“The accusation is pure conjecture.”
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THE TLATELOLCO MASSACRE
The Mexican government's planned response to the student rally on the evening of October 2 [1968] was called Operation Galeano. The most definitive account of this operation, culminating with the Tlatelolco Massacre, is found in a Mexican special prosecutor's report released in November 2006. According to this report, early on October 2 elements of the military's Estado Mayor Presidencial (EMP, the Presidential High Command) were placed in apartments on the upper floors of the Chihuahua apartment building and other apartment buildings surrounding Tlatelolco's Plaza de las Tres Culturas. (One of the apartments taken over by the EMP in the Molina del Rey building was the residence of a sister-in-law of Interior Minister Echeverría.) Once the rally started, the Army, using from 5,000 to 10,000 soldiers (the accounts varying) and more than 300 tanks and other vehicles, would surround the plaza to prevent those attending the rally from fleeing, while armed military men in civilian clothes, members of a unit called the Batallón Olimpia that had been organized to help protect the Olympic Games, would prevent anyone from entering or leaving the Chihuahua apartment building, in which the organizers of the rally were to be arrested.
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Echeverría was president of Mexico for less than a year when another student massacre occurred in Mexico City. Marching student protesters were attacked on June 10, 1971, by a secret, plain-clothed paramilitary squad called the Halcones (Falcons) trained and paid by the government, using clubs and firearms, resulting in at least 25 deaths. Some wounded students were allegedly finished off by the Falcons in their hospital beds. This so-called halconazo or Corpus Cristi Massacre (named for the day on the Roman Catholic calendar on which it occurred), the preceding Tlatelolco Massacre, and the killing or disappearances of hundreds of leftist radicals in the 1970s and 1980s, would become collectively known as la guerra sucia ("the dirty war").
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Denying that he ordered troops to fire on the student demonstrators, he also discounted the official government explanation that the deadly gunfire came from other student radicals. "These kids were not provocateurs," Echeverría said. "The majority were sons and daughters of workers, farmers and unemployed people." Only one person could have ordered the shooting, said Echeverría, and that was Díaz Ordaz (who died in 1979). "There was a hierarchy. The army is obligated to respond to only one man," Echeverría said. "My conscience is clear."
While Echeverría sounds almost as if he were out of the loop on the night of the Tlatelolco Massacre, or would not have known of an order by Díaz Ordaz to fire on the students, he was not only the man in charge of Mexico's internal security as previously noted, but headed a committee of high government officials, formed immediately after the violence of July 26, 1968, on how to deal with the student unrest...
