Tlatelolco Massacre (1968)

In one of the most important and controversial episodes in postwar Mexican history, on October 2, 1968, police and army units violently suppressed a demonstration in Tlatelolco Square in the heart of Mexico City. The government’s version of events differed starkly from those of eyewitnesses and the version that gained currency among much of the populace.

The crackdown contributed to a growing crisis of legitimacy for the ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), fueling popular sentiments that the PRI was corrupt, dictatorial, and antidemocratic, and tarnishing Mexico’s image on the eve of the country’s hosting of the 1968 Summer Olympics.

The roots of the October 1968 events in Tlatelolco have been traced to the upsurge in student and worker democratic and anti-PRI activism from the late 1950s, including the Teachers’ Movement in 1958; the Railway Workers’ Movement in 1958–59; demonstrations in support of the Cuban Revolution (1959); a massive student strike at the National University (UNAM, spring 1966); and protest movements in the states of Puebla (1964), Morelia (1966), and Sonora and Tabasco (1967).


More immediate antecedents include the government’s mobilization of an antiriot paramilitary squad, the granaderos, in response to street fights between two Mexico City schools in July 1968, and again in response to student protests commemorating the anniversary of Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement. Tensions mounted throughout August as students held huge demonstrations at the UNAM and the National Polytechnic Institute.

The events prompted the formation of a National Student Strike Committee, which issued a list of demands that included disbandment of the granaderos and release of all political prisoners. An estimated 500,000 people, mostly students and workers, participated in antigovernment demonstrations in Mexico City’s central square (Zócalo) on August 27, to that date the country’s single largest mass protest.

Law enforcement agencies responded with tanks and armored cars, killing at least one student. In mid-September, President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz ordered 10,000 army troops to occupy the UNAM campus. Some 500 protesters were jailed, and in the ensuing weeks tensions throughout Mexico City ran high.

The exact sequence of events on the evening of October 2 in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Plaza of the Three Cultures) in the District of Tlatelolco, where 5,000 to 10,000 protesters had gathered, remains disputed. The next day the government claimed that terrorists had opened fire on the police from a nearby building and that police had responded to the unprovoked attack.

Most newspapers at the time reported from 20 to 28 protestors killed. Eyewitnesses recalled with near unanimity that police and army units had instigated the violence, dropping flares from helicopters before spraying machine-gun and small-arms fire indiscriminately into the crowd, killing hundreds.

The British newspaper The Guardian estimated after "careful investigation" that 325 were killed, a figure cited by Mexican writer Octavio Paz as the most plausible. In the ensuing days and weeks, thousands were jailed.

Memories of Tlatelolco remained fresh into the 1990s and after, evidenced by a 1997 congressional investigation into the massacre and the 2006 indictment of ex-president and then-interior minister Luis Echevarría for his role in the events, which remain a festering wound in the nation’s collective memory.

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a trilateral trade pact among the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Implemented on January 1, 1994, the agreement is intended to foster open and unrestricted commercial relations among its three signatories.

Supplemental agreements, also part of NAFTA, are the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC), the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), and the Understanding on Emergency Action (Safeguards). Administered in the United States by the International Trade Administration of the Department of Commerce, NAFTA is one of several regional trading blocs in the Western Hemisphere.

These include the Andean Community of Nations (CAN, among Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru, f. 1969); the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM, f. 1973), the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR, among Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Paraguay, f. 1991), and the Central America–Dominican Republic–United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR, f. 2004).

NAFTA’s supporters conceive of the agreement as an important stepping stone in the creation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which would include the 34 nation-states and territories of the Western Hemisphere.

In its goal of fostering unrestricted commercial relations, NAFTA follows the principles of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO).

NAFTA has sparked a huge debate between its supporters and opponents. Its principal supporters in the private sector consist of the hemisphere’s largest corporations, most of which are based in the United States.

They argue that in all three countries NAFTA will increase living standards, create new jobs, protect the environment; and ensure compliance with labor laws. Its principal opponents include labor, environmental, faith-based, indigenous rights, and consumer rights groups.

They maintain that NAFTA, like the WTO, promotes a "race to the bottom" by favoring large corporations over smaller enterprises, benefiting the rich more than the poor; increasing inequality, causing a net loss of jobs, fostering environmental degradation, and failing to adequately protect the rights of workers.

The communiqués of sub-commander Marcos, spokesperson of the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico—a group whose rebellion against the Mexican government was timed to coincide with NAFTA’s implementation—convey many of the principal arguments of NAFTA’s opponents.

A large scholarly literature mirrors this debate. On the whole, the evidence demonstrates that NAFTA has increased trade dramatically while failing to meet its supporters’ expectations with regard to employment, poverty, inequality, the environment, and labor rights. In Mexico, poverty, inequality, and unemployment have all increased substantially since NAFTA’s implementation.

In the United States and Canada, the creation of new jobs has not kept pace with the outflows of capital and jobs traceable to NAFTA. The leftward tilt in Latin American politics since the 1990s has buttressed that continent’s opposition to multilateral trade agreements like NAFTA, the WTO, and the proposed FTAA.

Agrarian Reform in Mexico

Agrarian Reform in Mexico

Among the principal causes of the Mexican revolution (1910–20) were the country’s highly unequal landowning patterns and growing landlessness among the rural majority, especially during the regime of dictator Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910).

The 1917 constitution, which has governed Mexico since that time, included among its provisions several articles addressing the land issue, most prominently Article 27, which states in part: “The nation shall at all times have the right to impose on private property such limitations as the public interest may demand, as well as the right to regulate the utilization of natural resources ... in order to conserve them and to ensure a more equitable distribution of public wealth.”

Article 27 also stipulated that only ejidos (inalienable village-owned collective lands, generally distributed by villages to individual heads of households) and individual Mexican citizens could own Mexican land or subsoil rights.


In the early 1920s, under intense international pressure, Article 27 was watered down in a series of constitutional amendments to permit foreign firms, most notably U.S. oil companies, to be granted concessions on Mexican territory for the exploitation of natural resources.

Actual implementation of Article 27 varied greatly in accordance with the proclivities of individual presidents. In the 23 years from 1917 and 1940, approximately 30.6 million hectares were redistributed to villages and individuals.

Around one-third of this total (34 percent) was redistributed from 1917 to 1934 under the presidencies of Venustiano Carranza (1917–20), Alvaro Obregón (1920–24), and Plutarco Calles and his subordinates (1924–34), amounting to a little over 10.5 million hectares. The remaining two-thirds (66 percent), amounting to some 20.1 million hectares, was distributed by the administration of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40).

After 1940, the popular clamor for land declined substantially, in consequence of both the aggressive implementation of the constitution’s land reform provisions under Cárdenas; formal representation of rural producers in national and local governments via the National Peasant Confederation (Confederación Nacional Campesino, or CNC); and the growth of rural-urban migration and the attendant shift in the nation’s demographic structure. According to one leading scholar, “[the] kala of agrarian violence that began in 1810 finally ended with the land reform of the 1930s.”

After 1940, the national government under the PRI favored large commercial agricultural enterprises at the expense of smaller production units, resulting in growing impoverishment among rural dwellers. Under President Luis Echevvaría (1970–76), the government again emphasized the ejido sector, adding some 17 million hectares to the ejido total.

This was the last major redistribution of Mexican land. In 1992 the government radically altered the nature of the ejido, in effect privatizing it by permitting ejido-holders (ejidatarios) to sell, rent, lease, or mortgage their properties.

The neoliberal, free market, privatization-oriented reforms under President Vicente Fox (2000–06) continued the erosion of the ejido, though the institution remained important in many rural areas, while local struggles for land (as waged by the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, for instance) promised to continue into the foreseeable future.