The Resilience of Impunity: NACLA and Mexico, 1968-2008

...For that short time, tactical and politi­cal decisions were made by CNH leaders, by the group’s many “commissions,” and by a Plenary Assembly that had “sovereign decision-making power...

...As so often happens, the main issue of the conflict became the conflict itself: audacious youth against brutal authority...

...creating conditions that might allow for “civilized” political debate—were not all that radical...

...3 If the student move­ment was able to destroy the official image of Mexico, it was because the (privileged) young To the extent “are the ones who question society...

...General Lázaro Cárdenas, in the 1930s, fearing a resilience of personal impunity under the rule of the hegemon that would be the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), enforced the “no reelection” rule and limited the power of individual strongmen within the party...

...interventions in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic, for exam­ple, or regressive public policies on housing, schooling, abortion, jobs, health care, and policing...

...and an expressed commitment to democratic, non-authoritarian social relations...

...7 On July 26, Taibo marched through the center of Mexico City with a group of student radicals to commem­orate the launching of the Cuban Revolution...

...Written by the NACLA staff, it consisted of analytic discussions of the trans­national dynamics of the Mexican economy and of the NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: mexico i role of U.S...

...In the 1960s,” he says, “before the massive student move­ment and the formation of the CNH, we had an informal, international grouping of radical mathematicians...

...Most of NACLA’s authors began by assuming that while the carnage at Tlatelolco resulted from a paranoid regime’s overreaction to fairly moderate and negotiable student demands, the repression unleashed by then president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s government was nev­ertheless connected, at least indirectly, to the interests of certain branches of the U.S...

...We felt that in order to relate to the repression against Mexican students and workers we must first understand our own country’s involvement in that repression...

...You heard screams CNH in ’68, now a prominent architect in Mexico City...

...Brazil and Uruguay in Latin America...

...movement’s uncertainty of time and place, Ta­ibo continues: “We were strangers, too, in history...

...The student movement of the 1960s and 1970s carried the torch against the impunity of the PRI, but lacking a base of real power, was brutally repressed...

...But Mexico also continues to suffer from a resilient tradition of internal impunity, one that Mexican reformers and revolutionaries, from Francisco Madero to Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, have confronted over the past century...

...During the past 40 years, NACLA has done its best to keep track of these key moments of Mexico’s po­litical history, and here we will briefly discuss two, the student movement of 1968 and the implosion of the PRD that transpires as we write...

...But it was not only the U.S...

...universities and nonprofit corporations, and fi­nally, Mexican lobbyists in the United States...

...And further: “We expect similar developments in other Latin American countries...

...student movement, having grown ac­customed to protesting the latest outrage of the Vietnam War, was able to react im­mediately and strongly...

...It is always hard to imagine worse aggression than you know...

...While the student demonstrators adopted a militant stance, their most important demands—ending the state violence against demonstrators...

...To the extent that we can locate a “synchronized student move­ment,” it was one that identified with those demands and commitments...

...As much as the newly formed NACLA believed in— and hoped for—a global student uprising against the “empire,” the group was committed to covering the Mex­ico story as it actually happened...

...activ­ists who yearned for a more meaningful solidarity with their counterparts in the hemisphere...

...In the case of Mexico, there is no question that the country has suffered from its subordi­nate position to the United States—epitomized by the quasi-imperial imposition of free-mar­ket, neoliberal policies—and that we can fully grasp the Mexican reality only by placing it in the context of that relationship...

...To pursue these demands, in August activists created the CNH, which was to function as the democratic leader­ship body of the movement, but since it was virtually destroyed on October 2, it had an active political life of only two months...

...the demand for transparent governance...

...left...

...These discussions were accompanied by freshly researched lists of foreign direct investors, the country’s wealthiest individuals, re­cent U.S...

...It is generally agreed that the movement was ignited on 26 July, 1968,” remembers then student activist (now detective novelist) Paco Ignacio Taibo, “but as always in real history, the igniters did not know at the time what it was they were igniting...

...activists reading Mexico 1968 were finding out government, and about the CNH and maybe even against the closed, the PRI for the first time, while corporatist politics they were taking to the U.S...

...In that spirit, Uruguayan journalist Hiber Conteris led his NACLA article with the lines, “France and Germany in Europe...

...Popular revolutionaries Zapata and Villa took up the cause and broad­ened it to a struggle against the routine impuni­ty of daily life...

...Part I of the pamphlet, titled “Repression,” chronicled the conflict between Díaz Ordaz’s government and the students of the CNH that had just culminated in the long “night of Tlatelolco...

...One becomes a priísta upon attaining maturity...

...1 These expectations reflected the tenor of the times, the sensible starting point for any criti­cal analysis of any conflict in the Americas: Look first to “empire,” then to resistance to empire...

...In both cases, police and grunts, and blows to the head delivered without mercy, indeed with hatred...

...Leading up to the Mexican ’68, students and police clashed in 1966 at the University of Michoacán over an increase in bus fares and over the question of police violence itself...

...O n november 1, 1968, just a month after the Tlatelolco massacre, NACLA published a 50­ page pamphlet called Mexico 1968: A Study of Domination and Repression...

...Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, in the 1980s, led the effort to form the left opposi­tion Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the party that, for a while, carried the hopes of many Mexicans opposed to the politics of impu­nity...

...His group of “reds,” he recalls, soon found itself in the midst of another student march, this one called by Polytechnic Institute stu­dents to protest attacks from pro-govern­ment groups and youth gangs on their cam­pus...

...It was out of that reaction that NACLA was formed...

...NACLA was formed to investigate the re­ lations between the United States and its “sister republics” of the hemisphere, but try as we might, we don’t find the empire everywhere...

...the demand (a little later) for a new inter­national economic order...

...In Mexico,” she wrote in the 1970s, “there is an age to be idealistic . . . and another to become a priísta [a member of the then ruling PRI...

...And when news of the Tlatelolco massacre be­gan filtering out of Mexico, NACLA, now accustomed to tracking down political stories, was there to pick it up...

...streets to protest more familiar of the country’s outrages: Washington’s military long-ruling PRI...

...2 It mixed political analysis with re­porting taken and translated from other sources (NACLA had no reporters in the field...

...Suddenly, Taibo writes, the combined student marches were set upon and savagely Gamundi, one of the student leaders of the of social solidarity...

...So where was the synchronicity...

...attacked by riot police...

...This interpretation of events clearly resonated with NACLA’s avowed anti-imperialist politics: If Washington intended to exercise control of the Americas, it would face rebellion after rebellion...

...9 “By October 1968,” recalls CNH member Raúl Ál­varez Garín, “the students’ courage had begun to in­spire support from organized labor and peasants,” but it could not survive the massacre.10 “While the repres­sion of the movement, and especially of its leaders, was MAY/JUNE 2008 a reality that everyone had to take into consideration,” writes the veteran activist, “none of us foresaw the magnitude of the repression that unfolded at Tlatelolco...

...It created the conditions for the October massacre...

...We had close connections with academics at the Uni­ report: mexico i versity of California at Berkeley...

...readers by the publication of NACLA’s Mexico 1968...

...Among other things, in 1964 and 1965 we par­ticipated in solidarity meetings in California with the Free Speech Movement, the Brown Berets, and César Chávez’s United Farm Workers Union...

...democratically reform­ing a closed, corporatist regime...

...4 But youth in Mexico ran headlong into ment,” it was one repressive authority...

...Since 1914 [the height of violence during the Mexican Revolution] there has not been a massacre like this in the Mexican capital...

...invasion of the Dominican Re­public...

...12 The influence of the global moment—particularly the moment defined by the Vietnam War—is further cap­tured by Taibo: “We lived in thrall to the Cuban Revolu­tion and the Vietnamese resistance,” he writes...

...The long repression culminating in the massacre of 1968 was key,” he says...

...NACLA then added its own chronol­ogy of events, running from the excessively brutal police intervention in a student street fight on July 23 through the October 2 carnage...

...They were on strike against the violation of violation of university autonomy by an intru­ university sive, authoritarian government, autonomy by and against the closed, corporat­ist politics of the country’s long­ an intrusive, ruling PRI...

...It was a movement that located itself with­in the bonds of social solidarity...

...And “the repression of 1968–71,” he adds, “had repercussions that have lasted up to our own day, giving birth to a new generation of activists and analysts,” a generation that remains active and concerned with the issues of 40 years ago: openness and citizen participation in government.5 But within these complications, there are indeed some common threads linking the student movements of 1968: the demand for congruence between the state’s discourse and practice...

...Alas, as the party’s “tribes” vie for power 20 nAClA ArChives MAY/JUNE 2008 report: mexico i years after its founding, the PRD itself has reverted to the tradition of impunity within its own internal politics...

...capital...

...Often, the villain of the day is local politics but­tressed by impunity: the propensity (and ability) of rulers and contenders alike to place them­selves above the law—to exempt themselves from the legal consequences of their behavior...

...NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: mexico i The Resilience of Impunity: NACLA and Mexico, 1968–2008 Fred Rosen is NACLA’s senior analyst...

...We didn’t know why, but for us the past was an international realm that produced novels and revolutions, not a local realm be­ continued on page 22 Ángel morAles rizo...

...8 This “hatred,” le­gitimated by the president, was a measure of the class resentment that the police officers and troops felt to­ward the “privileged” student protesters...

...Part II, called “Domina­tion,” was a quickly but carefully constructed analysis of the long-term relations of power within Mexico and between it and the United States...

...11 T he outlines of the story were quickly made available to U.S...

...When the invasion took place, the U.S...

...NACLA had been founded just two years earlier in response to the U.S...

...It translated and carried a sobering assessment of the situation by a reporter from Le Monde: “The strike committee has been decimated...

...We have prepared this pamphlet in response to the recent events in Mexico,” reads its brief introduction...

...She went on: “Between a “synchronized July and October of 1968, all of Mexico was student move­ young, and it lived intensely...

...Nothing in NACLA’s chronology indicated the workings of “empire...

...13 And in a passage that could have been written about the U.S...

...ambassadors to Mexico, the Mexican activities of U.S...

...the demand for truth telling...

...the demand for inclusion and participation...

...In each country the that located itself movement had its own conditions and events within the bonds and consequences,” says Félix Hernández entered a Mexican campus to “maintain order,” and in both cases, Díaz Ordaz reacted by speaking resentfully of the tolerance and privilege accorded already privileged university students.6 This spirit of resentment spilled over to those under Díaz Ordaz’s command, intensify­ing and virtually personalizing the conflict between the students and authority...

...We did not come from the national past...

...It was a good bet that authoritarian most of the U.S...

...We listened to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul, and Mary— the music of the anti–Vietnam War generation...

...now the last outbreak of this synchronized student rebellion that is spreading throughout the Western Hemisphere has broken out in Mexico...

...corporations in Mexico...

...they are that we can locate the ones who get indignant about the injus­tices they encounter...

...Perhaps the most eloquent chronicler of the Mexican events of ’68, Elena Poniatowska, has remarked that the burning issue of the student movement may well have been youth itself...

...liberalizing political and social life...

...In the process we hope to develop an understanding of the wide range of activ­ities that fall under the heading of impunity...

...But in the context of NACLA’s solidarity with the Mexi­can student movement and its National Strike Council (CNH), it wasn’t strictly accurate to speak of a single global or even regional “synchronized student rebel­lion...

...lvarez Garín, then and now a mathematician and theoretical physicist at the IPN, remembers that before 1968, Mexico’s small Marxist student left had gone out of its way to forge links with stu­dent, academic, and Mexican American groups on the U.S...

...As we ap­proach the 40th anniversary of the massacre at Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Plaza—in which troops killed a still unconfirmed number of student activists and bystanders, perhaps as many as 300—it is clear that impunity can take many forms, and that the politics of impunity are quite resilient in Mexico...

...A year later a similar confrontation took place at the University of Sonora...

...While groups emerging from student movements around the world were respond-Mexican students ing to—and felt immersed in—a powerful global moment, Mexi­ were on strike can students were, after all, rais­against the ing Mexican issues...

...Madero rallied Mexicans in 1910 against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz with the then revolutionary slogan “Valid Suf­frage, No Reelection...

...government and U.S...

...By Fred Rosen Y ou can’t always blame it on empire...

...We read Howard Fast and Julius Fucik, Julio Cortázar and Mario Benedetti, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury and Jesús Díaz...

...It told the story of the mas­sacre (or at least as much as was then known) and tied the story to a larger analysis of relations of wealth and power in the Americas...