Soldiers of the Blockade.

Being the first Latin American country to become the elected host Olympics, the government did the impossible to look well under the rest of the world’s eyes.  It was a time of world turmoil and the last thing needed was for the twenty-ninth Olympic host to be seen as corrupt and dangerous.  A third world country, such as Mexico, needed such an event to give the economy a boost and become well recognized in the world as a prosperous country.  Some would have not imagined that it would have cost so many lives.  Until recently, the massacre which took place in the La Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco on October 2, 1968 was an event that was suppressed and shelved away in the Mexican government’s confines.  During this time, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz was Mexico’s president and he with his minister of the interior, Luis Echeverria Alvarez, were accused of having direct involvement in the genocide of Mexican students. 

Interesting enough, massacres as great as this have occurred in other societies and are also part of novels.  In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, a similar riot occurred.  In the novel, any form of retaliation against the banana plantation was brought to a halt by a massive killing of people at a train station.  The details of the event had been hidden from the public while only survivor was taken as a mad man when he tried to speak of his survival.  No one believed him and he could not forget the events.  About half a million students of the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) arrived to the event.  It was planned to be a peaceful demonstration, where families and workers would participate.  Yet, the event went to great extremes when the Mexican military decided to intervene.  Approximately three hundred people died during this tragic event, while the rest of the world prepared for the Olympics.  Many people were also injured, while others disappeared.  Jose Arcadio Segundo, a character from One Hundred Years of Solitude, made an attempt to form a movement against the mistreatment of the workers of the plantation.  The students involved in the occurrences that led to and preceded Tlatelolco were going against the abusive granaderos, the military occupation of the UNAM campus, the officers involved in controlling riots, and the government’s involvement against any movement for free speech (“Tlatelolco Massacre”).  The students were willing to cooperate as long as the students were allowed to present their views and come to a civilized agreement.  The organization involved in the novel’s riot as well as the organization involved in the Mexican political movement was feared by the authorities.  Therefore, the authorities, in both situations, decided to methodically rid themselves of any threat through genocide.  To Mexico’s misfortune, the government stated that there misbehaved protestors among the crowd and officials had no other choice than to defend themselves and the peace of the streets.  The bodies of the dead were removed in garbage trucks (“Tlatelolco Massacre”).  In One Hundred Years of Solitude, after the massive machine gun shooting at the train station, Jose Arcadio Segundo woke up inside a train surrounded by the corpses of the people that had been at the train station.  He realized that the officials believed he was dead, threw him in the train, and he was on the way to be disposed of with the rest of the people into the sea (Garcia Marquez 330).  In both, the novel and the Tlatelolco incident, traces of the crimes against the general public were erased, and those who could stand against the government were searched out.