Upsurge and Massacre In Mexico, 1968
Part 1: The Youth Revolt
Thirty years ago, Mexico was shaken to its foundations by a fierce upsurge of the people--with rebel youth at the forefront.
On the evening of October 2, 1968, the Plaza of the Three Cultures in the Tlatelolco apartment complex in Mexico City filled up with thousands of students and Tlatelolco residents. The students and residents boldly defied army troops and escalating government brutality. This was happening as hundreds of international journalists gathered in Mexico City for the 1968 Olympic Games, which were just about to get underway.
Plaza de las Tres Culturas
As darkness fell, soldiers, tanks, and police secretly surrounded the crowd. At a preset signal, helicopters, undercover agents in the crowd, two columns of soldiers advancing in a pincer movement, and tanks opened fire. Over 300 people were murdered and thousands wounded and jailed on that October 2 evening--known as the Massacre of Tlatelolco.
With this savage act, the U.S.-controlled regime of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) hoped to isolate and terrorize the student upsurge. Instead, the massacre exposed the real nature of the government--and compelled many people in Mexico to grapple with the question of what it will take to bring about real change.
The events of October 2, 1968 continue to be a very important question in Mexico. New books, newspaper articles and photos are bringing more facts to light about the massacre. Meanwhile, the "official story" still claims that the troops had been "provoked" into firing their guns. And the government refuses to release key evidence, including hours of film footage shot by their own film crews.
This continuing controversy shows that the questions raised by the Tlatelolco Massacre -- including the need for revolution -- are as urgent as ever in Mexico. The U.S. imperialists, in league with Mexico's bureaucrat bourgeosie and landowning classes, have tightened their domination over the country--as millions suffer from deepening poverty. From Chiapas to Mexico City, people are in struggle--as the government steps up bloody repression.
On the 30th anniversary of the Tlatelolco Massacre, the legacy of the rebel youth of 1968 remains alive. October 2 is not forgotten!
"We Don't Want Olympic Games, We Want a Revolution!"
The International Olympic Committee--headed by Avery Brundage from the U.S.--had chosen Mexico as the first Third World country ever to host the Olympic Games. This was aimed both to draw oppressed countries into imperialist-dominated world sport and to showcase Mexico as a model of U.S.-sponsored growth and relative stability. Mexico was supposed to provide a contrast to the national liberation struggles which were shaking most of Latin America, Asia, and Africa and sparking rebellions in the imperialist citadels from Detroit to Paris as well.
Then, two months before the start of the Games, Mexico added itself to the list of world trouble spots. A student rebellion erupted with a speed that shocked the government and various political organizations and ignited broader masses.
The Mexican government and their Western backers had hoped to send impressive images of the new $175 million sports arena, new hotels, and scrubbed streets to viewers around the world. Instead, buses burned on downtown corners and the U.S. embassy suffered attacks of anti-Yankee and anti-PRI graffiti. One of the popular slogans was, "We don't want Olympic Games, We want revolution!" The student strike council sent a "Manifesto to Students of the World," proclaiming that the myth "that our country is a model for other underdeveloped countries to follow, has been destroyed by the government forces themselves."
This movement of rebellious students was touched off on July 24 when a fight between gangs at two high schools connected with the longtime rivals, the Mexican National Autonomous University (UNAM) and National Polytechnical Institute (IPN, or "Poli"), was viciously put down by antiriot police called granaderos. When outraged vocational students protested, granaderos attacked again, killing many.
In response, students seized buses and put up barricades to defend their schools. Student strikes and takeovers hit high schools all over the capital. The high school students were supported by UNAM and Poli students. They formed a grassroots National Strike Council (CNH) and put forward six strike demands: disband the granaderos; fire police chiefs; investigate and punish higher officials responsible for the repression; pay compensation for students killed and injured; repeal laws making "social dissolution"--breaking down of society--a crime (under these laws many independent unionists and communists had been jailed); and free political prisoners, including students arrested in the recent disturbances as well as those seized earlier for social dissolution.
Within three days the government had to call in the army to take back several Mexico City prepas ( preparatorias--high schools connected to universities). There were clashes which led to many hundreds of arrests and injuries. Thirty-two students had been killed since the first confrontation, but this only fired up the youths' resistance. The student strike spread to the UNAM, Poli, and universities throughout the country, supported by a majority of professors. By late August and September the students were calling marches of 300,000 to 600,000 people; important contingents of workers and peasants participated regularly.
Taking the Stage on a School Bus Roof
The ferment and questioning of the youth, together with the visible weakness of the government in the face of the swelling upsurge, opened up a long-jammed door to political life for hundreds of thousands of workers, urban poor, and the poorer middle strata who in one way or another participated in the struggle.
Student brigades strained their creativity and skills to foil police and get the word out. Engineering students designed balloons which would burst when they got to a certain height and rain leaflets on the heads of pedestrians. Acting students put on realistic street theater in which a student and a conservative woman in pearls and heels carried out loud debates in crowded markets. Hundreds of observers would be drawn in, the majority on the side of the youth, and the advanced would be quietly contacted by "undercover" students in the crowd.
Some students found that they and the barrio or slum dwellers spoke what seemed to be two different languages. They had to throw out "bookish" talk and learn from the vivid "caló" slang of the streets. After a full day of brigade work, they would spend the night in classrooms they had taken over, discussing the conditions and outrages the masses had exposed them to and figuring out how to use this new knowledge in their leaflets and agitation.
The red and white buses of the IPN, always with some daring students and a loudspeaker perched on the roof, became famous for a kind of roving speak-in. Workers, market vendors, and even mariachi singers would climb up on the bus roof one after another to voice their support or disagreement with the students' demands or tactics and to air their grievances. In some neighborhoods, just the appearance of a Poli bus was enough to immediately attract crowds of hundreds of people who would gather around.
Peasants and Oil Workers
A particularly rich relationship developed between students and peasants from Topilejo, a small village in the mountains outside the capital. When a number of townspeople were killed in a bus accident in August, Topilejo residents seized buses and went to UNAM students to get support for their demand for safe roads, new buses, and fair compensation for the victims. Students sent university buses to take over the route. Nursing, agriculture, social work, and medical students set up a camp in Topilejo, "the Soviet," to provide information and assistance. Hundreds of brigades traveled into all the villages in the area to help expose many peasants to political ideas and in turn learn from the conditions and the rich history of rebellion of the peasants. After this, peasants from Topilejo participated at every student meeting in the capital.
Significant contingents of electrical, railroad, and petroleum workers defied threats from their government-run unions to join the movement. In many factories a few workers regularly took leaflets to distribute to others.
In one example, young oil workers in the Atzcapotzalco refinery district of northern Mexico City formed a "struggle committee" and contacted students in the nearby Casco de Santo Tomás vocational high school. Students and sympathetic workers conducted daily rallies at the gates and in the surrounding barrios where many oil workers' families lived.
The state took very seriously the potential for the student upsurge to infect wider sections of the working class, including relatively better-off workers in the strategic state-owned oil industry. According to a complaint published by a group of oil workers on August 30, undercover police infiltrated the plant and then the army was sent in. Outside, a cordon of soldiers would cock their machine guns and jab bayonets at workers as they left work to prevent them from gathering; inside, the troops supervised production to prevent strikes or sabotage.
The regime's overseers in the U.S. were also very worried. The New York Times warned on September 21: "The implications of [the brigades], if carried out on a large enough scale, are enormous. It is in effect an attack on the political and social structure as it now exists, and in this sense, quite apart from the presence of Communist groups in the student movement, the activity is subversive."
Women Brigades and Acelerados
In the course of and alongside all this activity, the movement wrangled over many crucial questions--from day-to-day tactics to what kind of revolution Mexico needed, what was its principal target, the role of the working class and peasants, and women's oppression. The pro-Soviet Communist Party, Guevarists, Trotskyists, and Maoists contended for leadership.
Women were particularly supportive of the movement. This was notable among middle-class women although not confined to them. The book Massacre in Mexico (La Noche de Tlatelolco) by Elena Poniatowska quotes several middle-class women who felt drawn to the youth because they were challenging society's rules, in contrast to how the women had been stifled and boxed in all their lives.
Among the students, young women upset the old reformist wisdom of women "supporting their men" and battled to participate--often against the tide--in all aspects of the struggle, whether debates or the physical defense of schools. In Massacre in Mexico, a male leader ruefully remembers how he had declared in a speech urging students not to give up territory to police and right-wing thugs: "Let us not have to weep like women for what we could not defend like men." When he returned to his apartment, he found two brigades of women students waiting for him. For the next few hours he got a well-deserved earful for his use of a degrading stereotype.
One wing of the movement became known as the acelerados, literally the sped-up ones, because they insisted on always going toe-to-toe with the forces of the state. The bulk of the acelerados came from the IPN and its vocational high schools as well as the prepas. Most were in their teens, and a larger percentage were from working-class families than in the university as a whole. The term "acelerado" was used as a put-down by the "soft-liners" who always tried to limit the scope and fury of the movement. But these rebel "sped-up" youth took the name as a badge of honor, and it was their defiance which characterized the movement and set the pace for much of the upsurge.
Baa...We're Sheep!
The student rebellion even spread into very respectable sections of middle-class people in Mexico City. On August 28, after a huge and unruly demonstration in the central Zócalo Plaza--up till then considered sacred turf reserved for PRI mobilizations--the government said that national symbols had been "insulted." Thousands of bureaucrats and government office employees were herded onto buses and taken to the Zócalo for a ceremony to "right the wrong." The government expected these government employees to be their most loyal followers. But hundreds began to bleat loudly: "Baa...we don't want to go, we're sheep...Baa!"
Students who had infiltrated the crowd began to call impromptu meetings then and there. Political discussion broke out in every small group of bureaucrats. The government had to call in tanks and soldiers to disperse its own rally, as running battles erupted through the center of town and a hail of bottles fell from the rooftops.
Then, on September 18, 10,000 troops invaded UNAM in an attempt to break it as a base for student actions and to nab CNH members meeting there. But the CNH had received hundreds of warning calls, and the members were long gone when the troops arrived. What the invasion did was to shatter the sham of the university's autonomy from the state and to outrage intellectuals and students all over the country and the world. Mexican embassies were stoned in the Caribbean; many university administrators in Latin America denounced the invasion; students in Latin America and the U.S. protested. UNAM's president announced his resignation. A group of 150 reporters and editors in the capital published a protest against the UNAM invasion and against the government's propaganda attack on the university and its president.
Wide sections of the middle classes, including professionals, were drawn into motion. For example, in late September doctors and nurses in the capital's two main hospitals were arrested for treating students wounded by police. Resident doctors went on strike in support of the CNH. Contingents of the Revolutionary Teachers Movement, dissidents from the government-run teachers' union, were regular participants as well.
Overlords and Agents
The Yankee overlords to the North viewed the gathering force of the movement in Mexico with great alarm. Here was a student upsurge centered in the two main universities of the capital, the UNAM and the Poli, which was gaining much support and drawing in broader and broader sections of society. The threat to U.S. imperialism's plan to showcase Mexico as a model of Third World stability was all too real (not to mention the larger dangers the movement posed).
The main stadium for the Olympics was located on the UNAM campus, in the middle of the ferment. CIA agent Philip Agee, who had been sent to Mexico as a spy in 1968 under the cover of organizing cultural exchanges during the Olympics, was forced to dismantle a Jupiter missile exhibition at UNAM before students tore it down. The opening of an Atomic energy exhibit at the Poli was postponed while another site was found. Right on the eve of the Olympics, the students were shattering the false picture of imperialist-sponsored development, economic prosperity and social peace. They were determined that the eyes of the world see the real Mexico.
Student unrest in Mexico City, 1968
Clearly things were getting out of hand, and the U.S. was certainly in a position to dictate policy behind the scenes. Mexico is the only foreign country where the FBI openly operates, and the CIA's Mexico City station is the largest in the hemisphere. Winston Scott, the CIA station chief there, was so thick with the Mexican elite that a Mexican president was the official witness at Scott's wedding. A CIA-prepared summary of leftist plans and activities was placed on President Diaz Ordaz's desk every morning. According to Agee (now a well-known critic of the CIA), the station was "of great assistance in planning for raids, arrests, and other repressive action."
On September 27-28, CIA director Richard Helms flew into Mexico City to consult with Scott.
Upsurge and Massacre in Mexico, 1968
Part 2: Blood at Tlatelolco
When the Tlatelolco Women Boiled Water--But Not for Dinner
As battles between youth and security forces became more and more pitched--and as supporting the movement became more risky--more sections of the masses stepped in to join them. This happened most especially in the Tlatelolco complex, a huge, mainly middle-class project which also housed many workers and poor families in its rooftop flats. One press report estimated that 12,000 residents participated in the movement on the side of the students.
On September 21, 1,000 police attacked Voca (Vocational) 7, a high school within Tlatelolco. Students held them off in a fierce battle in which police set fire to two buildings, fired round after round of gunfire into the school, and launched clouds of tear gas into apartments.
Tlatelolco housewives spent that night boiling water to throw out the windows onto soldiers or hunting for rags, bottles, and fuel to make molotov cocktails for the students. Children lined the roofs aiming rocks and sticks on the uniforms below. Hundreds of youths from Vocas in surrounding poor barrios broke through the police cordon by blowing up police cars. Newspapers reported that "gangster youth" from Tepito also joined with the student fighters. Even after calling in reinforcements from the army, the security forces were often driven back. They finally gave up at 2 a.m.
A baby girl and at least three students were killed and many hundreds arrested during this battle. Twenty granaderos (antiriot police) were injured. Four more were shot--one fatally--by an army lieutenant who saw them beating his mother.
The police seized Voca 7 two days later in a fierce exchange of gunfire. In response, a woman representative of Tlatelolco residents called for a rent strike, to continue as long as the student conflict did.
On September 24-25 a similar but even more ferocious battle pitted 1,500 police and soldiers against up to 2,000 students at the Casco de Santo Tomás vocational school near the refinery district. The students, some armed, barricaded the neighborhood, cut trenches, set up a command post and runners, and fortified themselves on rooftops. The Washington Post reported that students commandeered an oil truck to firebomb police cars and that perhaps 15 students were killed.
It is no accident that the government forces chose Tlatelolco as the site of the massacre and that bystanders, even small children, were targeted. The participation of Tlatelolco residents showed the potential for the student movement to unleash an even more powerful wave of mass rebellion against the ruling class.
At 6:10 p.m.
On the evening of that fateful October 2, 10,000 students and residents filled the Plaza. Almost every rally in the previous two weeks had been broken up by police, with up to 1,000 arrests a day. Many more residents leaned out from their windows. Speakers had told the crowd that a planned march on the Casco de Santo Tomás campus would be canceled to avoid "provoking" a fight and that the rally was about to end. But the government didn't need an excuse to launch what it had planned as a show of ruthless power. About 300 tanks, jeeps, and armored cars, 5,000 soldiers, and hundreds of police had crept up to surround the Plaza.
At 6:10 p.m. green signal flares burst in the sky. Police helicopters opened fire from above. Immediately the undercover Olympia Battalion (elite police in charge of security for the Olympics) seized speakers from the CNH (National Strike Council, the leadership of the student strike movement) on a balcony of the Chihuahua apartment building. The police beat the CNH speakers and forced many into the line of fire.
Archival footage recorded by the government on the day of the massacre, October 2 1968. Released more than twenty years after the Massacre at Tlatelolco, this footage shows that the shooting was a provocation.
Other Olympia Battalion members and plainclothes police began to fire on people from the balcony and from inside the crowd. The Olympia Battalion police wore white gloves so that other security forces could tell them apart from the masses. These police provocateurs not only added to the terror against the people; later the government would blame "student snipers" for starting the massacre. At the same time, soldiers with fixed bayonets began to advance from two sides while raking the crowd with machine guns. Waves of people ran from one side of the Plaza to another where they met up with more gunfire which forced them back.
White gloves and guns, Chihuahua Apartment Building
Autopsies showed that most of the officially recognized dead were shot in the back at close range or bayoneted. Hundreds banged on the doors of the church which blocks one side of the Plaza, begging priests to let them in. But the church remained closed--the archbishop had ordered the priests not to let any demonstrators in.
The tanks opened fire against the Chihuahua building, and its first three floors caught fire. So many bullets hit the building that the pipes and the boiler burst. Thousands of residents crouched for hours in wrecked apartments as bullets zinged around them. Heavy automatic fire lasted between 60 and 90 minutes and continued on and off into the early morning hours.
The shooting was so indiscriminate that the soldiers and police shot 12 of their own, killing two. An ambulance attendant was killed and a nurse injured as they tried to remove the wounded. Police sealed the Red Cross Hospital to arrest the wounded and to prevent any more ambulances from arriving on the scene. Even in the middle of this hellish scene, people struggled to fight fear and panic and protect one another. At the risk of their lives, many residents opened their doors to hide fleeing students.
There has never been an accurate count of how many people actually were murdered at Tlatelolco on October 2. Police admitted to only 32. The British newspaper Manchester Guardian reported that after careful investigation it found that 325 probably died and that the number could be much higher. There were reports that army trucks sneaked out hundreds of corpses and that bodies were burned or tossed into the sea.
About 1,500 people were arrested. Many were stripped naked and forced to stand in the rain for hours with their hands up while being beaten and stabbed with bayonets. In the streets outside the Plaza a wider ring of police fired tear gas at the angry crowds and arrested anyone who tried to enter. Soldiers rampaged through Tlatelolco, looting and tearing up apartments in search of weapons and escaped students. Remaining leaders were hunted down and jailed. Some disappeared.
Made in the USA
Many of those arrested were tortured. In the book Massacre in Mexico, a prisoner reports that a U.S. agent joined Mexican officers in the prison torture chambers. A policeman threatened another prisoner during his torture: If you don't talk now, we have gringos here who know how to make you. But U.S. interrogation experts didn't have to be physically present for "Made in the USA" to be clearly stamped on the crackdown.
The U.S. imperialists are very worried about the security of their southern border. By enforcing a bloody law and order, the Mexican regime helps protect the economic and political stranglehold of the U.S. over Mexico. But this repression is often directly supervised and coordinated by agencies of the U.S. government. Mexico is the only foreign country where the FBI openly operates, and the CIA's Mexico City station is the largest in the hemisphere. Many Mexican military officers and police of strategic agencies are trained under the CIA or at U.S. police institutes.
Philip Agee, a former CIA agent who is now a critic of the CIA, was sent as a spy to Mexico in 1968 under the cover of organizing cultural exchanges during the Olympics. In his book Inside the Company, CIA Diary, Agee wrote: "In Mexico the government keeps our common enemy rather well controlled with our help--and what the government fails to do, the station can usually do by itself."
Agee probably was not in on the most sensitive operations in Mexico City, including those which might tie the U.S. directly into the massacre. But he does report that the CIA exchanged intelligence reports daily with its most important liaison contacts. One such contact was President Díaz Ordaz. According to Agee, Díaz's relationship with the CIA was "extremely close," and he received expensive gifts.
Gustavo Díaz Ordaz
Another important contact was Luis Echeverría, who as Interior Minister was directly in charge of carrying out the massacre and who later became president. The CIA's intelligence on left and student organizations and activities, says Agee, was vastly superior to the Mexican government's. The information gathered by the CIA helped the Mexican police carry out raids and arrests.
Luis Echeverría Álvarez
After the massacre, there were no statements of condemnation from the U.S. State Department or President Johnson. This silence amounted to complicity with the killings, if not outright approval. On October 3 the executive board of the International Olympic Committee met in emergency session to decide whether to go ahead with the Games in spite of the massacre. Led by the American chairman of the committee, Avery Brundage, a narrow majority voted to continue. Brundage explained that Mexican authorities had assured him "nothing will interfere with the peaceful entrance of the Olympic flame into the stadium on October 12, nor with the competitions which follow."
So 10 days after Tlatelolco, the Games opened in an atmosphere of brutal hypocrisy. As streets rumbled with tanks, billboards grinned in a dozen languages: "Everything is possible with peace." The Mexican government decked out young women in miniskirts to serve as "Olympic hostesses" to the athletes. One hostess, still in her bullet-shredded Olympic uniform, lay in the police morgue, where thousands of parents filed through hunting for their missing children.
The massacre shocked thousands out of the illusion that the government would not commit so inhumane an act or that it would be held back by public opinion in Mexico and worldwide. As Mao Tsetung said, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun"--and the imperialists and their henchmen proved it one more time at Tlatelolco. In an oppressed country like Mexico, whatever facade of democracy they may find convenient in "normal times" is ripped away very quickly when their rule is threatened.
Democratic Opening--Cover for More Repression
Despite the lockdown atmosphere after the massacre, the student strike continued for two months with much support. In over a dozen cities in Europe, Latin America and the U.S., Mexican embassies were immediately hit by furious student actions protesting the massacre. Four hundred were arrested in Paris confrontations. Many protested the bloody hand behind the regime's slaughter; for example, the U.S. embassy in Chile was stoned. Students in many countries demanded that their national teams withdraw from the Mexico City Olympics.
However, the arrests of most strike leaders and the government's tactic of holding out the promise of negotiations while threatening more murder did have some effect. The student strike was increasingly dominated by the "soft-liners" who wanted to compromise with the government. In late November the council announced the end of the strike. The majority of students at the large and tumultuous meeting stormed out, shouting strike slogans. Several schools were briefly taken over by striking students to prevent a return to classes. But the movement was unable to continue in the face of mounting government threats and a leadership that had declared surrender.
Still, a deep disgust and outright hatred for the ruling regime had spread broadly throughout society. The true nature of this brutal, neocolonial state had been laid bare for all to see, and many illusions about the possibility of any real progress without its overthrow had been shattered. Clearly shaken by this situation, the U.S. and the Mexican regime launched some new initiatives to try and control the damage of '68.
Interior Minister Echeverría, who became president in 1970, was just the man to carry out these initiatives. The man identified by Philip Agee as a top CIA liaison now put up a show of standing up to the Yanquis. Meanwhile, his administration relied on more U.S. loan capital than any administration had up to that point and used U.S. military assistance to eliminate armed opposition movements. The man who had been directly in charge of the Tlatelolco massacre now declared an amnesty for many political prisoners. Wages and services for some workers improved, and university attendance was also allowed to increase.
Under this "democratic opening," parties which renounced violence and foreign ties were promised funds and seats in the powerless Congress. This "opening" was a chance for opportunists to stomp on the struggle of the masses while they asked for favors from the comprador bourgeoisie. Today this "democratic opening" is upheld by the electoral left as a major, or even the main, fruit of the '68 struggle.
In fact, these initiatives under Echeverría were both a continuation of the old repression and a cover for the new. On the one hand, the ruling class desperately needed to renew illusions about the state's legitimacy among sections of the urban middle classes. They hoped that the willing cooperation of members of the left, including some who had been leaders of the student movement, would help accomplish this. At the same time, other sections of the population and the movement which were considered more of a threat were isolated and viciously attacked. During the "democratic opening" period, Echeverría directed a harsh repression against Guerrero peasants and the "disappearances" of hundreds of people accused of being urban and rural guerrillas.
On June 10, 1971 a beginning renewal of the student movement was nipped in the bud by a new massacre. This time the murders were carried out by rightist paramilitary gangs brought to the scene of a demonstration by government trucks and given free rein. They killed at least 42 students, maybe many more, and injured over 100.
But the 1968 massacre continued to burn in the memory of students. When Echeverría attempted to speak on the campus of the Mexican National Autonomous University (UNAM), he was forced to take to his heels, bleeding from a hail of stones thrown by enraged students.
From 1968 to Today
The student struggle of '68 and the Massacre of Tlatelolco laid bare the true nature of Mexican society before the eyes of the world, shattering the false showcase image of imperialist-sponsored economic growth and prosperity. The glitter, splendor and Olympic gala was for a handful. It was built on the oppression of the majority, the peasants and working class, and defended by means of bloody repression.
But far from proving the invincibility of the government, the Tlatelolco Massacre and the '68 movement exposed the profound weakness of the comprador regime--its lack of popular support and its fundamental reliance on brute force. The students and broad masses who rose up in 1968 struck deep blows at the system, and Mexico's rulers still have not recovered fully. By unleashing people's rage and hopes, the 1968 upsurge rolled over the barriers of what was then called "possible." And it continues to inspire and challenge people today.
Expropriated from the archives of Chairman Bob Avakian and the drooling RCP's Revolutionary Worker
#975, September 27, 1998
#976, October 4, 1998
LITEMPO: The CIA's Eyes on Tlatelolco
CIA Spy Operations in Mexico
CIA Chief of Station Winston Scott
Winston Scott, the CIA's top man in Mexico at the time, was a brash and charming 59-year-old American who operated out of the U.S. Embassy on Reforma. The CIA documents, now publicly available in the U.S. National Archives in Washington, show Scott relied on his friendship [sic] with President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz; then-Secretary of Gobernación Luis Echeverría; and other senior officials to inform Washington about the student movement whose demands challenged the government's monopoly on power.
The documents, reported here for the first time, show that Scott recruited a total of 12 agents in the upper echelons of the Mexican government between 1956 and 1969. His informants included two presidents of Mexico, and two men who were later indicted for war crimes.
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The CIA's code name for Scott's spy network was LITEMPO. The letters LI represented the Agency's code for Mexican operations; TEMPO was Scott's term for a program that was, in the words of one secret Agency history, "a productive and effective relationship between CIA and select top officials in Mexico." Begun in 1960, LITEMPO served as "an unofficial channel for the exchange of selected sensitive political information which each government wanted the other to receive but not through public protocol exchanges."
Scott's agents were identified in CIA files by specific numbers. LITEMPO-1 was Emilio Bolanos, a nephew of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Minister of Gobernación and then President in the 1960s. Díaz Ordaz was LITEMPO-2. Like his predecessor Adolfo Lopez Mateos, he was a personal friend of Scott's. Both men attended Scott's wedding to his third wife in December 1962, with Lopez Mateos standing in as padrino, or chief witness, to the ceremony.
How much Scott paid his LITEMPO informants is not disclosed in the records, but at least two CIA officials thought it was excessive. In a review of the LITEMPO program in 1963, the chief of the clandestine services Mexico desk griped that "the agents are paid too much and their activities are not adequately reported." One colleague of Scott's said the LITEMPO agents were "unproductive and expensive."
Scott ignored such complaints. He met frequently with his agents who he called LITEMPOs and reported to Washington about his contacts. In October 1963, he gave Bolanos, LITEMPO-1, a "personal gift" of 1,000 rounds of .223 Colt automatic ammunition to pass to Díaz Ordaz. In his monthly report to CIA headquarters, Scott told his superiors that "changes to the LITEMPO program may be necessary when LITEMPO-2 becomes the presidential candidate" in 1964.
Scott also cultivated Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios in the Dirección Federal de Seguridad who was known as LITEMPO-4. Scott had known El Pollo since at least 1960. Gutiérrez Barrios assisted Scott in the panicky days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, by interrogating Mexicans who had contact with accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
Another one of Scott's agents, according to CIA records, was Luis Echeverría, a sub-secretary at Gobernación in the early 1960s, who is identified as LITEMPO-8. Echeverría started out handling special requests from the American government for visas to assist Cuban travelers seeking to escape Fidel Castro's socialist revolution. As Echeverría rose in the Mexican hierarchy, so did his importance to his American friend. He became an occasional dinner guest at Scott's home in Lomas Chapultepec.
In 1966, an unidentified subordinate of Gutiérrez Barrios, known as LITEMPO-12, began meeting daily with one of Scott's most trusted officers, George Munro, to pass copies of reports from his own agents. According to one CIA document, LITEMPO-12 became one of the U.S. Embassy's most productive sources of intelligence on "the CP , Cuban exiles, Trotskyites, and Soviet bloc cultural groups."
In the summer and fall of 1968, LITEMPO assumed even greater importance in Mexico City and Washington as a spontaneous student movement convulsed the streets of the capital. Scott relied on his allies at the top of the Mexican government to monitor and understand the unfolding events that culminated in the night of gunfire that claimed scores of lives in Tlatelolco Plaza on October 2, 1968. The story of LITEMPO is a previously unknown dimension to that tragic crime.
One summer night in 1968, one of Scott's sons went out to dinner in downtown Mexico City with his mother and stepfather, whom he called "Scottie."
"After we finished," the son recalled in an interview years later, "we were walking back to the car when Scottie said, 'Look they have music down there.' We were passing by what they call a pena, a coffee shop type of place. He said, 'Let's go listen.'"
While politically conservative, Scott was socially outgoing, adept at making friends and conversation.
"So we're sitting there drinking our beers and someone was singing a song about Castro that was popular at that time. The chorus went, "¿Fidel, Fidel, que tiene Fidel/Que los Americanos no pueden con el?"
"And Scottie's feeling good, so he starts singing along. He's holding his beer up and going, "¿Fidel, Fidel, que tiene Fidel/Que los Americanos no pueden con el?"
According to the son, Scott's wife said, "Scottie do you know what they're saying?"
"Oh, something about Fidel," he replied.
"She says 'Yeh, they're saying, you can't handle him."
"Scottie said something like, it's only a song, and she said, 'You know, if somebody didn't know any better and saw you singing here, they'd think you were some kind of communist.'"
Scott just laughed, the son recalled.
On the job, Scott obsessed about the possible influence of communism and Cuba in Mexico but reluctantly conceded that the student movement was not communist controlled. That summer the U.S. Embassy compiled a list of 40 separate incidents of student unrest since 1963. Twenty three of the incidents were motivated by school grievances; eight protests concerned local problems. Six were inspired by Cuba and Vietnam. Four of the demonstrations put forth demands related to the authoritarianism of the Mexican system.
In June 1968, U.S. Ambassador Fulton "Tony" Freeman called a meeting with Scott and other members of the Embassy staff. France had just been engulfed by student demonstrations so massive that the government fell. Freeman wanted to discuss whether the same thing could happen in Mexico. Because of his contacts in Los Pinos (the Mexican White House), Scott's views carried a lot of weight.
Scott and his colleagues concluded Díaz Ordaz could maintain control.
"The government has diverse means of gauging and influencing student opinion, and it has shown itself able and willing, when unrest exceeds what it considers acceptable limits, to crack down decisively, to date with salutary effects," Freeman cabled the State Department after the meeting. "Furthermore, student disorders, notwithstanding the wide publicity they receive, simply lack the muscle to create a national crisis."
Scott spoke frequently to Díaz Ordaz. Ferguson Dempster, a top British intelligence operative in Mexico and a longtime friend of Scott's, told one of Scott's sons that Scott delivered a daily report on "enemies of the nation" to the Mexican president.
Philip Agee, then a young officer in Scott's operation, told much the same story when he broke with the agency a few years later and published a book exposing its operations. Agee described Scott's service to Los Pinos as "a daily intelligence summary" with a section on activities of Mexican revolutionary organizations and communist diplomatic missions, and a section on international developments based on information from CIA headquarters.
Scott, in turn, relayed the views of Díaz Ordaz and other top officials to Ambassador Freeman and to CIA headquarters. The Mexican authorities' public position "regarding disturbances is they were instigated by leftist agitators for purpose [of] creating [an] atmosphere [of] unrest," Freeman said in a cable to Washington. "Embassy concurs in this general estimate."
But Scott's inclination to see the student movement as a communist controlled rebellion was not borne out by the station's reports from its many informants. Declassified CIA records show that Scott had a network of sources at the UNAM (National University of Mexico) and other schools called LIMOTOR that kept him well-informed about campus politics. He noted that students at the UNAM wrested control of student activities from the communist youth faction by creating a new National Strike Council. "Those who are advocating violent action are still in the minority," he reported.
In conversation with his LITEMPO agents, Scott realized that the desire of top Mexican officials to blame the communists for the burgeoning protests in the streets coexisted with a kind of passive uncertainty about what was really going on.
In late August Díaz Ordaz named Luis Echeverría to head a new "Strategy Committee," created to design the government's response to the student disturbances. But DFS chief Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios confided that the government did not have any plans in place to deal with student unrest, according to a confidential CIA cable.
Scott himself was uncertain. His frequent "situation reports," known informally as Sitreps, emphasized the communist background of the professors leading the student movement. In an August 1968 report, entitled Students Stage Major Disorders in Mexico, he argued that the riot in the Zocalo represented "a classic example of the Communists' ability to divert a peaceful demonstration into a major riot."
But which communists? Díaz Ordaz was sure the Mexican Communist party and the Soviet Union were involved. Scott wanted to believe it but could find no evidence.
"Although the government claims to have solid evidence that the Communist Party engineered the fracas on 26 July and reportedly has indications of Soviet Embassy complicity," he told CIA headquarters, "it is unlikely that the Soviets would so undermine their carefully nurtured good relations with the Mexicans."
Among the LITEMPO sources, Scott said, uncertainty about the student movement was giving way to anger.
"The Office of the Presidency is in a state of considerable agitation because of anticipated further disturbances," Scott wrote in early August. "The pressure on Díaz Ordaz to restore calm is particularly intense because of Mexico's desire to project a good image internationally."
From his conversations with Díaz Ordaz, Scott began to get a sense of how the president was going to respond. Tourist and commercial interests were calling for "early action," he told Washington. Scott suspected that the president might be planning to use Mexico City mayor Alfonso Corona del Rosal as a scapegoat. Corona del Rosal was a former general with a reputation for toughness. Much to Díaz Ordaz's annoyance, he was advocating a conciliatory stance toward the students. From long experience, Win knew how Díaz Ordaz operated.
"A politician's inability to preserve the peace in the area of his charge has more than once provided the President with an excuse to abort a political career," Scott wrote. "Corona del Rosal has been mentioned as Díaz Ordaz' possible successor, and it is possible that the President has decided to 'burn' him.'"
The next demonstration was the largest yet--but also peaceful. Reforma Avenue was jammed with a joyous throng headed for the Zocalo. People were shouting, applauding, laughing and crying too. The cathedral bells pealed and, even inside the Lecumberri prison, jailed men could heard the crowd. Mexicans were liberating themselves from fear of their government.
"We don't want the Olympics," the marchers chanted. "We want revolution."
Scott informed Ambassador Freeman that Díaz Ordaz was deeply offended that the students had flown the red and white strike flag in the Zocalo. He was ordering army riot police and police to use force if necessary to break up all "illegal activities and gatherings."
Win Scott was not a man who lacked confidence in his ability to correct a difficult situation. He had been the CIA's chief of station in Mexico City since 1956, spoke decent Spanish, and knew how to get his way with Mexican officialdom. One of his teenage sons got a glimpse of the father's authority when he got into a traffic accident on Reforma and wound up in the police station in Chapultepec Park. The cops suggested the young man make a phone call to get some money for the mordida that would secure his release. The son called Scott who said he would be right over.
"Next thing you know, Scottie pulls up in his big black Mercury," his son recalled. "It had these red diplomatic license plates for the Olympics which meant it was the car of someone important and this big American gets out with a teenage girl. Scottie had brought my sister along for some reason. The Mexican cops started rethinking their position. Ah chihuahua, quien es eso?
"Scottie hands the first cop he sees a hundred peso bill. He hands the second cop he sees a hundred peso bill. He asks me if I was OK. Was the car OK? I said I was fine and that he only had to pay the jefe. But he didn't care. He went around the room, shook everybody's hand and gave everybody a hundred peso bill. He gave the jefe about four hundred. Then he looked around and said, "Todos contentos?"
"Everybody was very happy. That was Scottie in his prime, this American who could do anything."
As the student protests grew larger, Scott's information from the LITEMPO agents informed Ambassador Freeman's increasingly dire cables to Washington, which noted that Díaz Ordaz and the people around him were talking tougher. The government "implicitly accepts consequence that this will produce casualties," the ambassador wrote. "Leaders of student agitation have been and are being taken into custody….In other words, the [government] offensive against student disorder has opened on physical and psychological fronts."
Scott knew that Díaz Ordaz thought the application of force was the only solution.
"The government policy currently being followed to quell the student uprisings, calls for immediate occupation by the army and/or police of any school which is being used illegally as a center of subversive activity. This policy will continue to be followed until complete calm prevails," he told his superiors in Washington.
In late September, Scott reported that the government was "not seeking compromise solution with students but rather seeking to put end to all organized student actions before Olympics….Aim of Gov[ernment] believed to be to round up extremist elements and detain them until after Olympics," scheduled to open in mid-October.
The leaders of the student movement called for a public meeting. Depleted by arrests, confronted by a hard-line government, and facing the opening of the Olympic Games in less than two weeks, they wanted to convene on the afternoon of October 2, at the Plaza de Las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco housing complex to announce their next move. Scott reported that morning that the Mexican government's determination to hold a successful Olympic Games would probably preclude any major incidents. However, random, unsuspected acts could not be ruled out, he warned.
"Any estimate, such as this one, of the likelihood of intentional acts designed to disrupt the normal course of events must take into account the presence of radicals and extremists whose behavior is impossible to predict. Such persons and groups do exist in Mexico," he wrote on October 2.
That might have been the voice of Scott's considerable experience in Mexico. But it might have been passed along to him by friendly LITEMPOs who had reason to believe that "radicals and extremists" whose behavior was "impossible to predict" were about to act.
The rally in Tlatelolco began around five p.m. Tanks surrounded the plaza and soldiers sat on the tanks cleaning their bayonets, but it was not a particularly tense situation. Between five and ten thousand people had gathered by late afternoon.
Military commanders on the scene had just received orders to prevent the meeting from taking place. They were ordered to isolate the leaders of the meeting, detain them and turn them over to DFS. A group of officers in civilian clothes, known as the Olympic Battalion, had their own instructions. They were to wear civilian clothes with a white glove on the left hand and post themselves in the doorways of the Chihuahua building overlooking the plaza. When they got the signal, in form of a flare, they were to prevent the entrance or exit of anyone to the plaza while the student leaders were being detained. Finally a group of police officers got orders to arrest the leaders of the National Strike Council.
What virtually no one knew until more than thirty years later was that Luis Gutiérrez Oropeza, the chief of staff of the Mexican military, had posted ten men with guns on the upper floor the Chihuahua building and given them orders to shoot into the crowd. He was acting on orders of Díaz Ordaz, according to a revelatory account published in Proceso in 1999.
Oropeza was the link between Díaz Ordaz and Echeverría, according to Jorge Castañeda's book about the Mexican presidency. Gutiérrez Oropeza was also a friend of Scott's who had dinner at his home at least once, according to a log of guests kept by the Scott family.
Just as a student speaker announced that a scheduled march on the Santo Tomas campus of the Politecnico would not take place because of the threat of Army violence, flares suddenly appeared in the sky overhead and everyone automatically looked up. That's when the shooting began.
A wave of people ran to the far end of the plaza only to meet a line of oncoming soldiers. They ran the other way into the free fire zone. It was, in the words of historian Enrique Krauze, a "closed circle of hell," a "terror operation."
Win Scott filed his first report around midnight. It was massaged at headquarters and passed to the White House where it was read the next morning. Something big had happened at Tlatelolco.
"A senior [classified source] counted 8 dead students, six dead soldiers but a nearby Red Cross installation had 127 wounded students and 30 wounded soldiers.
"A classified source said the first shots were fired by the students from the Chihuahua apartments."
An American classified source "expressed the opinion this was a premeditated encounter provoked by the students."
Another classified source said "most of the students present on the speaker's platform were armed, one with a sub-machine gun…troops were only answering the fire from the students."
None of Scott's reports turned out to be true. His only accurate observation was that "this is the most serious incident thus far in the rash of student disturbances which began in late July."
His next situation report cited "trained observers" who believed the students instigated the incident. He said that the Tlatelolco incident raised questions about Mexico's ability to provide security for the Olympics.
Agents of the American FBI in Mexico City who worked closely with Scott reported that the Trotskyite students had formed an armed group called the Olympia Brigade to provoke an attack. These students were allegedly connected to Guatemalan communists and had supposedly fired the first shots.
The FBI reported that Díaz Ordaz had told an "American visitor," who may have been Scott, that he believed the disturbance had been "carefully planned."
"A good many people came into the country," the president reportedly said. "The guns used were new and had their numbers filed off. The Castro and Chinese Communist groups were at the center of the effort. The Soviet communists had to come along to avoid the charge of being chicken."
In Washington, Walt Rostow, national security adviser to President Lyndon Johnson, sought to clarify the contradictory reports. He sent a series of questions to Scott who went to see Díaz Ordaz. He returned with answers that revealed how little he knew.
Were Mexican students using new rifles with numbers filed off from Chinese sources?
No verification to date, Scott said.
Did individuals from outside Mexico participate in the student movement?
Three students, a Chilean, French and an American, were arrested on July 26 and deported. Two other French students were not apprehended, he noted.
In other words, there had not been single report of foreign involvement in the previous five weeks. While the Mexican press continually played on the theme of foreign involvement, Scott said "no conclusive evidence to this effect has been presented."
Could he verify the FBI's story of a leftist Olympic Brigade that provoked the gunfire?
A small group of Trotskyite university students had formed a group called a "Brigada Olympia," he said. One source said they planned to blow up transformers to interfere with Olympic events and to seize buses carrying Olympic athletes.
The White House and CIA headquarters did not fail to notice that Scott seemed to know very little [sic] about what had happened at Tlatelolco, save that reports of Cuban and Soviet involvement were overblown and the government's claim of a left-wing provocation could not be proved.
Wallace Stuart, a counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, later said the CIA station had submitted 15 differing and sometimes flatly contradictory versions of what happened at Tlatelolco, "all from either 'generally reliable sources' or 'trained observers' on the spot!"
[...]
The massacre at Tlatelolco, says historian Sergio Aguayo, parted "the waters of Mexican history. It accented the turbulence of those years, served to concentrate power in the intelligence services dominated by a small group of men, hard and uncontrolled."
With Win Scott's assistance, those men had entrenched themselves in power over the course of a decade, acting with impunity against an opposition that was, in Aguayo's words, "weak but each time more bellicose and desperate to rebel against the apathy of an indifferent, if not complicitous, international community."
A week after the massacre, Win took time out from his duties to write a thank you note to Luis Echeverría. The interior minister had just given him a gift: a large framed electronic map of the world that displayed the correct time in every time zone in the world.
"The marvelous clock you sent to me recently is a wonder to all who see it," Win wrote in a note that Aguayo found in the Archivo General de la Nación.
[...]
Eight months later, Scott was forced to retire from his job as CIA chief of station. His ouster didn't have anything to do with the events of October 1968, according to William Broe, the chief of the CIA's Latin America division at the time.
"He was one of our outstanding officers. It was a strong station. He ran a very good shop," Broe said in a recent telephone interview. The reason for his removal, he explained, "was his long tenure. That was what we decided to do, to start changing and moving people. It wasn't because he had done something wrong. We just felt that we shouldn't have individuals there as long as that. Thirteen years is a long time."
In June 1969, Scott went to CIA headquarters in Washington to receive one of the Agency's highest honors, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. The citation accompanying the medal alluded to the LITEMPO program as one of his greatest accomplishments. Win Scott, it was said, "initiated and bought to fruition an international alliance in this hemisphere which constitutes a foundation stone for achievements of great significance."
Scott died of a heart attack in his home in Lomas Chapuletepec on April 26, 1971. He was 62 years old.
National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book No. 204
Edited by gyrofry ()
