ABSTRACT
In 1968 the Mexican state violently repressed a student movement that challenged the authoritarianism of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). In the months leading up to the 1968 summer Olympic Games, students from several Mexico City postsecondary institutions began protesting state spending on preparations for the Games, which they believed would benefit only a small segment of Mexican society. One of the Tlatelolco Massacre’s most important consequences was that public awareness of the state’s use of violence against its own citizens initiated a crisis of confidence in the PRI that led to the unraveling of the party’s hegemonic control of the country. Included here are two of the hundreds of eyewitness descriptions of the massacre collected by the journalist Elena Poniatowska, along with several newspaper articles and editorials about the events. Scholars have often asserted that a media blackout left the horror of the Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968 unreported.
