It wasn't the largest of the many demonstrations that had happened in the last few months. The 10,000 students, housewives, railway workers, mothers, children, cried out against the usurping of Zapata's and Villa's revolution. They did so in the same place where a lieutenant of Zapata taught Villa how to read during the time they shared the same jail cell (1912); in the same place where Cuauhtemoc was defeated by Cortes (1521); in the same place where the children of the valley of Mexico held their market for centuries before and after the arrival of the Europeans. The students asked for the release of political prisoners, an end to the military occupation of their universities, and they threatened to embarrass the government during the Olympic games that were set to begin in only ten days.
At 5:30pm the multitude had already assembled in the square of the Three Cultures, and the government sharpshooters were already in place in the apartment building next to the square. Flares light from a helicopter give the signal and ``the an intense shooting [began and] lasted for 29 minutes''. The fire came from the thousands of soldiers that had encircled the demonstrators. It came from the sharpshooters. It came from the helicopters. The helicopters ``passed so close that one could recognize the man shooting from within it''. Meanwhile the police dressed as civilians hunted the people down. They wore a white handkerchief on the right hand as a countersign. ``The shoots fired on the [apartment building] reach such a high degree that at 7pm a large part of the building caught fire''. ``A discharge of fire more intense than all the others begins, and it continues on and on and on. Sixty two minutes of fire until the soldiers can no longer stand the heat from the red hot iron''. As the corpses pile up on the square, the doors of the convent remain closed to the those who are desperately trying to get in.
``At 12am shots were no longer heard in the Tlatelolco area''. Throughout the night soldiers and police searched for and hunted down those who hid in the buildings and apartments. Entire families were forced to abandon their homes after a rigorous search and examination. More than 300 people died. Thousands and thousands laid wounded. They beat the survivors ``as if they were breaking open a piñata''. ``One young man was forced to his knees and they cut out tufts of hair with a bayonet''.
The headlines of the Excelsior of Thursday, October 3, 1968 reads: ``Heavy Fighting When Army Fires on Demonstrators. 20 Dead, 75 Wounded, 400 Prisoners''. The head of the operation General Jose Hernandez Toledo, who was wounded by a bullet in the thorax, is presented as proof of the students' aggression. ``I think that if one wanted blood shed, the blood I have shed is more than enough'', declares the General.
Oscar Hernández
Translated from the Spanish original by the author.
All the quotes were taken from testimonies collected in the book ``La
noche de Tlatelolco'' by Elena Poniatowska.
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