They where “suppressed” by the government which the president at the time was an authoritarian along with his party during one of the more rebel times in recent history, and some people think (idk if it’s true) that they weren’t liked by the US because they where left leaning and for the US that wasn’t good in the 60’s and also the Olympics where being hosted by Mexico around the same time at it wasn’t a good picture to have protests during those days
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Nope
I may have heard about it. Let me guess, the DFS (entity created by the CIA) was behind it?
All I know off the top of my head was that a bunch of students got killed protesting during the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. I can’t remember if they were protesting Mexico’s leaders or protesting the US’s presence at the Olympics or something like that.
Most of Reddit wasn’t alive in 68, media was much smaller then and 68 is too recent to have been covered in history classes.
I think I may have heard about it once as trivia, but it was never taught to us in a history class I don’t think
I’d lean towards the fact that Mexico was a semi-authoritarian one party state for the 20th century as to why they were suppressed, but I had heard of it.
Rings a bell.
I’m not too sure the PRI was that accommodating to American interests at the time
68 was pretty chaotic and violent across the world (riots in the US, the Soviet invasion of Prague, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of MLK and RFK, etc.), so my sense is it got lost in the noise. Mexico also just didn’t figure as prominently in US media as it did in later decades (68 was before mass migration, the rise of drug trafficking, or NAFTA).
I think another big part was it wasn’t an easy narrative to understand. The PRI government was ideologically vague—it didn’t fit into a clear left wing or right wing framework that would’ve caught US activists’ interest. It wasn’t democratic, but it looked more democratic to outsiders compared with a military junta like Argentina or a Communist dictatorship like Cuba.
I remember hearing of it as few years later, I was 4 when it happened. No details.
I learned absolutely nothing about Mexican history in school. We didn’t even cover the Spanish American war. We learned about the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans in 6th grade social studies, and that is the closest any of my school curriculum got to touching on Mexican history.
No. I’ve never heard of the 1968 student massacre in Mexico City, and I’m more interested in history than most
Just my guess, but American support for Mexico’s regime is better understood in the wider scope of all the Cold War fuckery that happened in Latin America. We likely wanted a buffer state and/or to ensure Mexico’s central government was pro-US. Which groups Mexico suppressed was probably not the primary concern so long as the regime was aligned with us.
About the massacre. It was quite a turning point in politics and society. It caused many intellectuals and lesser/non-corrupt politicians to split with the regime. The regime also had many people disappeared or killed, the extent of which wasn’t truly known until the PRI’s 70+ year rule came to an end in 2000. The opposition president Vicente Fox ordered an investigation into the massacre which included releasing secret government documents.
Mexican politics are very intriguing to me. Understanding the history gives a good insight into why Mexico suffers from severe corruption and narcotrafficos. Only two reformist presidents have held office since 1911, and one of them is the incumbent. Opposition parties don’t stay in power long enough for serious reforms to take effect, or they get sabotaged by an undemocratic/corrupt system. That system relies on the organized crime of the cartel, and since the PRI is still active at state and local level, you’re gonna see a lot of stuff people associate with Mexico, like political corruption, bad police, etc.