The fall of the hegemonic PRI began on October 2, 1968 as a discreet crack in the wall of its legitimacy. The generation that took to the streets that year and was violently repressed by the army disguised as the people, was born to stay.
Those who were not content to live in a country without them took control of alternative spaces, outside of state-controlled television through news programs and indoctrinating variety shows.
The literature of the wave was enriched by René Avilés Fabila, José Agustín, Gustavo Sainz, Parménides García Saldaña, Federico Arana, Héctor Manjarrez, Hugo Hiriart, Margarita Dalton, and even Armando Ramírez. The new Mexican painting with José Luis Cuevas, Lilia Carrillo, Fanny Rabel, Manuel Felguérez, Electa Arenal, Adolfo Mexiac, Gilberto Aceves Navarro and Vicente Rojo, among others. Groups such as La Revolución de Emiliano Zapata and Three Souls in My Mind were the first musical spokesmen of the incipient youth counterculture.
The same thing happened with politics. Supporters of the movement within the left-wing parties such as Heberto Castillo and Eli de Gortari supported some of the student leaders, who became important figures over time. Among them we recognize Pablo Gómez, Salvador Martínez della Roca and Eduardo Valle Espinoza. Thanks to them, the crack began to spread along the wall.
It was the generation of ’68 who, twenty years later, in response to the electoral fraud orchestrated by Manuel Bartlett (currently director of the CFE), created the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) which brought together the movement led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo and Ifigenia Martínez with the Mexican Socialist Party (PMS), which had integrated other left-wing political forces at the national level.
Ten years later, the same leaders promoted the transformation of single-party elections into a balanced and inclusive political system, culminating in the first victory of an opposition presidential candidate in 2000. The rift had finally brought down the edifice of the perfect dictatorship.
Today, September 1, 2024, almost sixty years after 1968, history is repeating itself. We have closed a cycle and returned to a one-party country and a one-man party. Sadly, some of the figures who promoted democratic opening at the time are those who now celebrate political regression. Let history take care of them.
But the cycle also begins with hope. Just as in 1968, UNAM law students have called on their generation to take to the streets again and for the same reasons. The banner of the mass demonstration with which this new resistance movement begins is the protest against the abuse of the Judiciary, the first crack, still a small one, in the new edifice of authoritarianism and exclusion.
It is up to us, who have already traveled that path, to support them with all means so that their journey is shorter, safer and less unpleasant. Let this text serve as the first of many recognitions of their courage, good sense and consistency. As was said in the 1968 movement, Long live the students, garden of our joy!