Before Saturday night, June 11, many people believed, either quietly or noisily, but with considerable exasperation, that the United States wouldn’t allow itself to become more self-destructive. Omar Mateen changed that.
For some U.S. citizens long resident in Mexico, the “massacre” by Mateen in Orlando, Florida rang brutal, if much twisted, echoes of killings directed by Mexico’s “political, social and financial elite” at its citizens. This mass killing was the October 2, 1968 work of the government’s military and police forces against unarmed Mexican students, professors and families, not the mass murder by a single home-grown Muslim extremist.
The similarity also rests with the fact that all the victims – unarmed midnight party-goers – were mostly young people. All were totally unprepared. The difference: the fact that all of last Saturday’s targets had no reason to harbor even the slightest bit of apprehension.
The brutality of the 1968 catastrophe: The innocence of the victims ... and the fact that their murders were ordered and carried out by their government, the elected (even if falsely) heads of that government, those policemen and soldiers.
In the 1968 slaughter, the evil was delivered by tax-payer-paid soldiers and policemen in the tax-payer-created Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of the nation’s capital.
The bitter irony: Most of the lucky survivors saw the casualty count as a low assessment, but were reluctant after the fact to suggest that truth. Many remained fearful of government retaliation ... and remained that way for a long time. For the Tlatelolco massacre was a part of what is now known as Mexico’s “Dirty War” of the 1960s. That was when the government used its forces to suppress political opposition. That massacre occurred just ten days before the opening of the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.
The numbers used by reports of that slaughter are considered false by everyone I know who had any contact with Tlatelolco. And even those false statistics are nearly impossible to obtain.
Mexican President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, of the long-reigning Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), had struggled to maintain peace during a time of rising social tensions but suppressed movements by labor unions and farmers fighting to improve their lot. He wanted to present the country in a positive light without protests and was heavy-handed in trying to direct the economy.
The deft manipulator of Diaz Ordaz’s government programs was the quiet, relentless Minister of the Interior, Luis Echeverria. And he would unfortunately, become Diaz Ordaz’s successor as president.
More than 1,300 people were arrested by security police in Tlatelolco. The similarity exists between this massacre and the one in Florida last Saturday primarily in 1) the surprise killings 2) attacks on unarmed victims and 3) the wide swath of deaths. Shock, total surprise and frozen fear, disarmed a great many of the surviving victims. And continued to do so for some time.
It has prompted long-time foreign residents to recall that such self-destructiveness, such self-ridiculousness was not merely becoming renewed, but newly widespread.
The presidency of the seemingly quiet Minister of Interior, Luis Echeverria (1970-1976), was to become more heavy handed than that of Diaz Ordaz. This stunningly incoherent and merciless presidency remains dizzying in its brutality to this day. Making such things as the brutality of Omar Mateen seem ruthless but, to many historians, not as intricate and culturally atrocious as the malignancy of Echeverria.
This is the first of a two-part series.