The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics by P. J. Brendese

Author:P. J. Brendese [Brendese, P. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Democracy, Political Science, History & Theory, Political Ideologies
ISBN: 9781580464239
Google: 90olBQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 14360715
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Published: 2012-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

IN MEMORY OF DEMOCRATIC TIME

SPECTERS OF MEXICO’S PAST AND DEMOCRACY’S FUTURE

In Mexico, all times are living, all pasts are present.... The coexistence in Mexico of multiple historical levels is but the external sign of a deep subconscious decision made by the country and its people; all times must be maintained, all times must be kept alive. Why? Because no Mexican time has yet fulfilled itself. We are a horizon of latent, promising or frustrated, never fully achieved potentialities. A country of suspended times.

—Carlos Fuentes

In what became known as the Corpus Christi massacre, on June 10, 1971, roughly eight thousand student protesters marched on Mexico City’s central square to oppose the government of President Luis Echeverría. A secret police unit called the Falcons (Halcones) attacked the marchers, allegedly killing at least twenty-five people—some that day and others after torture and interrogation. Echeverría ruled the country from 1970 to 1976 during what is often referred to as the “dirty war”—a term used to describe the government’s clandestine efforts to crush dissent.1 Echeverría’s government and his party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), allegedly used wiretaps, rape, torture, genocide, and extra-judicial death sentences to silence opponents.2 The media were coopted to prevent the actions of the government from becoming public. Since then, the Mexican government’s human rights commission has uncovered numerous stories of horrific acts perpetrated by the secret police, and there is evidence that children born to imprisoned mothers were stolen and that the Falcons were explicitly trained to kidnap, torture, and rape on behalf of the government.3

While second-in-command to President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, Echeverría was accused of ordering an assault that claimed the lives of up to three hundred student protesters in 1968, an incident known as the Tlatelolco massacre.4 Ernesto Zedillo, Mexico’s president from 1994 until 2000, called the event “the watershed of the country’s political life, when a real public outcry began for a more democratic country.”5 Echeverría reportedly orchestrated the 1971 massacre because he feared a recurrence of the democratic mobilization of 1968. In a similar way, the student demonstrators of Corpus Christi sustained the memories of their disappeared and fallen compatriots against a tyrant who feared a return of their specters.

In spite of Echeverría’s efforts to make the protesters disappear, they live on in memories of when the politically impossible became possible. Just as the ghosts of the 1968 massacre returned in 1971, more than thirty years later the vanquished returned as specters challenging Mexico’s nascent democratic institutions. Those whose futures perished in the name of democracy demanded to be remembered by it. In July 2002 the New York Times reported that Mexican President Vicente Fox was in possession of a sealed envelope bearing the names of seventy-four government officials alleged to be responsible for the torturing and killing of hundreds of leftists in Mexico.6 He vowed that, under the new democracy, none were exempt from the rule of law, including even former heads of state. On July 23, 2004, special prosecutor Ignacio Carillo Prieto filed charges against Echeverría and several government officials for the 1971 massacre.

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