As Richard Hoffer writes, “The haze of history would be slow to lift on this one.’’ Initial reports in the Mexican press claimed the students had fired first, “killing a general and wounding eleven soldiers,’’ and that the army “had killed twenty civilians,’’ essentially in self-defense.
“In fact,’’ as Hoffer writes, “according to accounts that would unfold over the years, as documents would continue to be declassified . . . it was an outright massacre.’’ The death toll among the demonstrators “may have been as high as 325, thousands more disappearing into prisons, some of them for years.’’
Avery Brundage, head of the International Olympic Committee, did his part to maintain the illusion that there was no reason to see Mexico City as anything but a happy host for the games. In response to the first stories of the slaughter, Brundage reported that he’d been at the ballet with friends in Mexico City that night, “and we heard nothing of the riots.’’
If the truth about the non-riot had come out in the days following the murders in the Plaza de Las Tres Culturas, would US athletes have proceeded to Mexico City? Richard Hoffer thinks not. “We wouldn’t have sent our kids down there,’’ he said recently in an interview.
But the Games began on schedule. And shortly thereafter, the event attracted the attention of the world when Tommie Smith and John Carlos, having finished first and third in the 200-meter run, stood on the podium and lifted black-gloved fists over their bowed heads. Their images went out on live television. Nobody could say the protest hadn’t happened.
That protest came as a result of a failed movement among US athletes to boycott the Games, not because of repression in Mexico, but because of the long history of oppression of blacks in America. Many of the runners’ teammates, black and white, backed them, and that support grew when the Olympic lords to whom Hoffer refers as “the old white men’’ removed Smith and Carlos from the team and hustled them out of Mexico.
