The Mexico Project
The Tlatelolco Massacre: U.S. Documents on Mexico and the Events of 1968

Kate Doyle | October 20, 2003

With this article, the Americas Program continues a new series in conjunction with the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. As Mexico Project Director Kate Doyle explains: "The main objective of the project is to challenge the myths of foreign policy--on both sides of the border." To that end, Doyle combs nearly four decades of U.S. and Mexican archives to uncover new evidence and bring to light the hidden histories behind the bilateral relationship. The results, presented in this monthly series, offer the unprecedented opportunity to separate the rhetoric from the reality, and provide a foundation for rebuilding binational diplomacy on the basis of shared interests, transparency, and citizen involvement. The original documentation, as well as previous articles, may be found at www.nsarchive.org/mexico. Your comments are welcome at <americas@irc-online.org>.

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. Although months of nationwide student strikes that preceded October 2nd had prompted an increasingly repressive response from the Díaz Ordaz regime, no one was prepared for the bloodbath that Tlatelolco became. When the shooting stopped, hundreds of people lay dead or wounded, as Army and police forces seized thousands of surviving protesters and dragged them away.

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 had 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-five years later, the Tlatelolco tragedy has grown large in Mexican memory, and lingers still. It is Mexico's Tiananmen Square, Mexico's Kent State: it marks the moment when the pact between the government and the people began to come apart and Mexico's extended political crisis began.

In 1998, the National Security Archive made public a set of 30 documents related to the massacre. This year, to commemorate the anniversary of Tlatelolco, we have assembled a larger collection of our most interesting and richly detailed records about Mexico in 1968. Many of the documents were only recently released in response to the Archive's Freedom of Information Act requests; all of them come from the secret archives of the CIA, FBI, Defense Department, the U.S. 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 that 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 and civilian security agents in crushing the demonstrations.

Times have changed since 1998. Mexico's political transition encouraged the government to take important steps toward clarifying the past. In November 2001, President Vicente Fox announced the creation of a special prosecutor's office, charged with unearthing new information about the events of October 2, 1968 and bringing judicial charges against those responsible for the deaths of the students. Fox also ordered the release of an extraordinary collection of government records produced by Mexico's intelligence and military services during decades of state-sponsored violence, from the 1960s to the 1980s, including records on the killing at Tlatelolco.

Mexican researchers are just beginning to plumb the depths of the recently opened files of the regime's domestic spy apparatus and military archives. In the meantime, details about the Tlatelolco massacre continue to trickle out through newly declassified U.S. documents. None provides a definitive answer to the questions that linger, but they do contain a revealing glimpse into what happened that night, thirty-five years ago.

An Embassy Confused

Like many Mexicans, officials of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City were unprepared for the strength of the student protests and the violence unleashed by the Díaz Ordaz regime in response. Reporting out of the Embassy was often confused during the crisis, probably because Embassy officials were closer than those of other U.S. agencies to the Mexican political class and tended to believe its propaganda. On the one hand, the Embassy had an underlying faith in the hegemony of the regime; on the other, U.S. officials discounted the possibility that the students might be capable of mounting a serious challenge to the government.

Prompted by a request from Washington after the riots in France that May, the Embassy wrote several assessments of the Mexican student body that failed to predict the coming storm. On June 14, less than six weeks before the first clash between students and security forces, the Embassy confidently predicted that nothing comparable to the upheaval in Paris could happen in Mexico:

The government and the official party (PRI) maintain persuasive contact throughout the country with the people, which serves not only to give the party and the government a continuing assessment of popular feeling but also to "sell" to the people governmental decisions and policies. [...] The government has diverse means of gauging and influencing student opinion, and it has shown itself able and willing, when unrest exceeds what it considers acceptable limits, to crack down decisively, to date with salutary effects. Furthermore, student disorders, notwithstanding the wide publicity they receive, simply lack the muscle to create a national crisis...

The United States knew long before the violence began that the Mexican government feared attempts to disrupt the Olympic Games, which were scheduled to begin on October 12 in Mexico City. In April, and again in May, the Pentagon received urgent requests from the Mexican military for military radios, several tons of gunpowder, and mortar fuses, which it sent. (Later, in mid-August, the Defense Intelligence Agency would pass a request to Washington from the Mexican Army for riot control training material.)

Once the disturbances broke out, the Embassy was quick to adopt the regime's line that the student protests were inspired by hard-line communists. Citing evidence that the Communist Party, with the complicity of the Soviet Embassy, had engineered the clash of July 26, U.S. officials wrote in a secret cable for the White House that "Embassy considers that strong possibility exists Moscow has ordered PCM (Partido Comunista de México) to adopt more militant tactics." It was a position they would change within days, as a more realistic analysis replaced the fictions spun for public consumption by the Díaz Ordaz government about foreign influence on the movement.

U.S. confusion also arose because the regime was itself divided over what tactic to take with the students. Although the first riots in late July were met with violent police and military force, much of August passed with little coercive intervention on the part of the government, though plenty of behind-the-scenes manipulation.

Central to the regime's decisionmaking was a key figure in the government--and one of the Embassy's main sources of information--Interior Secretary Luis Echeverría Alvarez. Echeverría has, over the years, repeatedly denied having been a protagonist during the student disturbances of '68. As recently as 1998 he told a reporter from El Universal that he played only a minor role at the behest of President Díaz Ordaz, who would later name him candidate for the PRI in the 1970 national elections. The journalist, Irma Rosa Martínez, asked Echeverría whether his involvement in the events of '68 affected his chances to be nominated for president.

- Well, it favored me because I didn't intervene in anything. That's it, the president handled everything, everything--the political and the military aspects--with the Minister of Defense. I made some declarations once for public dialogue and that's all. It didn't harm me at all.
- But as Minister of Government, hadn't you been charged with part of the problem, the negotiations?
- No, no, no. The president handled all that. Everything, everything. There were no negotiations. When there was a disturbance he left them and then sent in the Army.

But according to CIA and State Department documents, Echeverría created and headed a key working group of senior government officials designed to fashion a response to the student protests immediately after they broke out on July 26. The CIA station observed on July 31, that "A 'Strategy Committee,' under the direction of Minister of Government Luis Echeverría, is of the opinion that the current wave of student disturbances has been brought under control." In Washington, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) identified the committee as being at the heart of the government's efforts to head off the students--whether by force or by coercion. Following the first confrontation between police and students, the INR wrote on August 6,

The committee decided to allow the students to effervesce for a time hoping that the situation would not become violent. However, troops were alerted and moved into position. The government apparently considered the period around the 29th crucial and when it acted, it used massive force in an effort to convince the rampaging students that it would not tolerate a breakdown in public order. [...]

At the same time that force was being applied, the government worked quietly with the rector of the National Autonomous University and some student leaders. The strategic committee, acting on instructions from the president, advised the rector to encourage demonstrations on the university campus and even to criticize the government.

At that early stage, the regime was still unsure which hand to use: the mano dura or the mano conciliatoria--crackdown or conciliation. The CIA reported on July 31 that both DFS chief Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios and Fernando Solana, Secretary General of UNAM, had confirmed privately that "neither the Mexican government nor the university management has any plans for dealing with the current problem of student protests and agitation."

CIA on the Ground

While the Embassy struggled to make sense of the regime's strategy, the CIA was busy gathering raw intelligence on events as they unfolded. Curiously, most of the CIA records declassified on 1968 come from its covert directorate, and represent field reporting from the agency's station in Mexico City. The documents have the advantage of being vivid snapshots taken from the ground; they have the disadvantage of containing little analysis or "finished intelligence" that would help put the events into context.

It is clear from the declassified record that the CIA station in Mexico reported almost daily on the disturbances of July 26--October 2, using sources that included Fernando Gutierrez Barrios and other officials within the DFS, Luis Echeverría, officials within the President's Office, an official in the Education Secretariat, university contacts (including administrators and students), and intelligence gathered by "trained observers"--which could be American officers from the station or Mexican "liaison" intelligence officers.

Information was gathered on every aspect of the crisis, but the CIA's resources were most intensively focused on leftist students and "known agitators" (such as UNAM students Luis González de Alba, Gilberto Guevara Niebla, Romero González Medrano, Jesus Rodríguez, Roberta Avendano and Ignacio Rodríguez), radical professors (such as the IPN's Fausto Trejo Fuentes and Eli de Gortari), political tendencies within the various schools at UNAM, and the activities and whereabouts of known Communist Party members.

In particular, the CIA tracked attempts by the regime to penetrate and influence the university community from within. CIA officers tended to perceive such efforts through the lens provided by their sources inside the regime. Following UNAM Rector Javier Barros Sierra's decision to support the student cause and lead protest rallies inside the University City--a step taken in an effort to avoid violence and convince whatever moderate tendencies existed within the government that the students could demonstrate responsibly--the station wrote, on August 9, that

The government's strategy over the past week--temporizing concessions mixed with arm-twisting and encouraging university rectors to make common cause with the students in order to exert a moderating influence--was effective. Two mass student marches took place without disorder, and there has been no significant violence this week.

Like the Embassy, the station suffered from being too close to its sources. The CIA was still convinced in mid-August that Díaz Ordaz and his men could divide and conquer the 1968 student movement in the capital as they had other protests in the states during the 1960s: (August 10) "Government is aware that there are divisions among the various student factions, and it is actively involved in creating further division so that no really unified leadership group emerges." But as the crisis dragged on and became more violent, the CIA began to recognize the change that was taking place. As the station observed on September 9,

This experience has shown that the government and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) do not possess the power and near total control over public behavior which existed previously. While there is little doubt that Mexican students have been influenced by student uprisings in the U.S. and Europe, the recent student disturbances have been a new experience for Mexico and may provide an indication of things to come. The old order is passing, and [...] students have found they can be a significant element in the nation's decision making process, and they are no longer contented with the patronizing attitude of the government.

Shortly before the confrontation on October 2, the agency's dispatches to Washington began to reflect the sense that the Díaz Ordaz regime was closing in on the movement. On September 26, just six days before Tlatelolco, the station sent a cable describing clashes between security forces and students of Vocational Schools Two and Five. A policeman shot and killed a student outside of one of the schools; the next day, students gathered at the home of the victim to join the family in a funeral march to the cemetery. "The occasion was being watched by members of the security service," reported the CIA.

The government policy currently being followed to quell the student uprisings calls for immediate occupation by the army and/or police of any school which is being used illegally as a center of subversive activity. [...] Both the Minister of Government (Gobernación) and the head of the Office of Federal Security (DFS) state that, in their opinion, no danger exists that the Olympic games will be affected, and, further, that the situation will be under complete control very shortly, meaning a cessation of all acts of violence. [Emphasis added.]

Massacre at Tlatelolco

There are no eyewitness reports from "trained observers" present at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas among the U.S. declassified documents. What exist are summaries of what was believed to have happened, as collected from press accounts, intelligence officers, and Mexican government officials. In the hours and days immediately after the bloodshed, all the U.S. agencies operating inside Mexico--the Embassy, the CIA station, the Defense Department, and the FBI--initially accepted the regime's line that pre-positioned student snipers had provoked the massacre.

By mid-October, however, American officials had backed away from that theory and were expressing uncertainty as to whether students or government security agents had started the confrontation. "Versions differ," wrote the Embassy to Washington on October 20, "as to whether the first shots came from the Plaza or from the nearby Chihuahua Apartment Building and as to whether they came from the students or the agents of law enforcement."

Defense Intelligence Agency reporting contradicted official accounts of beleaguered Mexican troops trying to keep order as radical students attacked. On October 18, the military attaché described the scene: "There was considerable disorganization among Army elements present [...] and there was some indiscriminate firing by soldiers who fired wildly at the apartment buildings, rather than trying to locate the exact source of the sniper fire. No indiscriminate firing by soldiers into the crowd in the plaza was reported, however. These same sources did say that soldiers were observed looting shops in the ground floors of some of the apartment buildings, a situation which indicates they were not very well controlled by their officers."

As the dust cleared in the days following the bloodshed, American officials took note of Mexican government attempts to divert the blame for the confrontation away from the regime. In one report written by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research on October 10, the State Department revealed that the government had "arranged" to have student leader Socrates Campos Lemus accuse dissident PRI politicians such as Carlos Madrazo of funding and orchestrating the student movement. "The government's motives in doing this are as yet unclear, but it may have been trying to shift the blame for its inept handling of the affair to persons that it feels can be destroyed politically fairly easily."

U.S. officials stood resolutely by Díaz Ordaz after Tlatelolco, despite Washington's dim view of his government's actions. One day after Tlatelolco, the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, Covey Oliver, wrote the Secretary that, "We believe it important to avoid any indication that we lack confidence in the [Government of Mexico's] ability to control the situation." And in a review of "contingency scenarios" drafted by the U.S. Embassy in November, the ambassador urged Washington to be prepared to grant financial assistance and economic support packages to Mexico in the event of continued or increased student violence, as a way of showing U.S. support for the regime.

But the United States recognized the deeper significance of the Tlatelolco massacre, and the enormous chasm that had been opened between an intransigent regime and students demanding change. On October 10, the State Department wrote an insightful and pessimistic coda to the affair.

It seems unlikely that the PRI can bring about a fundamental solution to the problem without changing the widespread conviction that it is entrenched, stagnant, and primarily self-serving. The students have to be convinced that, despite the enormous graft and dishonesty which have become hallmarks of the PRI, the party is still, or will become again, a vital force for political and social change, as well as economic growth. The present leadership does not appear to be disposed to comprehend the magnitude of the problem of student alienation and to accept it as a serious warning that the party is not responding to the legitimate needs of an increasingly vocal segment of Mexican society.

Kate Doyle <kadoyle@gwu.edu> is a frequent contributor to the IRC Americas Program (online at www.americaspolicy.org) and Director of the Mexico Project of the National Security Archive.

Links:

National Security Archive
Mexico Project
Phone - DC: (202) 994 7000
Phone - Mexico: (52 555) 574 7897
http://www.nsarchive.org/

Proceso
http://www.proceso.com.mx/

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Published by the Americas Program at the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org). ©2003. All rights reserved.

Recommended citation:
Kate Doyle, "The Tlatelolco Massacre: U.S. Documents on Mexico and the Events of 1968," Americas Program (Silver City, NM: Interhemispheric Resource Center, October 20, 2003).

Web location:
http://www.americaspolicy.org/columns/doyle/2003/0310tlatelolco.html

Production information:
Writer: Kate Doyle
Editor: Laura Carlsen, IRC
Layout: Tonya Cannariato