Mexico's Students: One Step in Front of The Tanks

Three years ago last month, the 1968 Mexican student movement came to a bloody end when army tanks rumbled into a student demonstration in Mexico City killing over 200 men, women, and children on what is now remembered as "La Noche Triste"--the night of sorrow, While the movement lasted, it rivalled and sometimes surpassed the more famous movements of Paris and Columbia in both the size of its demonstrations and its shattering effect on the national power structure. But the protest died as suddenly as it began, and Mexican students left the streets for more than two and a half years. This past summer they returned.

In their boldest move since 1968, Mexican students three weeks ago marked the third anniversary of "La Noche Triste" by taking over the National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico's largest technical school. The takeover is only one sign of the increased political activity. When newly elected Mexican president, Luis Echeverria, granted amnesty to the student leaders imprisoned since 1968, the student left came alive. The atmosphere in university centers has noticeably changed from one of lethary and outright fear to excited planning and organizing. Opinions which were once only expressed behind locked doors are now freely offered to reporters. Richard Hyland, a former Crimson editor and now a freelance reporter, was soliciting these opinions from student leaders when he was imprisoned on charges of revolutionary activity last month.

There was a danger that the reawakened student movement would be strangled as soon as it began to breathe. On June 10 a demonstration of 10,000 students, demanding the release of all remaining student leaders from the prisons, was brutally broken up by a gang of toughs called the halcones. When the protesters reached a main intersection in Mexico City, busloads of halcones, armed with M-1 and M-2 rifles, emptied out into the street and began firing on the demonstrators as the police looked on. At least ten students were shot to death, and more died when the halcones entered hospitals and dragged the wounded students off the operating tables. Major Mexican newspapers immediately accused the city government of organizing and arming the halcones. Adding credibility to the accusations against city hall. President Echeverria fired the mayor and police chief and ordered a full scale investigation.

But far from scaring away the students, June 10 became a new rallying cry in the universities. Scores of signs calling for the dispersement of the halcones appeared on the outside of the national university buildings. The students realized that while the government was divided, the president and his close advisers wanted to be conciliatory in order to avoid another 1968.

Many student leaders would like to exploit the president's softer attitude but they have not yet been able to agree on a method. If June 10 exposed dissension within the government over how best to handle the students, it also laid bare the dissension within the students over what direction their movement should take. Factions are not new to Mexican student politics. Their notorious infighting, especially between the technical and preparatory schools, has earned the students a reputation as sideline political actors too busy attacking each other to attack the government.

Much of the factionalism is explained by the structure of Mexico City's school system, which is divided into two competing administrative sections. All the vocational schools are under the jurisdiction of the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) while all the preparatory schools (high schools) are under the jurisdiction of the National University (UNAM). Ever since Lazaro Cardenas, a famous leftist president, created the IPN for the sons of the working class in 1937 because of his frustration with the reactionary training given at the UNAM, the institute and the university have bitterly fought each other. Even the 1968 movement, which marked a high point in student unity, began as an argument over girl friends between vocational and prep school students.

It is still to early to tell whether the recent efforts by students to organize themselves will succeed or, if they fail, what positions the inevitable factions will take. Two rival camps are slowly emerging, however. One camp is led by Heberto Castillo, an engineering professor at UNAM who organized the teacher faction which supported the students in 1968, and by Cervantes Cabeza de Vaca, one of the most charismatic student leaders. Castillo and other long experienced radicals spent two years in jail after the 1968 movement. While in Lecumberri prison (the same prison where Hyland is now staying) they greatly influenced student leaders such as Cabeza de Vaca who were also there.

Castillo and Cabeza de Vaca are currently campaigning throughout Mexico for a national student party. They argue that the demonstration of June 10 was a foolish waste of lives since President Echeverria had freed all student prisoners shortly before the protest, thus removing any reason to have the march in the first place. Generally they believe that Echeverria would like to create a more open democracy, but that powerful business interests connected with American firms will discourage the president from his good intentions unless a student party can push him the other way.

The second camp, which is united in its opposition to Castillo, argues that he has misinterpreted the position and the power of the Mexican president. They claim that a student party would be bought off by the president like other protest groups in the past. Castillo is Echeverria's dupe, they say, and the president would exhibit the impotent student party as proof to Western visitors that he accepts opposition. Their utter distrust for the system has led these student groups to more radical activity than forming political parties. Some groups have joined the guerrilla movements in the mountainous states surrounding Mexico City.

It is indicative of the Mexican political system that both camps place so much emphasis on the position of the presidency. The executive is by far the most important branch of the government. Some "Mexicanologists" see the president as holding complete dictatorial power, limited only by a six-year term. Not only is the president the law-maker, he is the head of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the one party in a virtually single party system. PRI has won all presidential and senatorial elections since the end of the Mexican Revolution, 50 years ago. Yet the government has institutions even stronger than PRI for directing Mexican life and progress. These are three occupational sector organizations--labor, peasant, and popular (middle class). Almost everyone in Mexico's working and professional force must belong to one of these three organizations. Since the president personally appoints all the top leaders in each sector, he can count on their loyalty.

When other interest groups appear which have no connection with the three occupational organizations, the government will try to bring them into the fold, offering money, rewards, etc. If a group refuses to cooperate, the government will often use harsh physical force. In the government's eyes, the worst sin of all is to form a group or union independent of its control. Whole villages of peasants who refused to obey the state-controlled farm organizations have been uprooted and placed hundreds of miles from their homes. Sparing no one, the government has imprisoned railroad workers and doctors who have tried to form independent unions.

Of all groups, students have proven to be the most uncooperative. For decades the government has tried to create organizations to control the students. All have failed. In 1968 students turned away from any group which they suspected of having the slightest connection with the government. Even traditional leftist parties such as the communists and Trotskyites were driven off the campuses for fear of their possible PRI influence. Since 1968 neither a PRI official or a hard-line communist has been welcomed in Mexican universities.

The students see themselves as the only independent actors capable of large scale political action in a system where all other institutions have grown together into one monolithic ball. Wary of his government's attempts to destroy his unique position and yet intensely proud of his country, the Mexican student appears very different from his Western counterparts: he is first Mexican and second a student revolutionary.

In his book Los Dias y Los Anos on the 1968 movement, student leader Gonzalez de Alba tells of an encounter with an SDS member of Berkeley. The American could not understand why the Mexican students always spoke so reverently of their constitution whenever they attacked their government. Alba's answer reflected a nationalistic regard for the ideals of his constitution which would have become Daniel Webster. The SDS member then asked why the Mexicans struggled for such limited, reformist goals. Alba retorted that what might appear as liberal goals in other countries are truly revolutionary when applied to Mexico.

Most of the nationalist and reformist attitudes which separate Alba from the Berkeley student result from the position of the Mexican student in an economically developing nation. Within Mexico City, the educational center of the country, there are close to 200,000 students, of which 90,000 attend UNAM and 60,000 attend IPN. Although those attending the IPN are somewhat poorer than those in UNAM, most students are middle class in a country where the middle class is still very small. In the past 20 years the middle class has benefited most from Mexico's industrial growth. Students have very little contact with Mexican labor and almost none with the peasantry. While they would like to develop contacts with laborers and peasants, they are discouraged by the tight government controls. Before they can help the poor the students feel that they must first break the government's political stranglehold.

The students are fighting for a more open democracy. The government's calls for large voter turnouts and other democratic forms seem like sheer hypocrisy to the students, since only one party ever wins. In their view, labor and peasant organizations which were originally meant to serve the workers by adding unified weight to their demands serve only the government in its efforts to control the country.

In many ways the growth of students protest over the past five years is a sign that Mexico is growing up. After the brutal Mexican Revolution, national leaders were faced with unifying a country in which local war lords jealously ruled their domains. Leaders began to reconstruct the country around new organizations and unions is order to replace the influence of army factions with stable government. They did their job so well that Mexican presidents after World War II held unchallengable authority. Slowly in the middle sixties, however, young members of the middle class, who had grown up in a peaceful society, tired of a system which in the interests of stability left them little decision-making power. They wanted to pick their own leaders and run their own organizations. Foreseeing major disturbances unless the government opened its closed doors. Carlos Madrazo, the president of PRI in 1964, began to democratize the party by initiating primary elections. He was fired by President Diaz Ordaz who ruled over a Mexico increasingly torn by student strife. Finally in 1968 thousands of protestors challenged the very basis of his presidential power.

Despite the spontaneity of the 1968 movement, the student leaders showed a great awareness of the government's methods of handling protestors and a great dexterity in avoiding the government's advances. The students formed the National Strike Committee to best resist attempts to subjugate them. Sometimes, however, their fear of the government led them to make decisions which actually weakened their organization. Afraid to name a few top leaders who might then be bought off by the government, the students sat through hours of indecisive discussion without direction.

Believing labor too controlled and the peasantry too uninformed, the students played a public relations game aimed at wooing the middle class. Students demanded reform not revolution. Three demonstrations of between 250,000 and 500,000 people were conducted without violence. The government, on the other hand, began to use harsher and harsher methods. President Ordez was pressured by the approaching Olympics for which the government had spent millions. As time passed the students became less pliable. Finally on "La Noche Triste" tanks put an end to what negotiations could not solve.

Now, after three years, a new president rule Mexico and professes the need for rapid political change. The 1968 movement was seen by many as a critical changing point for the better in Mexican politics. Student leaders recently released from prison are not so sure. They admit that President Echeverria has fought hard to remove all traces of the rightist regime of Diaz Ordaz. But they suspect his intentions, which may be only to solidify his own position rather than to reform the government.

Some of the student leaders meet every week in a small cafe next to the school of political science in UNAM. They try to reach agreement on how to organize the students, how to raise money, and what to do once students and money are available. At the end of one such meeting a student turned to Romeo Gonzalez, one of the most radical of the 1968 student leaders, and asked him his prediction for the future. "Nothing has changed and nothing will change," Gonzalez said. "When the Mexican sees this the government will need the tanks again--but it won't be for a long time.