MOVIMIENTO SOCIAL

THE 1968 STUDENT MOVEMENT

by Erik Rogelio Flores vazquez 

Context, place, date and historical data.

The 1968 student movement was a social movement, in which in addition to Students from the UNAM and IPN participated, teachers, intellectuals, lovers of house, workers and professionals in Mexico City, and which was repressed by the Mexican government through the Tlatelolco massacre that occurred on 2 October 1968 in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas.

HISTORICAL FACTS 

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  The genocide was committed against a peaceful demonstration by the Mexican Army and the paramilitary group Olimpia Battalion forged by the Mexican government against the National Strike Council, the movement's leading body.
• This conflict began on July 22 with a fight between students (IPN, UNAM and more schools).
• The government of Mexico was interested in the image of our country being of peace and cordiality, since the entire Mexican political system went to amazing lengths, controlling all the media very well, because the government wanted to pretend that nothing was happening. and promoted the 68 Olympics with much more zeal.
• The illuminated advertisements showed the Olympic rings very close to the dove of peace, while hundreds of students were detained, beaten, abused, imprisoned and in many cases killed and / or simply disappeared.
• On the afternoon of October 2, a day after the army left the UNAM and IPN campuses, miles of students and workers, many of them with their wives and children, gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco
• They opened fire on the protesters and the military who were guarding the place, and at that precise moment the shooting began, the latter was a strategy of this paramilitary group created by the Mexican government to infiltrate and detain the protesters and make believe that the students they were the aggressors.
• The military, in their attempt to defend themselves, repelled "the aggression of the students", but in the face of confusion, the shots were not directed at their attackers, but at the crowd of protesters who were in the Plaza de Tlatelolco, soon a mass of bodies covered the entire surface of the plaza.

Process of deindividualization

Fight between students of Vocational 2 and the private high school Isaac Ochoterena, in the Citadel, what that the rivalry between the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) and the high schools incorporated into the National Autonomous University of Mexico was revealed

(UNAM).

Progress or results from the movement.

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  The massacre demonstrated that in Mexico "one did not live in peace" and that "freedom was very relative,"  As a result, "the opposition began to strengthen and the government was forced to promote electoral reforms"
• The movement "helped the country begin to democratize and that, later, there was a political alternation", which took shape in 2000, with the first presidential defeat of the hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)
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Reflection

We are in a country which has been very hard so the movement "helped the country to begin to democratize and that, later on, there was a political alternation.