Massacre in the Plaza

The anniversary of the JFK assassination jogged my memory bank about one of the most exciting chapters of my journalistic career. But it was not the only exciting chapter. Some were dangerous as well as exciting. I’ve been shot at with rifles and pistols, strafed by a fighter plane, gassed by soldiers and police and punched by an unhappy drunk who thought the U.S. should be on the side of Argentina instead of the British in the Falklands war.

But the closest I came to catching a bullet was probably on a soft, damp October evening behind the Iglelsia de Santiago Tlatelolco, Mexico City’s oldest church. It was 1968 and I was the news editor in the Mexico City bureau of The Associated Press.

All I could see were shadows. Bright lights pinned me against the stone wall at the rear of the church Hernan Cortes built after defeating the Aztecs in 1521. It was built on the spot where the Aztecs held out against Spanish might for 80 days. The structure saw many nights of violence during the turbulent years of Mexican revolution and civil war. This night was but the latest.

A mist put halos around the lights. Just beyond the circle of light a Mexican soldier pointed his rifle at me. He didn't flinch at the sound of gunfire coming from the apartments across the brick plaza to my left. But I did. He knew the snipers in the Chihuahua apartment building would see me in the light. He knew the bullets fired from the apartments might hit me. A Mexican army lieutenant put me against that wall knowing I would be in the bright light. I was a six foot, four inch, blond-haired target standing out like a neon sign saying “shoot here, shoot here.”

Demonstrations

A series of 1968 student demonstrations in Mexico left the country reeling only 10 days before the opening of the first Summer Olympics to be held in a developing country. About 10,000 people, mostly high school and college students, jammed the Plaza of Three Cultures on the afternoon of Oct. 2. Aztec ruins, a colonial church and a modern marble-faced Foreign Affairs Ministry building give the plaza its name. Condominium apartment buildings, the Nonoalco-Tlatelolco urban development, flank the plaza. Demonstrators carried banners and shouted or sang slogans. Soldiers watched tensely, their armored vehicles idling in the streets. Leaders of the student movement saw all that force and cancelled their plans for a march to the National Polytechnic Institute -- site of a bloody nightlong battle the previous month. They were through speaking by the time a helicopter dropped a green flare over the crowd. Gunfire started immediately. Snipers in the windows of the apartment buildings fired into the plaza.   Some of the bullets hit demonstrators. Some hit soldiers. When it was over hundreds were dead in a massacre still staining Mexico's conscience four decades later. I was almost among the dead. The Mexican lieutenant knew I was a foreign reporter. That's why he put me in danger. The anti-government demonstrations of that summer of pain had so endangered Mexico's image that the young officer thought it his duty to keep me from telling the story of this latest – and worst – example of government violence. He had seen me counting the bloody bodies of teenagers on the loading dock of the Foreign Affairs building and the ambulances taking wounded away. I had counted only four of the many bodies when the officer demanded at gunpoint that we walk to the back of the church. For a long time that body count – four – was the government's official body count because they could not deny I--representing The AP -- had seen them. But the government said agitators among the students  killed them. Later the government’s death toll was put at 40 but other estimates put it in the hundreds. Many more people simply disappeared. Perhaps as many as 400 died that night.

Preparation

My job that day was to oversee installations at The Associated Press area of the Olympic Games press center on the southern edge of Mexico City near the University of Mexico. I was the young news editor in the bureau with Olympic preparation as my special assignment. It was only my third year in Mexico but The AP had invested considerable money in preparing me for this by assigning me to the coverage of other international sporting events such as the Pan American Games and the Central American and Caribbean Games. I had been on a roving assignment in Winnipeg, Canada, the year before to learn as much as I could during the Pan American Games. In those days the Pan American Games rated only a notch below the Olympic Games in importance in the international sporting world. Now I was supervising the installation of photo transmitting circuits when the bureau called to advise me of the student gathering at the plaza, 18 kilometers away through Mexico City traffic. I often rode my motorcycle to work. The 1967 Harley Davidson Sportster was the fastest production motorcycle of its day so it got me to the plaza – also called simply “Tlatelolco” – quickly.

Plaza of the Three Cultures Today

I knew the plaza well. My wife Sylvia and I often took visitors there. The Plaza of the Three Cultures, the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Spanish, is a powerful symbol to many Mexicans. It was the center of the Aztec empire when the Spanish conquerors arrived. It became the center of Spain's colonial empire. The mixing of those two cultures produced the mestizos, a third culture that is modern Mexico. The plaza represents the three cultures.

It is actually over the heart of the Aztec city of Tlatelolco whose ruins include the Aztec temple of Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl. The colonial church was built atop those ruins in 1524 and rebuilt in 1609. Legend says the baptismal fount in the church is where Juan Diego, to whom the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared in 1531, was baptized. But that may just be legend because no one has ever produced a baptismal certificate for Juan. On Aug. 13, 1521 the Aztecs made their final stand here against the soldiers of Hernan Cortes. Tlatelolco was an island then, with low causeways linking it to the mainland. At least 40,000 Aztecs died in that savage fight.  A plaque there reads "Neither a victory nor a defeat, but the painful moment of birth of the Mexico of today, of a race of Mestizos." That battle ended the pre-Columbian era in Mexico. The battle of Tlatelolco on Oct. 2, 1968 ended the facade of peaceful democracy in Mexico. It brought a secret war that would last another 20 years and foreshadow the downfall of the Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI that ruled Mexico for more than half a century. The plaza would be the site of more death still. On Sept. 19, 1985 an earthquake caused the Nuevo Leon apartment building at the plaza to collapse. The earthquake left an estimated 8,000 dead.

How Many Dead?

But this night I knew of only four dead – four because I had seen them. I was going to join them pretty quick because I made such an easy target. I inched my way toward the dark side of the church. I had made a little progress despite the armed guard when I saw a captain and yelled for help. He demanded I get out of the line of fire. He yelled about danger and crazy foreigners, cursing the lieutenant for “allowing” me to stand there. My entire exposure lasted less than 10 minutes but it seemed like hours. I later learned that some of the officers intentionally put foreign correspondents in danger, hoping to block their reporting. Oriana Fallaci, an Italian reporter, was face down on the floor of a third floor apartment in the Chihuahua building when a bullet ripped her buttocks. She lay in her own blood for 45 minutes before she could get help. She had been covering the demonstration from that balcony. The badly shaken reporter said from her hospital bed:

“...I’ve been shot, they stole my watch, they left me bleeding on the floor of the Chihuahua, they denied me the right to call my embassy. I think the Italian delegation should retire from the Olympic Games. That’s the least they can do. My case is going to Parliament and the whole world will know what happened in Mexico, the kind of democracy that prevails in this county -- the whole world.”

Released from that danger I needed a telephone to contact the bureau with my latest information. I knew of a small grocery store on the other side of the plaza that had a working telephone. At least it had worked earlier when I last called the office. I worked my way around the rubber-tired armored vehicles Mexicans called “tanquitas” or little tanks. Their machine guns raked the Chihuahua apartments. I could see small fires burning behind some windows. “Don’t they know people are in those apartments?” I wondered. “There are women and little kids there.” 

Presidential Guards

Decades later, in a new century, I would learn that the opening shots were fired by members of the “Estado Mayor Presidencial,” the elite military unit protecting the Mexican chief of state. These official documents released in 2006 showed that President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz had ordered them dress as civilians, enter the apartment buildings, and to fire into the crowd -- to fire at fellow soldiers as well as student demonstrators and onlookers. Their purpose was to give the regular Army -- whose officers knew nothing of the plot -- a reason to open fire.

I didn’t realize it that night but Tlatelolco was something I would remember all my life. I was experienced but still young. I had my 31st birthday on Jan. 27 of that year. I had already been married nine years, fathered three children and covered some of the most important events in history. I witnessed the lunch counter sit-in in the South that really started the end of racial segregation as official policy in the United States. I covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and phoned in The AP flash on the death of his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. I covered presidential campaigns, high level diplomacy at the United Nations, Gran Prix auto races, championship prize fights, beauty contests and wrote about a guy who raised skunks for a living. But on Oct. 2, 1968 my life was somehow changed. Looking back 40 years later I see times when I was in more danger, times that had more international importance, times with more historical significance. But I still see the events from July through October of 1968 in vivid color, the red banners, the bright sports shirts, the bluish-grey uniforms of the “granadero” riot police, and the white plumes of smoke from tear gas canisters.

1968 was a year of trouble.

• Demonstrations against the Vietnam War caused problems in the United States.
• The “Prague Spring” caused trouble for Communists in Czechoslovakia.
• Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and riots started in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Newark, Washington, D.C., and other U.S. cities.
• Bloody student demonstrations in France paralyzed that country.
• Andy Warhol, the artist who painted Cambell’s Soup cans, was shot by Valerie Solanas, the founder of the Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM). He survived.
• Two days later on the night of the California presidential primary, Bobby Kennedy was shot. He was dead by daybreak.
• Richard M. Nixon was elected president of the United States.

How it Started

In Mexico the conflict really started on July 22 when two groups of preparatory school students fought in the streets of the “Ciudadela” neighborhood near the center of the city. These fights were nothing new but this time the “granaderos” busted up the youngsters pretty good. On July 26, the anniversary date of Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, there was another big fight between demonstrators and riot police. Soon the demonstrators had almost taken over the city, with a crowd I estimated at 300,000 marching down all four lanes of the Paseo de la Reforma boulevard toward the Zocalo or main plaza. This huge demonstration was peaceful but my stories at the time pointed out the attacks in shouts and banners against President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz. That was something that was just not done in Mexico in those days. The president was not to be criticized or lampooned in public. They called him “the monkey” because of his looks. Diaz Ordaz denied until he died in 1979 that he ordered the massacre of the student demonstrators in Tlatelolco. But the secret documents released in 2006 showed that those of us who suspected otherwise were correct. Diaz Ordaz had a direct role. So did Luis Echeverria, the head of national security who would succeed Diaz Ordaz as president. It simply could not have happened without the orders, or at least the silent approval, of the president and the minister of “Gobernacion.”

RIP Ruben Salazar

After I phoned my information into the bureau I ran into Ruben Salazar, a good friend who was the Mexico City correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.  Ruben would meet his death covering still another violent demonstration. Salazar had come to Mexico from an assignment in Vietnam and even he was shaken by the violence in the plaza. Ruben and I would cover many stories together before he transferred back to Los Angeles.  Back in Los Angeles he was the nation’s first Hispanic columnist on a major newspaper. He also covered the news for KMEX, the Spanish language television station. He defended Chicano interests in his columns and three times was warned to stop by the Los Angeles police, warnings he ignored. On Aug. 29, 1970, Salazar was covering a demonstration by 20,000 Latinos in East Los Angeles. They were protesting the Vietnam War. The demonstration turned into a bloody battle between police and the crowd. As the violence wound down Ruben and the camera crew went to the Silver Dollar Café on the east side. Police surrounded it and fire tear gas projectiles into the café. One of them hit Ruben, killing him instantly. A coroner’s hearing ruled that he was murdered but no charges were ever filed. Ruben became a martyr. His name is on parks, streets, scholarships. His picture is on a U.S. postage stamp. His death led to the formation of what became the Hispanic Journalists Association. I’m glad that Ruben got so much recognition but in a way it’s funny. He didn’t think of himself as a Hispanic Journalist. In fact, he argued that he was a reporter, not a “journalist” and used the j-word in derogatory references to colleagues he thought unworthy of being called “reporter.”  He also liked to jump the hyphen. “I can be a Mexican, I can be an American or I can be a Mexican-American,” he laughed during one of our many long sessions over Scotch at the Foreign Correspondents Association headquarters in Mexico City. “I can be on any side of the hyphen I want. You don’t even have a hyphen.”