Echeverría

Luis Echeverría turned 100 on January of 2022. He died peacefully in his residency on July 8, 2022. Impunity protected the former head of the Mexican nation-state until the end of his life.

The former head of the Mexican nation-state, Luis Echeverría (1922-2022), who ruled from 1970 to 1976, has passed away. He orchestrated the student massacres of Tlatelolco (October 2, 1968), and the CIA-trained paramilitary bloodbath known as The Corpus Christi Massacre (1971) 

Echeverría was instrumental in orchestrating the counterinsurgent massacre of Tlatelolco in 1968, as well as the international operation known as Halconazo.

Despite the copious lives executed on account of publicly expressing dissenting convictions, impunity sheltered the authoritarian chief executive until the end of his life. The president died in the safety of his home, in Cuernavaca, after having lived beyond the centenary of his birth.

In solidarity, we translate the following excerpts¹, penned by the deceased Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos.

In these vignettes, the author juxtaposes both general and painfully detailed brushstrokes, depicting a vivid genre painting of society in 1968.

Worldwide, the escalation of movements against capital, the status quo, armed forces, and bureaucracies administering the necessary steps to facilitate the full-subsumption of this bloodthirsty mode of production outlined the emergence of two different dimensions. The outcome, this explosive dialectical image of 1968, renders vividly two contrasting realities in fierce opposition to one another.

The Plaza of the Three Cultures corresponds to the main square within the Tlatelolco neighborhood, located in the nation-state’s capital. The name alluded to three distinct periods of architectural design manifested to the bare eye: that predating the perils of colonization, the syncretism of Spanish colonial facades, and the violent emergence of the modern state’s edifices.

This scenography witnessed the emergence of the Olympia Battalion, a secret component of the state apparatus intended exclusively for oppressive silencing throughout the Olympic Games hosted in Mexico City. The battalion members wore white handkerchiefs tied to their left extremities to distinguish themselves from civilians and prevent their fellow soldiers from shooting them.

According to reports widely circulated by the state-controlled Mexican media, the students had provoked the army's reaction when they fired snipers from within the surrounding apartment buildings in the plaza. The morning headline read: "Criminal student defiance at the Tlatelolco rally triggers a bloody confrontation." The Mexican public prosecutors accused the political figure of José Revueltas, among others, of being the "movement's ideologue" which led to his persecution.

The number of victims remains unknown. Although the United States government has declassified dozens of documents from the secret archives of the CIA, State Department, Pentagon, FBI and White House, certain key records remain classified and inaccessible to the public².

While the echoes of "¡no queremos Olimpiadas, queremos revolución!" ("we do not want Olympic Games, we want a revolution!") predate our terrestrial presence, the clamor of these voices nonetheless reaches us. We refuse to forget our fallen comrades, the impunity surrounding their murders, and their struggle.

Their struggle outlived their last breaths and continues to do so, despite the hegemonic attempts. 

taller ahuehuete

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1968

The 1968 movement marked the history of this land definitively.

Two contrasting countries confronted each other: the one on authoritarianism, intolerance, repression, and the most brutal forms of exploitation; and the one that wanted —and wants— to construct itself on a foundation of diversity, independence, participation, and autonomy.

Up there: the Mexico of the powerful, of those who decide by force and violence the course that best suits their interests; those who decide to use monologues, the stick, and the lie as their form of governance.

The ‘country’ of those who only listen to the false mirror that Power constructs, materialized by those who serve and idolize the powerful.

The ‘country’ of those who feign to offer an outstretched hand while they attack, persecute, imprison, rape, murder, and lie against those who do not render them blind obedience, submission, and bowed heads […], the Mexico of those who pretend to govern for all.

The Mexico of those who orchestrate catastrophes for the benefit of a few.

The Mexico of the wicked who order or pull the trigger in Tlatelolco, in Acteal, in Chavajeval, in Unión Progreso, in Aguas Blancas, in El Charco.

The Mexico of those at the top. The Mexico in agony.

Below is the Mexico of 1968. Of those who live and die this rebellion and commit to this struggle in the only possible way. That is, with their whole life.

Of those who continued, and continue demanding, fighting, organizing, and resisting.

The Mexico of those who did not see the years go by with bitterness.

Of those who rose, and fell again.

Those who returned, and always return, to rise again.

The Mexico of those who did not limit rebellion —and the demand for justice— to mere calendar issues, to passing illnesses that age cures.

Of those who refused to define "rebelliousness" as a notion that did not go beyond the length of men's hair as inversely proportional to the length of women's skirts.

The Mexico of those who were not satisfied by what they heard when searching for the signal of their radios, looking for an answer that claimed was in the wind; who did not see rebelliousness only as an uncomfortable counter-cultural alternative, who did not define the struggle for justice only as the season’s banger continually hummed.

The Mexico of those who did not let the passage of time equate sanity with claudication. The Mexico of those who did not cut off their dignity nor lengthen their forgetfulness.

The Mexico of those who did not turn 68 into a shameful past, a mere youthful prank, a stairway to bad government.

The Mexico of those who were not, are not, and will not be leaders.

But who at home, at their waged-labor location, in the bus, in the cab, on the horse, in the machine, in the classroom, in the factory, in their place of worship, in the messed-up [untranslatable³], they⁴ raise a hand, an image, a sound, a ballot, a vote, a fist, a thought, a voice to confront governmental lies and exclaim: No, no more. Enough is enough. I don't believe them. We want something better. We need better. We deserve better […]. The Mexico of those who learned that hope is also built with pain and falls.

Of those who said no to the false comfort of surrender, of those who with short, long, or no hair grew their dignity, of those who cradled the memory no matter if the skirt covered the knees or not.

Of those who lived and died in 1968 and began to give birth to another tomorrow, another land, another memory, another politics, another human being.

Of those who do not build stairs, of those who look to the sides and search for the other to become their "comrade", "compañera", "compañero", "compa", "hermano", "hermana", "pareja", "compita", "valedor", "amigo", "amiga", "manito", "manita", "colega".

Or whatever you want to call that long and bumpy collective road to the future.

From the mountains 
of the Mexican Southeast: 

The Clandestine Revolutionary 
Indigenous Committee - 
General Command 
of the Zapatista Army 
of National Liberation,

Subcomandante 
Insurgente 
Marcos

Courtesy of Héctor Gallardo, Images of Mexico City Student Movement, October 1968.

Courtesy of BrodyLiudzius. September 14th, 2020.

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1. From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast:

The Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee - General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation,

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos. October of 1998. Enlace Zapatista.

2. Doyle, Kate. “The Tlatelolco Massacre U.S. Documents on Mexico and the Events of 1968”.

3. It is hard to find an equivalent for the anglophone world. The US, for instance, exports their peseras (peceras, retired yellow public school buses) to the south, where they’re rehabilitated into polluting and crowded forms of transportation for the proletariat of the global south.

4. “[…] in their wheelchair, the plow, in the barber shop, in the beauty salon, on the tractor, in the airplane, in the workshop, in the street stall, on the motorcycle, in the market, in the hospital, on the bench, in the sports stadium, the doctor's office, on the stage, in the lab, in the strip club, the retirement home, at the desk, in the office, radio and television studios, in the visual arts workshops, in the subway, in the closet, in the newsrooms, at the counter, on the bicycle, in any of the colors with which the daily and silent are painted…”