Known mostly for his wonderful Mexico City detective novels, Paco Ignacio Taibo II reported, in this small book, now available in English, on events leading up to a mass murder of Mexican students and supporters during the turbulent year 1968. While students and activists worldwide took to the streets to protest repressive governments, few met the end that as many as 400 -- the numbers vary wildly -- students did in what has become known as the Tlatelolco Massacre.
As thousands of students and their supporters massed in a public square known as the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Tlatelolco, in Mexico City, activists' speeches were interrupted as shots rang out and bodies began to pile up. The official report was that a couple of dozen people had died; estimates, though, range into the hundreds - and this happened with little notice in the American press. After all, the world was preparing to hold its Olympic Games in Mexico City and the mass shooting was downplayed in that country and in the U.S.A., too.
But Taibo, who was part of the Movement that brought young Mexicans into the streets, paints a poetic picture of himself and his young comrades as they came together on campuses across that sprawling city, in classrooms and in busy downtown streets and squalid artists' apartments as well as parents' quiet homes. The students had the usual demands, hardened by the stranglehold that the country's corrupt government had on institutions and the media. Paranoid and frightening? Of course. Romantic and exciting? For sure!
There is better journalism detailing the Movement, the massacre and the lackluster official postmortems of the terrible event. But there is not, to my knowledge, any book that lets us feel the excitement and the terror that drove those brave students out of their classrooms and, for some unknown number, to their violent deaths in the Plaza of the Three Cultures.
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