No Light for a Mexican Tragedy

Americans remember 1968 as a year of crisis. Vietnam brought down the Lyndon B. Johnson presidency, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago exploded into street violence.

Mexican memories are no less dramatic. That was the year of the Olympic Games in Mexico City and an outburst of anti-government student demonstrations that shook the foundations of the oligarchy. What a disappointment it was last week to see former President Luis Echeverria duck a chance to set things straight, wasting an opportunity to speak the truth about one of Mexico’s most painful moments.

A commission from the national Congress had taken the unprecedented step of calling a former president to testify in an open session. The Congress, no longer fully under the thumb of the Revolutionary Institutionalized Party, wanted the truth about the massacre of peacefully demonstrating students in the Tlaltelolco, a closed plaza in Mexico City, 30 years ago.

What it got instead was a circus orchestrated by Echeverria himself, in his own house and in the presence of his relatives, his friends and the press. For 90 minutes Echeverria lectured his audience, delivering a rambling speech with no trace of revelation. When the deputies timorously asked the former president to answer a few questions, he arrogantly dismissed them. That, he said, would have to wait for another day. What a sham.

On Oct. 2, 1968, perhaps as many as 300 people died in the Tlaltelolco. Echeverria, then a powerful Cabinet minister in the regime of President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, defended the president’s decision to put down the protest. In return, he got his reward. The president named Echeverria as his successor under the PRI’s secretive selection system, and 30 years later Echeverria still cannot face the truth of what happened that day in downtown Mexico City.

There are, though, some important lessons to be drawn from this sad experience. For one, the Mexican Congress should have never accepted Echeverria’s terms for the meeting--he speaks, it listens. The congressional delegation should have challenged him to tell what he knows. One might think he would have the pride to defend his action. Apparently not.

Echeverria’s cynical disregard for the truth demonstrates why the old Mexican system is crumbling. The new voters of Mexico want, deserve and demand better.