(3 Oct 2019) Thousands demonstrated in Mexico City on Wednesday in commemoration of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre of student protesters by army troops 51 years ago.
Students and surviving leaders of the 1968 student democracy movement took part in the demonstration marking the anniversary of an event that caused such revulsion that it helped spur long-term political reforms.
This year protesters could be seen demonstrating peacefully while others rioted, spray painting streets and firing objects at the police.
Today, the 1968 movement is credited with sparking Mexico's democratic transition and its participants and martyrs are treated as heroes.
It is unclear how many protesters, reviled at the time as troublemakers, died after troops attacked the peaceful rally at Tlatelolco.
Estimates range from the official version of 25 dead to an investigation that identified 44.
Activists at the time claimed hundreds, saying large numbers of bodies were carted off in garbage trucks.
Gilberto López y Rivas, an anthropologist and writer for La Jornada said: "This is a country of massacres, of graves and impunity is what keep reigning since then to now so we are not seeing any change and even with the current government."
Luis Tuñon Arriaga, former student and witness of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, said "(We are) still claiming for justice that there will be punishment for those who were responsible for the massacre of October 2, not only (Gustavo) Díaz Ordaz and Luis Echeverría, they for sure were the intellectual authors but the perpetrators were the army and the policemen."
The government at the time was almost a one-party institution, dominated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which held the presidency from 1929 to 2000.
While it faced little mass opposition - the government had been able to guarantee steady economic growth throughout the 1960s - officials harboured an almost paranoid fear that the students might try to disrupt the Olympic games held in Mexico City a few weeks later.
It took decades after the massacre for Mexico to elect its first opposition-party president - conservative Vicente Fox - and he proved a disappointment to most Mexicans.
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