Carrying on the Struggle: El Comité 68

...unfortunately, many Mexicans criticize the Comité’s right to memory, portraying the activists as living in the past...

...Members of the Comité, as the developers of memory, have sought to enlighten, to judge, and to put up for discussion traumatic events, perspectives, and people of recent history...

...For the next 40 years, the Comité continued to mark the massacre with anniversary marches, publications, and conferences...

...By emphasizing this continuity, the Comité’s demands for justice and transparency intersect with those of other movements...

...Meanwhile, successive Mexican governments have sustained a judicial structure that refuses to punish state agents who have committed violent acts...

...Moreover, the Front demands that all those who have violated human rights while serving in the Fox or Calderón administrations be punished...

...the members included ex-CnH members who were also joined by prominent artists and intellectuals in seeking justice for the crimes committed in the late 1960s and early 1970s.5 By 2002, the Comité had become a civic association whose members had all been instrumental in bringing legal proceeding against echeverría and other government officials.6 the Comité began documenting the violence in an effort to create a national collective memory...

...the Comité 68, as an agent of democratic change and the guardian of memory, is part of a social movement that continues to recover, preserve, and to diffuse those events that stirred up in the country...

...to develop and promote historical memory, the Comité has collected oral histories, writings, and visual evidence to articulate and publicize the memories of the events, people, and places...

...as during the summer of 1968, activists recognized the need to take to the streets, the countryside, and the factories to construct spaces for discussion, reflection, and analysis...

...in 1988, the electoral corruption that robbed Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas of the presidency and installed Carlos salinas de gortari galvanized the activists to push for greater transparency and democratic reform...

...despite little recognition in governmental and international agencies’ reports, the Comité is one of the motivating forces behind the modern human rights and democracy movement in Mexico...

...police beat, detained, and arrested male and female activists with equal vengeance.3 in the years immediately following the massacre, many activists received stiff prison sentences, while others, fearing for their lives, fled into exile...

...when Mexico ratified the 2002 inter-american Convention on Forced disappearances of persons, according to daniel wilkinson of Human rights watch, “it included an interpretative declaration stating ‘it shall be understood that the provisions of said Convention shall apply to acts constituting the forced disappearances of persons, ordered, executed, or committed after the entry into force of the Convention.’ ”7 Because of such deliberate examples to protect those in power, the Comité is determined to sustain the right to remember and to know the facts—whether in Mexico or in other parts of the world—to show how those in power construct strategies of impunity, mainly behind closed doors, as they did in 1968 and 1971...

...Yet the Comité’s struggle is not based on nostalgia, but on a continued analysis of the Mexican state’s often violent behavior, both past and present...

...Elaine Carey teaches at St...

...despite constant threats, activists continued to organize, forming a loose organization on the first anniversary of the movement...

...echeverría remains under house arrest for his involvement in the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre, but he has never been held accountable for the tlatelolco massacre.8 through collecting evidence, activists address, rescue, and recover memories, whether personal, social, or collective, in an analytical process on a continuum from the past to the present...

...Following echeverría’s ascent to the presidency, several activists arrested in 1968 and 1969 gained their freedom...

...By doing so, they seek to historically support and reconstruct a memory of truth that informs contemporary events...

...1 during his 1970–76 presidency, echeverría oversaw a “dirty war” against political dissidents, and before that, as secretary of the interior, directed the massacre of student protesters in Mexico City’s tlatelolco plaza on october 2, 1968...

...0 MAY/JUNE 2008 report: mexico i the Comité has left an indelible mark on contemporary Mexican society...

...the use and production of these materials demonstrates the authoritarianism and impunity of the state, but more importantly it validates the experiences by rescuing individual and collective identities of those who may have been affected by the violence...

...at anniversary marches in 2006 and 2007, 1968 activists joined with representatives from the popular assembly of peoples of oaxaca (appo), the people’s Front in defense of the Land (Fpdt) of san salvador atenco, teachers’ unions, and student activists to denounce the continued impunity of echeverría and other government leaders and the continued use of military force to intimate civil society...

...in turn, Mexico must demonstrate in the public realm its commitment to democracy and transparency...

...Moreover, this type of memory politics serves as a real indicator of the “democratic transition” of the state since it must respond, resolve, or ignore such cases of violence...

...in the summer of 1969, activists organized groups to visit the political prisoners and continued to push for their initial demands...

...Because of the continuation of state-sponsored violence and anti-democratic practices in Mexico, the Comité seeks to create a political memory of Mexico that connects individuals to such events whether as a member of a family, investigator, or organizational activist...

...in some cases, the government has protected them outright...

...through this process, the Comité seeks to reaffirm that violent deeds took place and that people were in fact damaged by such deeds...

...the cancellation of all prosecutions against social activists...

...José Agustín Román Gaspar is a doctoral student at the National School of Anthropology and History, in Mexico City...

...John’s University in New York and is the author of Plaza of Sacrifices (University of New Mexico Press, 2005...

...this push for a public debate was a key demand of students in the summer of 1968...

...the presentation of the disappeared...

...thus, they take up these perspectives as witnesses to such events and as active subjects who have the right to demand justice...

...Much of this activism was dispersed due to the continued police and military presence on university and high school campuses, especially around the time of the october 2 anniversaries in 1969 and the early 1970s...

...this work continues to be key in demanding the release of documents and archives from the government, but also from ex-activists...

...as Mexico embarks on a path of increased militarization under president Felipe Calderón, the Comité and a number of other groups have formed a new collective to struggle against increasing state-sponsored violence...

...the Comité demands the responsibility of the state to rectify its legal, political, and social debts to those who have by Elaine Carey and José Agustín Román Gaspar suffered, by preserving this memory of the state’s acts of violence and impunity...

...in 1993–94, activists, scholars, and artists formed the truth Commission, whose efforts would ultimately lead in 2001 to the opening of closed archives that are now housed in the national archive in Mexico City...

...it has demanded the inclusion of the massacres in history textbooks and recognition of them in public spaces...

...using the halcones as shock troops, the government repressed the activists, and a 1971 massacre on the religious holiday of Corpus Christi was followed by a systematic dirty war against young people that predated the horrors of Chile and argentina.4 over the following years, members of the national strike Council (CnH) began to formalize a project that would eventually evolve into the Comité 68, and develop a language of human rights and democratic liberties...

...and the decriminalization of social protests...

...the national Front against repression comprises some 50 labor, student and political organizations including the appo, Fpdt, and the Comité itself.9 the key demands include the release of all political prisoners...

...the abolition of torture and sexual violation of detained women...

...in the immediate wake of the 1968 massacre, student activists continued their struggles against impunity despite insurmountable odds...

...with the 40th anniversary of the 1968 Mexican student movement, and with the advent of new conflicts since then—particularly in Chiapas, oaxaca, and atenco— the group’s history of struggle is crucial to understanding contemporary Mexican politics...

...the struggle against impunity continues, and the Comité 68 is right in the thick of it...

...in bringing echeverría, his secretary of the interior, Mario Moya palacios, and many of their subordinates to face charges for their involvement in the massacres of tlatelolco and Corpus Christi in 1971, a small group called the 1968 Committee for democratic Liberties (Comité 1968) played a crucial role, having struggled for such an outcome for decades.2 Led mostly by survivors of the era’s political movements, the Comité has fought for human rights for close to 40 years...

...in 1998, for the 30th anniversary, the Comité 68-98 was developed as an organizational body...

...this right to recall serves as a connection to similar cases of state-sponsored violence in recent years, against workers, campesinos, teachers, indigenous peoples, women...

...activists were finally able to see their own security reports and gauge the level of government infiltration...

...But in the summer of 1971, activists were brutally confronted by an organized band of government­sponsored (and allegedly u.s.-trained) thugs called los halcones (the falcons) when they organized to support student protests and workers’ strikes...

...NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: mexico i Carrying on the Struggle: El Comité 68 i n 2004, when ignacio Carrillo prieto, Mexico’s special prosecutor for past social and political movements, sought an arrest for ex-president Luis echeverría Álvarez, many hailed the arrival of Mexico’s “pinochet moment...