But Díaz Ordaz also understood that the world was having its 1968 and there would be troubles. The most apparent controversy on the horizon, the U.S. race conflicts, had the potential to politicize the games the same way the King assassination had politicized the Oscars. The idea of a black boycott of the Olympics first emerged in a meeting of Black Power leaders in Newark after that city’s riots during the summer of 1967. In November, Harry Edwards, an amiable and popular black sociology instructor at San Jose State College in California, again raised the idea at a black youth conference. Most athletes and black leaders did not think a black boycott would be effective, but one of Edwards’s first adherents to the idea was Tommie Smith, a student at San Jose State College and an extraordinary athlete who already held two world records in track and field events. Lee Evans, another champion sprinter at San Jose State, also said he would boycott. In February fresh life was breathed into the boycott idea by the International Olympic Committee, which in exchange for a few token gestures readmitted the apartheid team of South Africa.
Harry Edwards, a six-foot-eight, bearded twenty-five-year-old in sunglasses and black beret, was a former college athlete who insisted on referring to the U.S. president as “Lynchin’ Baines Johnson.” From his sports boycott office in San Jose, he was interested not only in the Olympics, but also in boycotts of college and professional programs. In 1968, though, the big target was in Mexico City. A poster on his wall said, “Rather than run and jump for medals, we are standing up for humanity.” His wall also featured the “Negro traitor of the week,” a prominent black athlete who opposed the boycott. Among those so honored were baseball’s Willie Mays, track’s Jesse Owens, and decathlon champion Rafer Johnson. A boycott of the 1960 Olympics had been suggested to Johnson, and Dick Gregory had called for a boycott in 1964. But this year, with the help of Harry Edwards’s office, the idea seemed to be gathering force.
In March,
Life
magazine published a survey of top black college athletes and was surprised to discover a widely held conviction that it would be worth giving up a chance at an Olympic medal to better conditions for their race.
Life
also found that black athletes were angry about their treatment at American universities. They would be promised housing but would get no help when confronted with housing discrimination. At San Jose State, white athletes were entertained by the athletic department in fraternities that did not accept black members. In the top 150 college athletic programs, there were only seven black coaches. White coaches bunched the black athletes together in locker rooms or on road trips. Academic advisers were constantly counseling them to take special easy courses so they could pass. And they would find that no one on the faculty or the student body ever talked to them about anything other than sports.
The International Olympic Committee had made the decision to let South Africa back early in the year, after a successful winter Olympics. It did not yet understand what 1968 was going to be like. In the spring, the Mexicans, sensing disaster, asked the committee to reconsider after at least forty teams threatened to boycott the games. The committee reversed itself, once again banning South Africa. This made a number of black American athletes, including Smith and Evans, say that they would reconsider competing in Mexico. The Americans were trying desperately to avoid a black boycott because they were putting together a track and field team that had the potential of being the best in American history and perhaps in the history of the modern sport. At the end of the summer, Edwards told a Black Panther meeting that the Olympic boycott had been called off but that athletes would wear black armbands and decline to participate in medals ceremonies. By September the Mexican government had every reason to hope for an extremely successful Olympics.
The Mexican government did not see itself as a dictatorship, since the president, in spite of his absolute power, had to step down at the end of his term. There would be no Porfiriato, as the three decades of Porfirio Díaz’s rule was known. The government responded to the needs of the people. If workers wanted unions, the PRI would provide them with unions. Mexicans who wanted to change things, improve things, make life better, needed to join the PRI. Only PRI members could be players. Even Emiliano Zapata’s three sons, one of whom inherited his father’s spectacular face, worked for the PRI. In Mexico the PRI still encountered Villa-like people who could be bought off, as well as a few Zapatas, people too stubborn to be co-opted, people who had to be either locked away indefinitely in prisons or killed. When the peasants kept noticing that the revolution was not delivering on its promise of land, they turned to peasant organizations, which were all controlled by the PRI. Sometimes a new organization emerged to represent the peasant. Its leaders too had to be bought out or killed, just as did new labor organizers and new journalists.
As the economy experienced its seemingly miraculous growth, year after year, there was an increasing suspicion that the distribution of this new wealth was grossly unfair. In 1960 Ifigenia Martínez, a researcher at the economics school, conducted a study that showed that about 78 percent of disposable income in Mexico went to only the upper 10 percent of Mexican society. No one had ever scientifically researched this before, and the results seemed hard to believe, so others, such as the Bank of Mexico, repeated the study but got the same results.
Such research was just the statistical explanation for an observable phenomenon: In fast-growing, rapidly developing Mexico, there were a lot of unhappy people. Starting in the late 1950s a series of protest movements emerged—peasant movements, a teachers union protest, a Social Security doctors’ strike, and, in 1958, a bitter railroad workers strike. They were quickly crushed, with everyone either co-opted, imprisoned, or killed. Ten years after the railroad strike, its leader, Demetrio Vallejo Martínez, was still in prison.
Yet in 1968, as the Olympics approached, there was only one group that the PRI did not have under its control, and that was students. The reason for this was that students as a political force was a new concept in Mexico. The students were a product of Mexico’s new economic expansion. After World War II, the growth rate in Mexico City began accelerating. By 1968 Mexico City was one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, its population increasing at about 3 percent each year. Typical of the pyramid-shaped demographics of rapidly developing countries, a very large percentage of the Mexican population, especially the Mexico City population, was young. And with a growing middle class, Mexico had more students than ever before, many of them crammed into the National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM, and the National Polytechnic Institute, on vast, sprawling new campuses in the newer parts of a capital city that swallowed miles of new area every year.
These students, like those in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States, and so many other places, were acutely aware that they had more economic comfort than their parents. But in the case of Mexico, they were also aware that they had been the recipients of a growing economy that had not benefited many of the people around them.
Roberto Escudero, who became one of the student leaders in 1968, said, “There was a big difference between our generation and our parents’. They were very traditional. They had received benefits from the Mexican revolution, and Zapata and others from the revolution were their heroes. We had those heroes, too, but we also had Che and Fidel. We saw the PRI more as authoritarian, where they saw it as revolutionary liberators.”
Salvador Martínez de la Roca, a small, scrappy-looking blond man known to everyone as Pino, also was a student leader in 1968. Born in 1945, he was studying nuclear physics at UNAM in 1968. Pino was a
norteño,
a Mexican from the northern states, where the United States is much closer and its cultural impact far greater. “In the 1950s we loved Marlon Brando in
The Wild One
and James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause,
” he recalled. “We were more interested in American culture than our parents. In the fifties students wore shirts and ties. We wore jeans and indigenous-style shirts.”
To him UNAM also showed him more of the world. “The Cine Club at UNAM showed films that were not available anywhere else in Mexico—French films, the first film I ever saw about lesbians,
Easy Rider.
There was a cultural rebellion. We loved Eldridge Cleaver and Muhammad Ali and Angela Davis, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger,” he said. Songs of the civil rights movement such as “We Shall Overcome” were well known, and Martin Luther King, especially after his death, had a place in the UNAM student pantheon of heroes in proximity to Che and Zapata. The Black Panthers also enjoyed some popularity at UNAM. Norman Mailer was widely read by students, as were Frantz Fanon and Camus. But, as Martínez de la Roca said, “Most important was the Cuban revolution. We all read Régis Debray’s
Revolution in the Revolution.
”
There were many strikes and marches at UNAM before the famous 1968 events. In 1965 students supported the doctors’ strike for better wages. In 1966 UNAM students went on strike for three months against an authoritarian rector, Ignacio Chavez. In March 1968, after the big marches in Europe, Mexico City too had a march against the Vietnam War. But compared with those in the United States, Europe, or Japan, the Mexican student movement was minuscule—a few hundred students.
In 1968, for the first time, the small student movement became a concern of the Mexican government because it did not want
any
problems during the Olympics and because of President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s particular way of viewing the world. A world in which spontaneous movements spread without organizers across the world on the airwaves of television was something new and, for the Mexican president, very hard to believe. He was convinced there was an international conspiracy of revolutionaries moving from country to country, spreading chaos and upheaval. A key component in this conspiracy was the Cubans. So while the Mexican government defied the U.S. embargo and openly befriended Cuba, in reality the president had a paranoid dread of the Cubans and carefully monitored flights to the island, keeping and studying passenger lists. While publicly refusing to embargo Cuba, he did not let Mexico conduct trade with the island and consulted with American intelligence about “the Cuban threat.” While Díaz Ordaz had been minister of the interior, he had cultivated close relations with the CIA and FBI. It was in the nature of Mexican policy toward the United States to have this contradiction between public stance and private communication, the same way that in 1916 Carranza had pretended to oppose U.S. intervention while in reality encouraging U.S. president Woodrow Wilson to send troops to Mexico and attack the troublesome Pancho Villa.
Lecumberri, a black castle in downtown Mexico City, looks like the Bastille and is in fact a French-style prison, with a round central courtyard and cell blocks stretching out in spokes. The cells are about fourteen feet long and six feet wide. In 1968 this was the infamous dungeon into which political prisoners were thrown. Today, the National Archives documents that were state secrets in 1968 are housed in Lecumberri, where the bars have been replaced with large windows and well-polished parquet wooden floors have been installed. The cramped fourteen-by-six-foot cells are filled with files that have clearly been laundered. But they do paint a picture of the kind of state paranoia that was obsessing the Díaz Ordaz government.
The Ministry of the Interior had had a wealth of informants. Every student organization, even if it had only twenty members, had at least one who reported to the government, writing up records in tedious detail of meetings in which nothing happened. Communists of any kind were of particular interest, and of even greater concern were any foreigners who talked to Mexican communists. The government kept detailed reports on who was seen singing Cuban songs, who proposed erecting a Vietnamese statue and who supported the suggestion, and who were on flights to Havana, especially around the time of July 26, when Cuba had its annual celebration of Castro’s first uprising. The names of people participating in an homage to José Martí were also noted, even though the writings of the Cuban father of independence were admired by both pro- and anti-Castro elements.
Díaz Ordaz was also obsessively concerned about the French. This may in part have been because Mexican students had a fascination with the French May movement out of all proportion to its consequence. Though American and German and numerous other movements were older, more durable, better organized, and of greater impact, to many Mexican students, May in Paris was
the
event of 1968.
This was in part because of a nineteenth-century concept that endured in Mexico—that France was the imperialist world power. The French had briefly ruled Mexico. In 1968 a French graduate degree was still the most prestigious degree in Mexico, and Sartre was considered the leading intellectual. Lorenzo Meyer, a prominent Mexican historian from the Colegio de México, himself a graduate of the University of Chicago, said of this lingering Francophilia, “I think it was caused by inertia . . . something lingering from the past.”
But both the students’ admiration and the president’s fear of the French student movement were also based on the myth that the Paris students were able to join forces with the workers and together shut down the country. On May 31 the Trotskyite Revolutionary Workers Party in Mexico City called for a student and worker meeting “to do what was done in France” and “to apply to Mexico the experience of France.” On June 4, in the school of political and social sciences at UNAM, a newspaper had appeared from the Trotskyite Revolutionary Workers Party IV International, Mexican section, with the text “All worker states should support the revolutionary French movement for the formation of a new worker state. The PCF [French Communist Party] and CGT [PCF’s trade union] that traditionally are sellouts and traitors to the French revolutionary movement have asked the leadership of the French movement and the workers together with the students and the peasants to confront world capitalism. This French revolutionary movement is a powerful blow to the legacy of the French Communist Party and world bureaucracy.” On July 24 UNAM’s economics school offered a meeting with two French students, Denis Decreane and Didier Kuesza, both from Nanterre.