Small Wars Journal

Mexico’s Murderous Alliance of State, the Army and the Drug Cartels

Sun, 11/16/2014 - 6:20pm

Mexico’s Murderous Alliance of State, the Army and the Drug Cartels by Ed Vulliamy, The Guardian

When the cycle comes around to commemorate the spectacles of 1968 in Chicago, Paris or Prague, few people outside Mexico remember that the real bloodbath that year was in Mexico City.

It is not the hands wearing black gloves held aloft by American athletes at the Olympics that year, but the white gloves of the army’s Olympia Brigade, which fired upon crowds of students and families in the Tlatelolco district of Mexico City, killing 350 people in cold blood, that will be recalled.

This was the quintessence of political violence in Mexico for decades, between the state and the leftist opposition. These were the faultlines which detonated the Zapatista movement in Chiapas during the mid-1990s, the mobilisation of workers in wretched sweatshops along the US border, the near rise to power of leftist López Obrador in his 2006 electoral bid…

Read on.

Categories: El Centro