This month marks the 50th anniversary of the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City – the first Olympics held in Latin America. Today, however, we remember the 50th anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre and the unknown number of lives lost in one of the darkest and most violent events in modern Mexican history, one that is indelibly linked to the 1968 Olympic Games and stands as a solemn reminder of why we continue to fight against the Olympics today.
The official remembrances and celebrations of the 1968 Olympics have focused on the striking visual identity of the Games (an appropriation of countercultural aesthetics), the record-setting performances of star athletes in several events, and – in a rare acknowledgement of the social and political forces surrounding the Olympics – the memorable black power salute by Tommie Smith and John Carlos that sent shockwaves of outrage throughout the white ruling class.
The fact that this is still considered to be one of the most political displays at the modern Olympics already tells us quite a bit about how aggressively the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has worked to depoliticize the Games. Carlos and Smith learned quickly how the IOC viewed their “act of racial protest”: the pair was summarily expelled from the Olympic Village and banned from the Games with an official spokesperson decrying the “untypical exhibitionism” and “deliberate and violent breach of the fundamental principles of the Olympic spirit.” (In a darkly ironic twist, IOC president Avery Brundage, who oversaw the expulsion of the black athletes for their act of political speech, had also presided over the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, where he found himself untroubled by the displays of Nazi salutes at the Games.)
This small act of political protest followed by swift and merciless punishment serves as a prominent example of the relationship between political and social movements and the Olympic Games – a relationship that was savagely expressed through the violence of Tlatelolco.
1968 had been a year of political turmoil and upheaval around the world. In the United States, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. sparked uprisings in cities across the country, and protests against the U.S. aggression of the Vietnam War surged in intensity following the Tet Offensive. Simultaneously, various protest movements were forming across Europe, perhaps most famously in France, where students and workers participated in mass strikes, protests, and occupations across the country, culminating in the historic events of May 1968.
During this period of anti-capitalist unrest and the growth of what became known as the New Left, the Mexican Student Movement of 1968 began to take shape. Fighting against the authoritarian regime of President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, the movement protested the Olympic Games of 1968, seen as a symbol of the growing threat of imperialism and global capitalism. These protests posed a significant threat to the country’s ruling class, who sought to use the Games to showcase the modern and cosmopolitan qualities of their nation to the forces of global capital who perceived Mexico as an economically underdeveloped Third World country.
Against this backdrop, it was particularly ironic that the 1968 Olympic Games were officially declared the “Games of Peace,” as the lead-up to the event was anything but peaceful. In the months leading up to the Games, student protests intensified across the country, and the government responded harshly with extreme violence and displays of military force.
On the morning of October 2, 1968 – ten days before the opening ceremonies of the 1968 Summer Olympics – thousands of students peacefully assembled in the Plaza de Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City to hear speeches from leaders of the movement and to protest the unjust imprisonment of their comrades by the repressive Mexican government. One of the rallying cries heard in the square that day: “We don’t want Olympics, we want revolution!”
While the protests and speeches occurred throughout the day, the police and government forces surrounded the plaza. Tensions between the protesters and their oppressors continued to mount throughout the day until sometime around 6:00pm when the first shots were fired. Soldiers from the Olympica Battalion – a violent and secretive special forces group established to enforce “security” around the Olympic Games – entered the plaza and the Tlatelolco massacre began.
Student protesters were arrested, tortured, and brutally murdered in a shocking and savage display of violence. Official reports varied in their estimates but claimed that somewhere between 30-40 students were killed. However, the repressive government ensured that no official investigation ever took place, and tried to cover up the truth of the massacre. Eyewitness accounts and more accurate estimates made by scholars have placed the number of actual deaths somewhere closer to 300 with countless more wounded and over 1,000 imprisoned.
Ten days later, the opening ceremonies of the 1968 Summer Olympics were held, as if the massacre had never happened, and the Games went on as planned.
In the fifty years since, we’ve learned more about what happened that day in October. Early reports from the Mexican government claimed that communist agents embedded with the student protesters fired the first shots. However, declassified documents and archival footage later revealed that the government had planted snipers in the surrounding buildings who opened fire on the Mexican troops, provoking the subsequent assault on the students.
Additionally, documents obtained from the White House, the CIA, and other branches of the United States government have shown that the U.S. was heavily invested in the situation in Mexico, motivated both by anti-communist fears and the desire to suppress the growing student movement before the global spotlight of the Olympic Games shined on Mexico City.
One chilling telegram from the Department of State, issued just days before the massacre, noted the “high level disorders in Mexico […] as Olympics approach,” with the Mexican government “virtually committed to forceful showdown with student militants.”
We’ve seen echoes and reverberations of Tlatelolco again and again. Before the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, the LAPD engaged in massive police sweeps of South Los Angeles, arresting suspected gang members, unhoused residents, and anyone they believed might pose a threat to the city’s image, laying the groundwork for Operation Hammer and the 1992 Uprising. It’s hard not to see echoes of the Olympia Battalion in the LAPD under the command of Daryl Gates.
During the long lead-up to the 1988 Games in Seoul, hundreds of unhoused children were imprisoned in concentration camps, leading to their torture and mass murder at the hands of the government. Similar purges of unhoused residents occurred in Salt Lake City prior to the 2002 Games. The suppression of political protest has long been a feature of the security forces brought in by Games, ranging from the violent responses to protests in the London to the veritable war zone created by militarized security in Rio de Janeiro, when the Olympics finally returned to Latin America in 2016 for the first time since the Summer Olympics of 1968.
This reality stands in stark contrast to the shallow displays of global unity and prosperity promised by the Olympic Games. The superficiality of the event can only be maintained by the violent repression of the political and social realities that exist in Olympic host cities. While the IOC and other Olympic boosters relive the false and hollow glories of 1968, we choose to remember the lives lost in Tlatelolco, and the true costs of maintaining the Olympic legacy.
