Mexican History

Content: As the time for the quadrennial Olympiad drew near, Mexico, the host country, looked warily at the anticipated arrival of thousands of visitors. Upheaval was the name of the game. It was, after all, 1968. Mexico’s President and Army had brutally, finally, firmly crushed the student-led protests that had filled the streets of the Capital since mid-summer and were anxious to demonstrate that the Revolution had produced a miracle of social and economic progress.

Content: In high summer 1968, a minor incident between two rival Mexico City high schools launched a national movement protesting government oppression and uniting left and right wing university students, faculty, and labor unions. With that ham-handed sense of public relations semi-democratic or single party states nearly always acquire when under assault, the Mexican government panicked and resorted to violence to suppress this student movement. It saw the marches and protests as an embarrassing challenge to Mexican tranquility, the regime’s authority and the idyllic image Mexico was creating of itself for the outside world, set to visit during the up-coming summer Olympics in October 1968.

Content: Until the middle of 1968, it seemed as though Mexico would be spared the unrest and violence that was sweeping the rest of the world. Despite the occasional outburst from labor unions and student groups over the years, quickly suppressed by the regular police and the infamous and brutal riot police, granaderos, Mexican society remained an intensely conservative one. It was seemingly devoted to its one-party state dominated since the 1920s by the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The so-called, “el milagro Mexicano,” the Mexican miracle, over three decades of unprecedented economic growth had boosted incomes, although unevenly, and began a significant expansion of the Mexican middle class.