Gustavo Gordillo de Anda, witness of ’68 / Elena Poniatowska

From time to time, a leader, now of a certain age, calls me to remember what happened in 1968 and we always end up talking about marches and rallies like the one on October 2, and we remember the tragedy, especially the emotion that preceded it with the strength of the student movement of 1968 and the applause of sympathy in Reforma. This is now the case of the leader Gustavo Gordillo de Anda, who writes his novel sixtyyochera, whom I welcome with great pleasure into the house.

–On October 2, 1968, some friends who were coming with me grabbed me and took me to hide in a house in Santa María la Ribera, because the situation was already terrible; They did not arrest me and I was able to leave Mexico thanks also to a providential woman: madame Suzanne Felicien, from the French embassy.

–I think Suzanne Felicien helped many young people…

–I went to France thanks to her, who was the scientific attaché of the embassy in Mexico and a friend of my father, a very famous nephrologist. My father asked him if there was any program for a leader to come out of ’68. As many as you can take out, take them out at oncesaid one of the leaders, a teacher whose name I withhold. I went out and, do you know who took me to the airport? Vicente Rojo’s wife, Albita, pretending that she was my wife. I went out with a group with a scholarship from the French government.

“The student movement of 1968 cost me 20 years of my life, because the impact was very strong. To recover from that image that was always with me, that of October 2 in Tlatelolco, 10 years ago I began to write a novel about ’68; I haven’t published it. I want you to see it because what you said in The night of Tlatelolco I turned it theatrical, I turned it into characters in several of the dialogues, of course, I quote you in everything that needs to be cited; I also grabbed a lot of Monsi and José Emilio Pacheco. The first scene of my novel is that of the lady with the child in her arms telling the soldier: ‘Kill him.’

–Oh God, how horrible!

–Throughout the novel, everyone who participated speaks: the mother because she protected the student, the son who tells the mother 20 years later about the risks he took and she never suspected. The main character is my another self. Throughout many pages, I tell many things about ’68 that are not yet known.

“I left Mexico at the end of October. In France, my thesis director was Charles Bethleheim; and with him I did my doctorate, because what was I going to do? I couldn’t go back to Mexico. I met a lot of people in France. I met Sartre at the time when he was very Maoist, he sold on the street The Cause of the people, a newspaper banned by De Gaulle, who said in public: ‘Whoever distributes that I’m going to put in jail.’ Sartre responded: ‘Let’s see if they arrest me’, and he settled in the Latin neighborhood to distribute the newspaper, and of course no one ever arrested him in that neighborhood full of police and journalists from all over the world. Nobody dared to mess with Sartre. That night, de Gaulle was interviewed on television, almost all of which was state-run, and they also asked the police chief or the person in charge or the mayor: ‘Why didn’t you arrest Sartre?’, and he answered something. like: ‘because Sartre is France’.”

–Did De Gaulle really say something so cool about Jean Paul Sartre?

–Yes he said it. Sartre, who was enraged because he wanted him arrested and imprisoned to cause an international scandal. I accompanied Sartre to all of his rallies at the exit of Citroen and Renault; He stood on a stool with a megaphone: I am Jean Paul Sartre; you don’t know who I am. How could they not know, if they knew him very well? I come to tell you that I am with you, with the working class.

–Gustavo, you lived an extraordinary time.

–The years from 1968 to 1972 were splendid for young people in France. I recount many student actions in this novel, which I returned to newspapers like The day, and I collected dialogues and scenes that I wanted to dramatize; I turned many students into characters in my novel, in which I also did many dialogues…

–Have these been represented?

–No, it took me 10 years to write it and I just finished it. Friends have read it, but I haven’t looked for a publisher. Notice that I haven’t seen him for a while now. Pino, Salvador Martínez della Rocca; he married a girl from the University of Guadalajara; she worked with Marcelo Ebrard in the Mexico City government; It’s almost the last time I saw him. There are not many of the leadership of ’68 anymore. I see Gilberto Guevara Niebla from time to time, but not much; I met Félix Hernández Gamundi when it was the 50th anniversary of the movement and I saw several there, but the commemoration seemed very soulless to me.

“With my novel I intend to reflect events that are not so well known; for example, the meeting we had with General Cárdenas before October 2. Cárdenas asked César Buenrostro, who told his brother, Jorge Buenrostro, an economics professor, to look for me and invite me to his house in 1968 when Ciudad Universitaria was already taken. It was a privilege to see General Cárdenas in his house in Las Lomas. The general responded to us that he had to attend a representative group of the National Strike Council (CNH). I talked about it with Gilberto Guevara Niebla and Raúl Álvarez Garín, and they accepted that there were several of us, because we were already without many options, because the Army had taken Ciudad Universitaria (CU) and also Casco (of Santo Tomás); This meeting was on September 20, more or less. César Buenrostro told us: ‘I’m going to put a bus at Sanborn’s and I guarantee that nothing is going to happen to you. So they go to the general’s house, and the bus returns them.’

“We entered his library, in Reforma; We were a group of 20 or 30; Raúl Álvarez Garín was not there, but Gilberto and Cabeza de Vaca were, and Cárdenas listened to us for two and a half hours, silent as a statue, as he was. After two and a half hours he said one very brief thing: ‘I believe in the Mexican Revolution; I believe in the government, but it is distorted now, and I want to be the bridge between you and the government, because your enemies are also enemies of the government, and I want to be the bridge, but for that I need a letter signed by the CNH and by the most renowned representatives, telling the President of the Republic that you trust General Cárdenas to be this bridge.’ We told him that we could not decide that, that we had to do it in a CNH assembly.”

–You placed a lot of emphasis on transparency and that all decisions were made by everyone…

–Yes, everything between everyone, and, furthermore, everything in public view. The general said: It’s very good, ask whatever question you want, but this is urgent, things are very serious, believe me, it is serious., and we all came back scared. For General Cárdenas to say that things were serious, it had to be, because Díaz Ordaz’s threatening report had already been passed.

–Do you think that Barros Sierra greatly defended the boys of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) against President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz?

–Extraordinary, he behaved very well; If he had not led the march and the lowering of the Mexican flag in CU, UNAM and the impunity of the Army in CU would have been even more endangered.

–Do you think there would have been more arrests against the kids?

–And many more dead. The public support of Rector Barros Sierra gave us a month and a half of respite. I tell all that in my novel. What bothers me a lot about ’68, and especially about the leaders, because I was one of them, is that it seems that we are not human beings; I was 21 years old and it was my first participation, we were very scared, we realized that the persecution was serious, we already had prisoners, we knew of the danger. After the takeover of Ciudad Universitaria we thought that they were going to arrest us, but never that they were going to shoot us like they did in Tlatelolco. On the morning of October 2, the newspapers published that Jorge de la Vega Domínguez and Andrés Caso Lombardo were the government mediators, and we elected Gilberto Guevara Niebla, Manuel Muñoz –director of the Higher School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering–, Luis González de Alba and I don’t remember who else. The meeting was very hard; We waited in Zacatenco until October 2 arrived… I write it in my novel; We feared that they would disown us and declare us traitors. We cannot take a step back even though we know things are going wrong.I told them.

“At that meeting, De la Vega, who was the most aggressive, warned: ‘Either they stop right now and call off the strike or we break it,’ and Guevara, who was not very fond of too many speculations, replied: ‘Let’s see who breaks it.’ whom’. We received that information at the CNH assembly. One of the things that was silenced was the draw among 120 from the CNH to go to Tlatelolco. “So there were already many very scared, more than half who did not attend the rally in Tlatelolco.”