Rubbing at nerves still raw nearly 18 years after his death, former President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz wrote in memoirs published Sunday that a 1968 massacre of protesting students was the work of student agitators.
The memoirs, withheld from publication for years by family members, provide the late president's version of events leading to the shooting deaths of at least 300 protesters in Mexico City's Tlatelolco Square on Oct. 2, 1968.Diaz Ordaz is widely blamed for the violence, which quashed one of Mexico's earliest pro-democracy movements and still inflames the passions of Mexicans, particularly on the left.
Until he died in July 1979, Diaz Ordaz alluded to the massacre only twice, even then only obliquely, and Mexican government records on the tragedy remain sealed.
In excerpts from his memoirs published in the weekly magazine Proceso, Diaz Ordaz accuses the student movement of "assassinating its own members."
"Killer bullets were fired from machine guns by young idealists on the roofs" of nearby buildings, the former president wrote.
Diaz Ordaz's version of the massacre was immediately rejected by one writer who has examined the tragedy.
Author and journalist Elena Poniatowska, who interviewed dozens of participants and survivors of the ill-fated student demonstration, said Diaz Ordaz' version "sounds like a justification of his responsibility" in the killings.
"What is certain is that those who fired on the crowd, those who carried out an encircling action to trap them, were military forces," Poniatowska said.
Poniatowska said witnesses reported seeing members of a paramilitary group, identifiable by their white gloves or handkerchiefs, poised on rooftops and balconies surrounding the square just before the shooting began.
Curiously, Diaz Ordaz said several years after the massacre that he accepted responsibility for having given the order to deploy troops to the square.
The memoirs, which Diaz Ordaz turned over to family members shortly before his death, say that some student protesters were armed and planned to take over the nearby Foreign Ministry building.
"I don't doubt there were some pretty agitated students at the meeting . . . but as soon as there were indications of a dangerous situation, the student leaders told the crowd to disperse, to go home," Poniatowska said.
It was then that a red flare was fired - something Diaz Ordaz called "a simple signal" - and the shooting began.