TIBETelolco: Human Rights in the Global Stadium
The 1968 Summer Olympics were hosted by Mexico City, the first developing country to hold such an honor. This was Mexico’s grand curtain opening, their inauguration ball, as they entered the industrialized world. Mexico had been experiencing rapid–albeit unequal–industrialization and economic growth beginning around the 1930s, and continuing steadily into 1968. However, the economy was not the only thing being publicized.
In the summer of 1968, several conflicts within Mexico City high schools and police overreaction jump-started a national student movement on par with those happening simultaneously in Paris and the United States. The students were influenced by the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the other student movements, and prior labor and agrarian movements within Mexico. Mobilizations on the part of students were met with repression: beatings, jailings, and occasional murders. Each wave of repression led to a larger march or rally, which in turn led to a more forceful response from the state. Approaching the Olympic Games, a number of the main student organizers had been thrown into military jails, and Mexican special forces had invaded the UNAM, Mexico’s national university.
Students marched with the slogan: ¡No queremos Olimpiadas, queremos revolución! We don’t want the Olympics, we want revolution! The Olympics were to bring in more international capital investment; but students and their supporters did not want the games to obscure the human rights violations and authoritarianism of the Mexican federal government. Reporters from all over the world had already descended upon Mexico City, and many had become sympathetic to the protests. Sound familiar yet?
October 2, 1968, just a few days before the Olympic opening ceremony, a rally and meeting was planned in the Tlatelolco housing complex. Tlatelolco is a very poor housing development just outside the downtown area of Mexico City, between the main government offices and the Instituto Politécnico, where many of the poorer students went to school. Tlatelolco is known as the Plaza of the Three Cultures: it is the site of Moctezuma’s defeat by Cortés, where indigenous met hispanic, and the mestizo Mexican nation was born. It also features a ruins, a Catholic church, and a newer housing project, all next to each other. The analogy of the three cultures can be extended to what was to happen here.
As the Olympic torch makes its journey around the world en route to China, we are reminded again of China’s suppression of basic human rights–the freedom to associate and the freedom of information and press–and its repression and occupation of Tibet. Repression has already begun more strongly than in Mexico: dozens have been murdered by the Chinese government and many more have been jailed. And as protests follow the torch across Europe, the world’s leaders have made it clear that they will remain complicit in repression and even slaughter, just as they did 40 years ago. Foreign governments are even filling the role of the Chinese state, repressing protests in their own countries.
This latter protest shows that the Olympics has been a stage for demands for human rights and equality. This hasn’t stopped some from stating that human rights debates and protest have no place at the Olympics; this line of thinking only further legitimates the campaigns of policide and mass murder which happened in Mexico City and which happen now in China and Tibet. Such organizations as the OPHR no longer exist, but serve as a connection between the protests and athletes who would be affected by a boycott. There is never an excuse for the limitation of human rights and freedom, and it is morally reprehensible to use the Olympics–an event with such humanitarian and fraternal intentions–as an excuse. We have already seen the commercialization of the ancient event, but the potential for profit may not take precedence over human life and liberty.
We already know that China has the audacity to kill: We have Tian’anman Square as evidence, and we can currently observe the killing and beating that is occurring now. The only question remains is, will our own governments have the audacity to permit this?
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IN MEMORY OF TLATELOLCO
Darkness breeds violence
and violence seeks darkness
to carry out its bloody deeds.
That is why on October 2 they waited for nightfall
so that non one would see the hand
that held the gun, only its sudden lightening flash.
And who is there in the last pale light of day?
Who is the killer?
Who are those who writhe in agony, those who are dying?
Those who flee in panic, leaving their shoes behind?
Those who fall into the dark pit of prison?
Those rotting in a hospital?
Those who become forever mute, from sheer terror?
Who are they? How many are there? Not a one.
Not a trace of any of them the next day.
By dawn the following morning the Plaza had been swept clean.
were about the weather.
And on TV, on the radio, at the movie theaters
the programs went on as scheduled,
no interruptions for an announcement,
not a moment of reverent silence at the festivities.
(Because the celebration went right on, according to plan.)
Don’t search for something there are no signs of now:
traces of blood, dead bodies,
because it was an all an offering to a goddess,
the Eater of Excrement.
Don’t search in the files, because no records have been kept.
But I feel pain when I probe right here: here in my memory
it hurts, so the wound is real. Blood mingling with blood
and if I call it my own blood, I betray one and all.
I remember, we remember.
This is our way of hastening the dawn,
of shedding a ray of light on so many consciences that bear a heavy burden,
on angry pronouncements, yawning prison gates,
faces hidden behind masks.
I remember, let us all remember
until justice comes to sit among us.
—Rosario Castellanos