Four Decades

Forty years ago today, hundreds of student activists were slaughtered in Mexico City in the Tlatelolco massacre, a tragic event that stands as perhaps the most significant moment in Mexico's post-revolutionary history. It exposed the governing class --Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and Luis Echeverría specifically, the PRI more generally-- as predators. Tlatelolco helped form a generation of Mexicans with a confrontational and cynical attitude toward government, which made the fall of the PRI inevitable. Spanish speakers, check out the special supplement in today's Jornada, the major newspaper whose consciousness remains most affected by October 2nd, 1968.