Former political prisoners publish books about ’68

‘The boss left very angry because you didn’t collaborate,’ they told me when they took me blindfolded at night from the safe house outside Mexico City. ‘You’ll run when we open the door. We are going to give you the escape law. If you’re lucky you’ll be able to escape.’”

The economist Francisco Colmenares, captured on January 24, 1969 and author of the recently published book Rebellion, Tlatelolco and prison in Lecumberri (Plaza y Valdés Editores), told The Day the consequences of his interrogation and torture by Miguel Nazar Haro, who would later head the feared Federal Security Directorate.

“After a while of silence they ordered me: ‘Take off the blindfold. Join in.’ In the distance I saw the main façade of Lecumberri. It moved me. I told myself: ‘another chance at life’, because I didn’t go there any more than on October 2, 1968 in Tlatelolco, when I was among the students of the National School of Economics. I was lucky to run, get out and not be hit by any of the bullets that were fired from many places.”

In that prison he shared with Heberto Castillo, Marcué Pardiñas, Elí de Gortari, Luis Tomás Cervantes Cabeza de Vaca, Adolfo Gilly, Óscar Fernández Bruno, Roberto Iriarte, Pablo Alvarado, Víctor Rico Galán, Ramón Danzós Palomino, Mario Rechy, Antonio Gershenson and Rolf Meiners, of the medical movement.

After having gone through the beatings and what happened at the time they arrested me, which I narrate in the book, arriving in Lecumberri was for me a school of knowledge, of teachings of an impressive multiplicity.Colmenares commented.

The unionist also stressed that it is convenient for young people to know that “there were many emotions and experiences that we experienced during the student movement of 1968. At least I did not imagine an outcome like October 2. Nor what was going to happen after that day.

The movement invited us to fight for demands that had already become traditional, such as the freedom of political prisoners, who had been there since 1958 and 1965 and were increasingly detained. In 1968 there was already a string of prisoners imprisoned in Lecumberri and in different places in the country. There was a feeling of helplessness and anger that in the face of every peaceful public event that we called, the response was always repression.

The economist Francisco Colmenares during the interview with ‘La Jornada’ about his book. Photo Roberto García Ortiz

Colmenares said that on the night of July 26, 1968, which marked the beginning of the student revolt, “the group that participated in the commemoration of the Cuban revolution encountered the polytechnic students who were returning from the Zócalo beaten and wounded by the grenadiers. We feel a lot of indignation and solidarity.

Seeing that this indignation grew and managed to infect thousands and thousands of students made us feel that we were facing an opportunity to achieve the freedom of political prisoners. That solidarity, that enthusiasm, was multiplied by the act of dignity led by engineer Javier Barros, rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

“The government did not give alternatives”

Around the very painful experience of the crime that was committed on October 2Francisco Colmenares recognized the responsibility of those We had invited colleagues, friends and family who were there then… I invited and I couldn’t realize what they were brewinghe said with a broken voice.

Despite all that and the fears that invaded us, we were able to overcome it. Although the government first sought to crush us, then humiliate us, and then put us in a condition of surrender, it could not surrender us. Many went into exile, they withdrew from the movement, they stayed in their homes, but there were thousands who did not. We decided to maintain the movement and look for a way out that would leave a testimony of non-surrender in the face of the government’s atrocities.

In that fight were Raúl Álvarez Garín; María Fernanda Campa; Roberta Avendaño, Tita; Hannah Ignatius RodriguezNacha; Salvador Villegas; Heberto Castillo; José Revueltas; Fausto Trejo, and many more colleagues, who From their position they returned to give continuity.

The economist summarized that what motivates his text is share that the struggle of the student movement was an experience in which dreams, defeats, frustrations, losses were combined, but at the same time a deep will to continue. The message is that it greatly encouraged that fortitude.

He concluded: “I have always felt immense satisfaction having lived through it. We were convinced, and even when we said goodbye, in December 1968, we recommended to ourselves: ‘take care of yourselves’, because there were no alternatives that the government gave. Either we surrender or we go into exile or they put us in jail or they kill us, and the majority chose to continue. The most important thing is that trail he left: the resistance.”