Oaxaca remembers October 2, 1968

All month long in Oaxaca city there have been special events to commemorate a tragic event that happened 40 years ago. The past 2 weekends I've been to a number of art exhibits and a movie that really show just how much this event shook things up in Mexico, especially as it was the same year that the Olympics took place in Mexico. I'm attaching some pictures (sorry for the glare!!) representative of the student protest in response to the government's actions, and following is a description I found online...

The protest rally here on Oct. 2, 1968, began like many others
across the world in that era of campus revolt and
rock-and-roll. Thousands of demonstrators huddled in a drizzle to hear
student leaders with bullhorns denounce the army occupation of a
university.
Then the sky over downtown Mexico City crackled with flares and
Tlatelolco Plaza exploded in gunfire. Shooting at the panicked crowd,
troops and the police turned the plaza into an inferno of carnage and
screams. When the firing stopped, 2,000 demonstrators were beaten and
jailed, scores of bodies were trucked away and firehoses washed the
blood from the cobblestones.
Like the killings outside Tiananmen Square in China in 1989, the
Tlatelolco massacre seared the conscience of an entire Mexican
generation. Government officials have resisted every attempt at
investigation, insisting that students had provoked the bloodshed by
attacking security forces.
The government originally insisted that 27 people died, but others put the
body count far higher. Robert Service, who was a diplomat at the U.S.
Embassy in 1968, estimated for Aguayo (a historian) that "nearly 200" died.
"This year a lot of new information is coming out," Aguayo said. "But this
wound isn't going to heal."