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Despite being Canadian, I don’t give a shit about hockey. I find all professional sports boring. But the Olympics? I’m glued to the TV. However, in 1968 Mexico there were a lot of people not at all excited for the Games, probably because the president spent the equivalent of a billion dollars on the Olympics rather than feed the people. When the people protested, murder happened.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: October 2, 1968--
The games were to begin on October 12, and the Mexico City summer was marked by growing protests. Social tensions were high, and President Ordaz suppressed labor unions and farmers who were pissed at, well, everything. Then university students got in on it, and the protests grew. Some of the protests were violent, but the one that took place on October 2, 1968, was peaceful.
Approximately 10,000 protestors arrived at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, which I shouldn’t have to translate, in the Tlatelolco district of the nation’s capital and the event began with speeches as they had often times before. But the government was getting pissy about all this protesting stuff, what with the Olympics being only 10 days away, and decided that high-velocity projectiles ripping through human tissue was a reasonable response to complaints about government corruption.
Troops were sent in. The official line, which was perpetuated via government-controlled media, was that the protestors shot at the troops first and those poor soldiers had no choice but to defend themselves. Of course, this was bullshit. You know who started the shooting? Fucking army snipers. They’d taken up positions on various rooftops and just began shooting into the crowd at a signal given by government helicopters dropping flares. This was planned murder. Then the soldiers on the ground joined in.
Protestors and passersby, journalists and children, were shot by government forces. It wasn’t just a short burst of fire, but a mass killing that went on into the night. The government downplayed the number of deaths, but the estimates are that hundreds were killed and many more wounded. Over a thousand were arrested. Thirty years later there was an official investigation, but no one was ever held accountable. In 2003 it was discovered the U.S. played a role in the massacre, providing weapons, training, and intelligence leading up to the events of October 2.
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Why am I not surprised?
I just watched the PBS special "America and the Holocaust". That was more than disgusting, but not surprising.
"How dare you peacefully protest our spending all the country's money on the Olympics while you're starving to death, peasents?"