State Repression in Mexican Social Movements: Tlatelolco y Ayotzinapa

This paper attempts to analyze a facet of the Mexican government’s corruption; the first goal is to understand the injustices faced by the Mexican people that led to El Movimiento Estudiantil, the Student Movement of 1968. This essay will discuss the country’s history of conflict, the events leading up to La Masacre de Tlatelolco, the government repression in its multiple forms, and the consequences of such repression. In doing this, I will make connections between the disappearance of los normalistas, forty-three student activists who disappeared at the hands of local Mexican police. The Mexican government’s repression has left its constituents’ grievances unaddressed, thus causing a resurgence of insurgence; the government’s silencing of the protesters merely swept the problems of the Mexican people under a dirty rug, which inevitably rose again. The Student Movement was started by college students, but expanded to include a wider range of demands; they were joined by virtually the entire Mexican populace. Forty-six years later, student activists in their late teens and early twenties from the Normal Rural School of Ayotzinapa were attacked by state police in Guerrero. They were on their way to La Ciudad de México from Guerrero to honor the martyrs who died in the Massacre of Tlateloclo, proving that, when the government attempts to silence its people with the use of violence, it will work against its favor, as more disruption will arise out of the anger directly caused by the violence