled over the barriers of what was then called “possible.” And it continues to inspire and challenge people today.

Thirty years later, Mexico is once again being convulsed by an upsurge of mass struggle, this time centered in the countryside. The 1994 Chiapas rebellion demonstrated the deep revolutionary sentiments of the Mexican people. And the situation today points to the potential–and urgent need–for a Maoist new democratic revolution and people’s war to overthrow the reactionary ruling system and break the U.S. grip on Mexico.

In many ways, the U.S. imperialists face a more difficult situation in Mexico today than they did in 1968. Great stirrings are rumbling up from the peasants on the very bottom of society–and this has deeply shaken other sections of the people. The Mexican economy has become more tightly wrapped in the web of interdependency with the U.S. economy. Economic crisis in Mexico can send powerful shockwaves through the whole U.S. empire–as the 1994 collapse of the peso demonstrated.

There has been a barrage of propaganda about how the Mexican economy has been put “back on track” since 1994. In reality, the situation is very precarious with the potential for much deeper crisis. Real income has fallen 75 percent in the last 10 years, and large sections of the middle classes are deep in debt. Unemployment is sky high. The peso is steadily losing value. The situation in the countryside is abysmal. A recent UN report on nutrition classified Mexico in the same category as many African countries plagued by famine. There is much less maneuvering room for the Mexican ruling class to increase profits or to hand out concessions in the hopes of tying the masses to the government. Infighting and splits within the ruling class are very intense.

The cold-blooded government massacre of hundreds of Mexican youth on October 2, 1968–and many other outrages that have followed–cry out for the overthrow of the system responsible for these crimes. The boldness and dreams of the rebels of 1968 live on. October 2 is not forgotten!

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