'68

Known mostly for his wonderful Mexico City detective novels, Paco Ignacio Taibo II reported, in this small book, now available in English, on events leading up to a mass murder of Mexican students and supporters during the turbulent year 1968. While students and activists worldwide took to the streets to protest repressive governments, few met the end that as many as 400 -- the numbers vary wildly -- students did in what has become known as the Tlatelolco Massacre.As thousands of students and their supporters massed in a public square known as the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Tlatelolco, in Mexico City, activists' speeches were interrupted as shots rang out and bodies began to pile up. The official report was that a couple of dozen people had died; estimates, though, range into the hundreds - and this happened with little notice in the American press. After all, the world was preparing to hold its Olympic Games in Mexico City and the mass shooting was downplayed in that country and in the U.S.A., too.But Taibo, who was part of the Movement that brought young Mexicans into the streets, paints a poetic picture of himself and his young comrades as they came together on campuses across that sprawling city, in classrooms and in busy downtown streets and squalid artists' apartments as well as parents' quiet homes. The students had the usual demands, hardened by the stranglehold that the country's corrupt government had on institutions and the media. Paranoid and frightening? Of course. Romantic and exciting? For sure!There is better journalism detailing the Movement, the massacre and the lackluster official postmortems of the terrible event. But there is not, to my knowledge, any book that lets us feel the excitement and the terror that drove those brave students out of their classrooms and, for some unknown number, to their violent deaths in the Plaza of the Three Cultures.

This is what primary-source, first-person history is supposed to be like, and it's written with regret -- regret, specifically, that Taibo II finds himself alone as the memorialist of the rebellion and massacres of 1968. History has made Mexico City into the empty center of the events of that year, and the place where so much of what was to follow, from the Dirty War in Argentina to, ultimately, the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, found its beginning. This is essential history; a book that every school library should have.

I felt like I was there with the students of '68. Biased? No doubt, but that's not the point. The vivid view from the left of the barricades is what counts.

This was the first non-fiction that I've read from Sr. Taibo. He brought the same attention to detail and sense of place to '68 that he brought to his detective novels.

Paco Ignacio Taibo II, considered by many to be Mexico's greatest modern writer, dives into his memories of 40 years past to recollect a time when the world was turning upside down, when political movements were more than just slogans, and when revolution was something the young deeply aspired to. "68" is a powerful, fascinating look at 1960s Mexico, while America was celebrating flower power, Latin America's own youth was inspired and captivated by the possibility of socialist revolution inspired by events in Cuba and figures like Che Guevara. The mass student movement culminated in a notorious chapter of Mexican history: The October massacre in Tlatelolco Square where hundreds, possibly thousands of people were shot down by government troops in an even still shrouded in mystery and official denial. Taibo is the perfect choice to write on the subject considering he lived through it, he was one of the students marching in the streets of Mexico City that year and still a Leftist, having written the definitive Che bio, "Guevara, Also Known As Che." His chronicle here is a nostalgic, interesting, never boring slice of memory. He meticulously captures the culture of the time, not just politically but socially, showing us a conservative country rattled by the emergence of hippies and miniskirts, with students studying Marx and traveling to Havana to drink in the idea of utopian revolution. He also captures the dark side of the times, the brutal government repression, troops invading campuses in ways that make the 60s campus battles in the U.S. seem like child's play. There are comic side stories that dip into the more light-hearted side of youth and discovery, but always full of intrigue, consider Taibo lamenting his girlfriend leaving him for a "student" that turned out to be a government informant. "68" races along with the urgency of memory, of a writer trying to get it all down before memory and official history begin to fail. 40 years later the bloody events of 1968 will no doubt be revisited in Mexico, and in times just as interesting with the new rise of the Left in the region impulsed by Venezuela. But the beauty of "68" is how it is just such a well-written, fascinating moment in time, a universal story of being young and having ideals, fighting authority and hoping for something better. The hope and terror are all here, "68" is not confined to it's era and finds itself at home in our own decisive moment in history.