Tlatelolco -- yes, it was the CIA

This has always been known -- two and a half years ago, I bought a CD from an ambulante on the Mexcio City Metro for five pesos detailing much of what's just "officially" coming to light now. The Jornada program didn't quite say the CIA had suborned President Diaz Ordaz, but hinted at it. The semi-official line was that Luis Echiverria was responsible for the massacre, but when Diaz Ordaz left office, he took the blame himself, shortly afterwards leaving the country as Ambassador to Spain. I don't know how this is going to pan out. Some older Mexican I know fondly remember Diaz Ordaz as the last "good" PRI president. They overlooked the authoritarian facets of his presidency, noting the economic successes and stability of the country. Echiverria, who had a schitzophrenic policy of repressing the left while trying to build a populist image (and rewarding leftists who worked with the administration) destabilized the entire economic and political structure -- leading to the "12 years of misery" that followed. It was only with Cuauhtemoc Cardenas' stolen victory in 1988 (engineered by the CIA?) that the system began to change. The 1994 murder of Luis Donaldo Colosio (backed by ???) finally forced PRI to open up the system, though there's no doubt the system was tilted (with the help of ???) towards PAN, not the left (which tended to meet with an incredible number of fatal accidents in those days, though you only heard in the U.S. about anti-PAN actions from the U.S. sources). Of course... the U.S. couldn't be involved today. Could it? The National Security Archives Project is here. Documents link past presidents to CIA El Universal October 20, 2006

WASHINGTON - Mexico´s president and interior secretary at the time of the 1968 massacre of protesters in Mexico City were both CIA informants and the intelligence they provided had the effect of misleading Washington policymakers about who was responsible for the repression, declassified U.S. documents show. The revelations appeared Wednesday on the web site of the National Security Archive, a Washington-based independent research organization. The group posted more than two dozen declassified documents detailing the CIA´s recruitment of senior Mexican officials over the 1956-1969 period. The highest-placed CIA sources were Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, who served as president of Mexico from 1964-1970, and his eventual successor, Luis Echeverría, who was interior secretary. "Never before had there been official verification, via declassified documents, that the CIA relied on high-level Mexican government officials to provide intelligence reports on political events in that country," Kate Doyle, director of the Archive´s Mexico Project, told EFE. ... The documents shed light on what the CIA knew and did not know about the events of Oct. 2, 1968, in Mexico City, where a student protest ended with a massacre in Tlatelolco Plaza. ... While Mexican authorities put the number killed in Tlatelolco at 39, hundreds are believed to have been slain in the square by members of a government-run paramilitary squad known as the Falcons, which also played a role in other acts of repression during the PRI´s "Dirty War" against leftists, which went on until about 1980. ... In February, the National Security Archive published on its web site a copy of a draft report on the Mexican "Dirty War" that the country´s current conservative government has yet to publish. The initial draft accuses the administrations of Presidents Díaz Ordaz, Echeverría and José López Portillo of committing "crimes against humanity that culminated in massacres, forced disappearances, systematic torture and genocide." Under Mexican law, the term "genocide" can refer to instances of mass murder that fall short of the attempted extermination of an ethnic, racial, religious or other group.