From Luis Gómez Romero, University of Wollongong, at The Moderate Voice:
Ten days before the opening ceremony of the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, uniformed soldiers and rooftop snipers opened fire on student protesters in a plaza in the capital city’s Tlatelolco neighborhood.
Hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators, who were rallying against the country’s semi-authoritarian government, were gunned down.
Foreign correspondents reporting from Tlatelolco estimated that about 300 young people died, although the toll of the Oct. 2, 1968 massacre remains contested. Over a thousand people who survived the shooting were arrested.
Tlateloloco was not the first time Mexico’s government would send the army in to kill its own citizens. Nor, as my research on crime and security in the country shows, was it the last.