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During their fifth grade of Elementary school , students in Mexico will be able to get acquainted with the student movement of 1968 . In the new History books published by the National Commission of Free Text Books (CONALITEG) there is an entire chapter that deals with the events of the Tlatelolco Massacre .
Five images of student protests and the Olympic Games accompany the texts that tell the story of how the young people of 1968 demanded a new social order that would benefit the majority of the Mexican people, arguments that, according to the book, were repressed since the government “failed to acknowledge the value of said demands.”
The book states that, due to this repression, Mexico’s youth went out to the streets to protest and demand for change: “Workers, professors, housemaids, and normal citizens who were against the authoritarianism of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz ’s government joined the movement. The president had accused the students of representing a threat for the country’s social peace.”
Without using the term “ massacre ,” the book explains that on October 2, 1968 , a protest was held at the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Tlatelolco, Mexico City , in which students demanded that the authorities offered an efficient solution to their requests, but in response, “the protesters were attacked, many were killed, and others were severely injured and locked away. The hostility of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s government and the mass media towards the movement was so severe that the magnitude of the event was silenced for years.”
Furthermore, the book states that one of the clauses of the students’ petition was the elimination of the social dissolution felony , which referred to “the verbal or written dissemination of political propaganda with ideas that disturb the public order or affect the country’s sovereignity.”
This is the first time in history that the subject of the Tlatelolco massacre is addressed in Mexico’s free textbooks.
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