the plaza just before the shooting began
a CIA internal report about the massacre
The massacre had an afterlife.
In 1994, the PRI's Ernesto Zedillo became president of Mexico. Zedillo called the Tlatelolco Massacre "the watershed of the country's political life, when a real public outcry began for a more democratic country." A student at the time, Zedillo had experienced the type of brutality that students protested for decades when he was cornered and beaten on the street by riot police on July 23, 1968.
Before becoming president, Zedillo had been appointed Secretary of Education in 1992. Noting that the Massacre was not mentioned at all in student textbooks, in 1993, he tried to include an objective, concise paragraph in school books that read, "On Oct. 2, a few days before the inauguration of the Olympic Games, a student meeting was dissolved by the Army in Tlatelolco. Blood ran and the city was shaken." The Mexican military did not allow even this short account to be published, so the books had to be sent back and reprinted without mentioning the massacre.
In 1997, the PRI lost its majority in Congress. As a result, Congress conducted the first investigation ever of the Tlatelolco massacre, nearly three decades after the shootings. Díaz Ordaz was dead and could not be investigated, but Luis Echeverría confessed in a 1998 interview that the students had not instigated the violence, as the government had claimed. Echeverría also claimed he was innocent, laying the blame at the feet of Díaz Ordaz: "The army is obligated to respond to only one man. My conscience is clear."
The 2000 presidential election marked a major victory for the opposition. The PAN's Vicente Fox won, putting an end to the PRI's seventy-one years in power. During his campaign, Fox promised, just like Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas in 1988, to reopen the case and hold government officials responsible: "under no circumstances are we going to cover up for the people who committed these crimes." Once in office, Fox appointed special prosecutor Ignacio Carillo Prieto to investigate the student massacres of 1968 and 1971.
On July 23, 2004, Carillo Prieto made the first of many attempts to file charges against Echeverría. In June 2006, he charged Echeverría with genocide for the 1968 and 1971 massacres and had him placed under house arrest. But in July of 2007, a Mexican federal judge lifted the genocide charges and claimed "there was no proof that Luis Echeverría Alvarez was the one who prepared, conceived, and executed the crime of genocide.
Fox's government never actually convicted a single person responsible for the student massacres.
