Once More with Violence

The cast was familiar: an immovable government pitted against students suddenly intoxicated with their own force. The setting was Mexico City, bedecked with flags for the Olympics that were to show Mexico's modern, progressive face to the world. What was different about last week's cops-and-students scenario was that Mexico City's antagonists did their arguing with guns.

Casualty counts were treated as practically state secrets. But in a week of rioting and sporadic shootings, the toll reached at least eight and possibly 18 dead, with perhaps a hundred wounded on both sides, and more than 2,000 arrested. It was a heavy cost for what began as a minor spat between the granaderos, or riot police, and prep-school students affiliated with the 90,000-student National University. As the scrap spilled into the streets, the students directed their anger toward the traditionally revered personage of Mexico's President, and seized the chance of disrupting the upcoming Olympics (see SPORT) as a historic opportunity for official embarrassment. For his part, dedicated, aloof President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz grimly vowed "to do whatever is our duty, however far we are obliged to go," to protect his country's good name and, presumably, the Olympics tourist trade. Fortnight ago, he ordered the army into the National University's campus, violating a 40-year tradition of academic freedom from government interference.

Home-Made Bazooka. The first casualty of the invasion was nonviolence. When protesting students assembled in the Plaza of the Three Cultures,* the granaderos charged. Students retreated to nearby apartments and replied with a volley of rocks and Molotov cocktails. At the Santo Tomas campus of the Polytechnic National Institute, the students had better weaponry. Snipers armed mostly with .22-cal. rifles and pistols, plus a home-made bazooka, pinned the granaderos down until reinforcements of riot cops arrived. Throughout much of the week, clashes continued in scattered spots.

Outwardly, the students were protesting against government repression and demanding redress for a growing list of grievances, particularly against the heavyhanded riot cops. "In actuality," declared a student leader, "we are testing the structure of the country. We want the people to see what happens when the government is criticized. We want to awaken the need for change."

If that is by now an international cliche, there was no evidence of international conspiracy. Castroite Professor Heberto Castillo, head of the Communist-lining Mexican Liberation Front, was presumed to be lending a hand somewhere, and the cops spotted half a dozen Black Panthers on their way ' home from training in Cuba and quickly shipped them on to the U.S. But even the Mexican government ceased last week to blame "outside agitators," as it had in the riots' first days. Instead, a commission appointed to study "the problems of education and youth in the country" began looking into the students' grievances.

Popular Approval. In cracking down on the students, the government demonstrated both its strength and its weakness. Popular approval for the move was evident in the fact that the stu dents were unable to rally worker support. Most of the capital's residents simply went about their business. The government's weakness lay in its innate inability to join in the public "dialogue" that the students demanded. As heir to the oft-invoked revolution of 1910, the governing Partido Revolucionario Institutional, or Institutional Revolutionary Party, represents a rather special brand of home-grown democracy. It is regularly returned with 90% of the popular vote, and Presidents pick their own successors and, in effect, their legislators.

Traditionally, the P.R.I, has straddled a broad enough political spectrum to accommodate nearly all dissent within its ranks, and has exerted control through its wings representing peasants, workers and the middle class. That method is less than totally satisfactory. The government has had to put down a string of minor revolts among the impoverished peasants who still make up nearly half of Mexico's population of 45 million. To its credit, the system has brought prosperity to the other half that is urbanized, and has given Mexico one of its few generations of civil peace. "The President of Mexico," wrote Columbia University Historian Frank Tannenbaum, "has either all power or no power; there is no middle ground."

The students in Mexico City provided a violent dissent to that notion, and they were not alone. One of their first nonviolent parades was led by the university's rector, Javier Barros Sierra, a respected former Minister of Public Works and grandson of the educator who established the modern university in 1910. Barros Sierra was President Diaz Ordaz's personal choice for the post. But last week, finding himself under increasing attack by P.R.I, politicians for his protests against invasion of the campuses, Barros Sierra abruptly resigned, with a parting shot at "those who don't understand the conflict." The teachers' union vowed that if he left, so would they, and the university's board of governors refused to accept his resignation. Going back to work, Barros Sierra promised this time to restore order--though whether he had enough remaining influence to accomplish that feat remained to be seen.

* So named for its preserved Aztec ruin, Spanish colonial church, and modernistic marble-and-glass foreign-ministry building.

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