'The most terrifying night of my life' Mexico October 1968

[AlphaCentauri]

In October 1968, British journalist Robert Trevor was in Mexico City getting ready to cover the Olympic Games which were about to start.

But he ended up reporting on one of the bloodiest episodes in Mexican history, what he calls "the most terrifying night of my life".

Mr Trevor, then aged 34, was the sports editor of the London Evening News and was in the Mexican capital to report on his third Olympics.

In the run-up to the Games, Mexico had been caught up in the wave of social and political unrest that had erupted in other parts of the world throughout 1968. But Mr Trevor says the people he first met were just excited about the sports events.

"The atmosphere was one of pleasure at having the Olympic Games. The Mexicans were proud of their Olympics. They wanted them to go off as well as possible," Mr Trevor told BBC Mundo.

He heard that a political demonstration was planned for the evening of 2 October in Tlatelolco Square, or Plaza de las Tres Culturas. He went along to see if there would be a story in it.

"There was a big crowd there, about 3,000," he says, most of them young students and union activists.

"To begin with it was very peaceful and quiet. Everyone was listening to the speeches calling for the resignation of President Diaz Ordaz and for the government to rule according to the Mexican constitution.

"There were calls for better housing, better education, better food."

But then shots were fired from nearby rooftops.

"Before people could grasp what was happening, helicopters arrived, helicopter gunships that started firing down on the crowd," he says.

An American journalist from the UPI news agency standing next to Mr Trevor suddenly found himself covered in other people's blood.

"When the helicopters opened fire and flares were dropped to light up the square, people were absolutely terrified," Mr Trevor recalls.

The crowd began darting down side-streets to try to escape.

"As we ran down the streets we were met by Mexican soldiers in full battle order - steel helmets, rifles - and backed by armoured cars.

"People were being shot at from the front, by the foot soldiers, and from behind by the helicopter gunships, so they were trapped. It was terrible, there was no escape."

Mr Trevor managed to run down a street that eventually took him back to Mexico City's main thoroughfare, Paseo de la Reforma.

"There it was unbelievable because the restaurants were full, people were coming out of cinemas, people were walking up and down the boulevard. Nobody knew what was happening 800m (2,600ft) away. It was unreal."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7646473.stm

[Judi Lynn]

1. This voice comes from outside the country. So glad he finally speaks out.

Just looked in for a minute to see what's up here, don't have time to read. Will come back to read this information later. Wouldn't miss it.

All those other voices silenced all these years for all practical purposes. When news is suppressed in this hemisphere it often really stays buried for decades and longer, doesn't it?

Remember our President had his CIA active in Mexico at the time, feeding the names of the leftist university students to the Mexican government.

Thank you for posting this article.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Have read this, and I'm so glad this man is going "public" with his experience,

and particularly disputing the Mexican government's lie that it only slaughtered 25 of these young people and union workers.

Here's more information:

MASSACRE AT THE OLYMPICS: BEIJING GAMES UNFOLD AGAINST SAME SINISTER BACKDROP AS MEXICO '68
Posted August 11th, 2008 by cdfierro

~snip~
The 1968 Olympics were Cold War Games. The International Olympics Committee had displayed an anti-Soviet bias ever since the 1920 Games in Belgium, the first since the Great War and the Russian Revolution, from which the Soviet Union delegation was barred. After World War II, London (1948), Helsinki (1952), Melbourne (1956), Rome (1960), and Tokyo (1964) had all been Cold War Games and Mexico 1968 was no exception.

U.S. intelligence agents trolled the Soviet bloc delegations for defectors. East and west spied upon each other without remorse. Washington's Mexico City embassy was its largest in the world and equipped with cutting-edge technology to keep tabs on Cuban and Soviet diplomatic missions. Both teams assembled top tier teams of spies for the Games. By the summer of '68, Mexico City resembled a spooks' Olympics.

Winston Scott, the CIA station chief in Mexican capital, had developed a close relationship with Diaz Ordaz and pledged his aid in quelling the student disturbances. The late Phillip Agee, a veteran Agency spook in Africa and Latin America, was brought in under cover as a "cultural attaché." One of Agee's assignments was to tout the U.S. Space program before university audiences but his real mission was to infiltrate the General Strike Committee and thwart Cuban influence.

In Agee's breakaway bestseller "Inside The Company - CIA Diary", he reveals that the agency had assets inside the strike committee. One of Agee's tasks was to prepare a daily report on the student strike that appeared on Interior Secretary Luis Echeverria's desk each morning - Echeverria was Diaz Ordaz's top civilian organizer of the repression.

Some 8000 strikers and their families gathered in the Plaza of Three Cultures on the evening of October 2nd, a disappointing turnout. They were outnumbered by police and army units encamped on the side streets. As daylight faded, a military helicopter dropped a flare, signaling government sharpshooters on the ninth floor of the Secretariat of Foreign Relations, which overlooked the plaza. The snipers deliberately fired on army troops who had moved in to surround the protestors and cut off all escape routes from the plaza.

As the snipers' bullets rained down on them, the mostly Indian "Olympic Brigade" opened up on student leaders who were speaking from the steps of the nearby Chihuahua apartment building. Thousands assembled in the plaza were caught in the crossfire. The corpses stacked up like cordwood on the plaza floor. Estimates of the number of dead vacillated wildly but the best count remains 257 killed, researched by a British Guardian reporter who had been trapped under a corpse heap on a Chihuahua building landing.

Thousands were rounded up and disappeared into the pens of Military Camp #1 on the western edge of the capital. The bodies of the dead were incinerated in the camp's ovens. Those who survived still speak of the stench of their comrades' burning flesh.

The next morning, Excelsior, then Mexico's newspaper of reference, noted that 30 "Pro-Cuban" agitators had been slain after firing on army troops in the Plaza of Three Cultures. With the Olympics only ten days off, notice of the massacre was buried. Outspoken Italian correspondent Oriana Fallaci, who had been shot in the ass, was one of the few to make a stink. Carolyn Lippert, then working for CBS, took film of the massacre to Mexico City International Airport and persuaded a tourist to smuggle it to New York but CBS never ran the film.

More:
http://www.fresnoundercurrent.net/node/1864