The Surprising Piece of Mexican (and American)
History at the Center of Roma
The Corpus Christi massacre—and
the United States’ alleged involvement—explained.
NOV 21, 20183:32
PM
Roma.
Netflix.
Alfonso Cuarón’s acclaimed new film, Roma,
mostly revolves around the unremarkable home life of one middle-class family
and one of their domestic workers—which makes it all the more surprising when,
about two-thirds of the way in, it zooms out to find this same family at the
center of a historic tragedy. Though Mexicans who know their history may see
the signs that the movie is about to depict the infamous Corpus Christi
massacre, many Americans will be blindsided and may be left scratching their
heads. For those viewers, here’s a guide to understanding what’s
brewing quietly in the background of Roma until it erupts into
the political conflict that left about 120 people dead.
No historical account of the massacre—more
colloquially known as El Halconazo, or “hawk strike,” because of
the collaboration of a paramilitary group called Los Halcones—would be complete
without first understanding the pseudo-democratic system that ruled Mexico for
most of the 20th century. From 1929–2000, the country was ruled
by only one party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. This created
what Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, in 1990, called “the perfect dictatorship,” because it was a
“dictatorship that’s camouflaged.”
Some
viewers may notice that when Cleo finds Fermín training with a large group of
men on a soccer field, there’s an American trainer and someone wearing
a CIA cap.
Then, in 1968, as Mexico prepared to be
both the first Spanish-speaking and the first developing country to host the
Summer Olympics, students from various universities mobilized to protest this
oppression and demand democracy. The Mexican student movement echoed the
protests happening worldwide at the time, such as the civil rights movement in
the United States. The government of President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz violently
repressed several protests throughout the summer of ’68, arresting and beating
people indiscriminately, culminating with one of the worst displays of authoritarianism in Mexican history: the
Tlatelolco massacre. On Oct. 2, 10 days before the Olympics started,
soldiers and police disguised as civilians opened fire on thousands of high
school and university student demonstrators gathered in the Plaza de las Tres
Culturas in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco neighborhood. Government officials claimed that only a few
people had been killed during the confrontation, but eyewitness and independent
reports have set the number closer to the hundreds.
Decades later, Luis Echeverría Álvarez,
who was the interior minister at the time, was blamed for orchestrating the Tlatelolco massacre,
but not before being elected president in 1970, a time when elections were
heavily rigged in favor of the ruling party. It’s in this year that Roma opens,
and campaign posters, signs, and T-shirts supporting Echeverría and the PRI are
visible in the backgrounds of several scenes. Similarly, when the protagonist,
Cleo, the domestic worker, goes to a rural part of the State of Mexico in
search of Fermín, the father of her child, the camera focuses on three letters
spelled at the flanks of a mountain: LEA, for the president’s
initials.
It’s earlier in the film, when we first
see a naked Fermín show off his martial-arts skills, using a shower rod in
place of a kendo stick, that some viewers may intuit that he is training to be
one of the Halcones, who became known for using such weapons. By 1971, the
Mexican government, allegedly in collaboration with
the United States, had devised a plan to prevent uprisings of such
magnitude from happening again. In fact, viewers may notice that when Cleo
finds Fermín training with a large group of men on a soccer field, there’s an
American trainer and someone wearing a CIA cap. Fermín even mentions that a
“gringo” had been training them for a while. (The United States, of course,
trained a number of violent paramilitary groups during the Cold War, with the
right-wing Contras in Nicaragua and the CIA-trained Bay of Pigs invaders being
two more well-known examples.)
The idea behind the Halcones was to
recruit young men, particularly from poor neighborhoods, who could pass
themselves off as students to more easily infiltrate campuses and repress protests, and authorities often
instructed them to initiate violence, as if they were students, so the police
and military could claim they were provoked. (Three years earlier, during
Tlatelolco, the Mexican government used a similar black operations army group,
known as the Olympia battalion.) In 1971, the wounded
students were taken to the Rubén Leñero hospital, where the Halcones followed to finish them off, some as they
laid in the operating table.
Though Echeverría was put under house arrest in 2006 for both
Tlatelolco and El Halconazo, he was cleared of criminal responsibility three
years later, when courts found there wasn’t evidence to convict him. To this
day, Mexicans are still looking for justice.
All contents © 2018 The Slate Group LLC. All rights reserved.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment