Ex-President Testifies About ’68 Mexico Massacre

For the first time in modern Mexican history, a former president testified Tuesday before a congressional committee, as legislators plunged into an investigation of one of this country’s most painful events: the army massacre of student protesters in 1968.

Former President Luis Echeverria, 76, was asked to clarify the mystery still surrounding the military attack--an assault so bloody it started the gradual decline of Mexico’s one-party state. Echeverria was the powerful interior minister at the time and was president from 1970 to 1976.

But more striking than his testimony was the fact that the investigation was taking place at all. The probe was launched by the country’s first opposition-controlled Chamber of Deputies, or lower house. It was seen as an attempt to change a political system that long considered presidents sacrosanct and tight-lipped discipline more important than disclosure.

“This is very important for history,” said Armando Lopez, a member of the congressional committee, as he shook the former president’s hand before the hearing. It was a striking reversal of roles: Lopez told reporters that he had been a student demonstrator in the Mexico City plaza on the night of the massacre.

But the session disappointed those who were hoping for new information. Echeverria gave a rambling half-hour speech in which he spoke sympathetically about the students. When the legislators tried to close the session to the public in order to begin asking questions, Echeverria asked for a postponement.

As the hearing ended, a reporter asked the former president how many people had died in the massacre.

“I don’t know,” replied Echeverria, who as interior minister had been in charge of public security. “It’s being cleared up. Why are you so curious?”

Despite the powerful symbolism of a president being questioned, critics noted that the investigating committee has limited powers and cannot subpoena witnesses or offer immunity for testimony. Some questioned whether the truth would ever emerge. “This will serve to keep the theme in the media and ratify its historical importance,” said Carlos Monsivais, a noted social critic. “I don’t think it will serve for much more.”

While many books and articles have been written about the Mexico City massacre, the government has divulged few details about its actions.

What is known is this: On the evening of Oct. 2, 1968, shortly before the Olympic Games opened here, the Mexican army and riot police opened fire on demonstrators who had thronged the historic Plaza of Three Cultures to demand more democracy. The government said 50 were killed; historians put the figure in the hundreds.

The massacre was a turning point in Mexican politics. For many people, it stripped the legitimacy from a one-party system founded on the ideals of the Mexican revolution, a system that until then had provided political stability and impressive economic growth.

The government of then-President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz said students started the shooting and the army responded. Diaz Ordaz blamed an international left-wing conspiracy. But historians have discarded such accounts. For years, they have demanded, in vain, access to government files on the event.

“Within the culture of secrecy and private decision--often secrecy for life--that marks the modern Mexican political system, will we ever have a list of the men who were responsible?” wrote anguished historian Enrique Krauze in a best-selling recent book, “Mexico: A Biography of Power.”

Members of the congressional committee say the moment may finally have come when they can learn the truth. The committee was formed in October, after elections in which the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, lost control of the Chamber of Deputies for the first time in seven decades.

The new, opposition-controlled house has declared it will launch unprecedented investigations into past cases of corruption and abuse of power. Already, it has unearthed dozens of alleged cases of payoffs and payroll-padding in the past Congress.

But how far it will get with the 1968 massacre is unclear. Legislators said it was the first time a former president had ever appeared before a congressional committee. The members also want access to army files and intelligence information compiled by the United States and other governments.

But Monsivais, the social critic, said he believes the military files have already been destroyed.

Critics also noted that Echeverria was not under oath in Tuesday’s hearing and faced no prosecution. The congressional committee was so deferential it even interviewed the former president at his home.

But others said the probe could mark the end to a tradition in which political memoirs were seen as treason to the system and Mexican leaders took their secrets to the grave.

“We all have an enormous responsibility to advance in this investigation, to reach the limits of what is humanly possible,” wrote political scientist Federico Reyes Heroles, in a column in the daily Reforma. “How many mysteries are we Mexicans prepared to tolerate at this democratizing end of the century? Very few, and ’68 is not on the list.”