By Molly Moore
                  Washington Post Foreign Service
                  Friday, October 2, 1998; Page A29

                  MEXICO CITY—Not one sentence in its schoolbooks mentions the
                  bloodiest episode in modern Mexico's history. In a capital of monuments
                  to the vanquished, no bronze statue commemorates those who perished.
                  No president has dared unlock the military archives that could reveal the
                  30-year-old secrets of the cataclysmic event that altered the political views
                  of a generation.

                  Now, on the 30th anniversary of the slaughter of as many as 300 people
                  during a student demonstration in Mexico City's Tlatelolco square on Oct.
                  2, 1968, the democratic transition that is forcing open Mexican politics and
                  society has triggered new efforts to set the record straight on what critics
                  consider one of the nation's most disgraceful coverups.

                  "Tlatelolco is symbolic of everything that is negative about Mexican
                  authoritarianism -- impunity, violence, silence, control of the media," said
                  Sergio Aguayo Quezada, author of an exhaustive new book on the
                  massacre to be published this week, titled "1968: Archives of Violence."

                  The massacre, which came just days before the 1968 Olympics began
                  here, was as momentous to modern Mexican history and the national
                  psyche as were the student shootings at Kent State to the United States
                  and the killings at Tiananmen Square to China. The aftermath left a trail of
                  conspiracy theories as tangled as those of the Kennedy assassination.

                  This year -- with opposition parties in control of a house of Congress for
                  the first time in 70 years, the most aggressive press in Mexican history and
                  new access for historians to once-secret documents, some from U.S.
                  intelligence agencies -- Mexico is confronting one of the darkest pages of
                  its 20th-century past.

                  Victims, who in the past have been remembered only by the candles and
                  flowers left in the plaza by loved ones, this year will be acknowledged
                  publicly for the first time: The first elected opposition mayor of Mexico
                  City has ordered that all flags be flown at half-staff Friday to honor the
                  dead.

                  It is partially because so many Mexican politicians today witnessed -- and
                  in some cases were student victims of -- the violent government
                  crackdowns of 1968 that the government has begun to acknowledge
                  events it has long suppressed.

                  President Ernesto Zedillo, who said that as a 16-year-old student activist
                  he was attacked by police in a protest in the weeks before the massacre,
                  now credits the events of that year and the public revulsion at government
                  actions with launching the democratization of Mexico.

                  In 1968, as in the United States and elsewhere, Mexico's university and
                  high school campuses roiled with student unrest. Politicians, long used to
                  tight control over every aspect of Mexican society and obsessed with their
                  image as hosts of the upcoming 1968 Games, showed little patience with
                  the demonstrators.

                  Confrontation erupted into bloodshed late on Oct. 2, when Mexican
                  military forces fired indiscriminately on thousands of student protesters
                  gathered in a downtown square known as the Plaza of Three Cultures in
                  the neighborhood of Tlatelolco.

                  The government insisted at the time that the shooting was started by
                  student snipers in buildings. But newly declassified documents and
                  independent historical research support what many Mexicans have long
                  believed: The snipers were plainclothes paramilitary forces ordered to
                  provoke trouble.

                  Author Enrique Krauze, in his authoritative history, "Mexico: Biography of
                  Power," published last year, described what no Mexican student reads
                  today in any government textbook: "Down on the expanse of the plaza,
                  people were fleeing in terror. A desperate human wave swept . . . toward
                  the far end of the square only to meet the advancing soldiers and turn and
                  race away again until death might come from a bullet, a bayonet, or
                  through falling and being crushed by the crowd that was running -- with
                  absolutely nowhere to turn -- for their lives.

                  "Bullets were descending like rain on the plaza. And soon -- because it
                  was October in Mexico City -- rain began to fall from the sky and run with
                  the blood. The army and the police and the paramilitary gunmen had
                  created a closed circle of hell."

                  When the shooting ended, bodies were hauled away in trucks; most of the
                  dead have never been accounted for. Local newspapers slavishly reported
                  the government claim that two soldiers and "more than 20" civilians had
                  been killed. As families searched futilely for missing loved ones, the true
                  number of dead was estimated at between 200 and 350.

                  Three decades later, this is all that Mexican school children read in their
                  history books under the 1968 time line of events: "Student movements in
                  Mexico and around the world."

                  It is the disparity between 30 years of official reluctance to acknowledge
                  what occurred in the blood-soaked square and one generation's quest for
                  closure that has opened the long-festering wound.

                  Nobel Prize-winning author Octavio Paz, who died earlier this year, wrote,
                  "What were the reasons behind this massacre? . . . Only when it is
                  answered will the country recover its confidence in its leaders and in its
                  institutions."

                  Aguayo, who spent years researching his new book, said those in
                  government at the time -- from the president to the army to Mexico City
                  police officials -- "shared responsibility not only as individuals, but as
                  institutions." He added that documents assessing blame have been so
                  closely guarded for so long because "everybody has something to hide."

                  One of the first acts of the first opposition-controlled lower house of
                  Congress, whose members took office last fall, was to establish a
                  commission to investigate the massacre. After much resistance, government
                  agencies have turned over hundreds of boxes of files to the commission,
                  many in disarray. Even so, the military, the institution that may possess the
                  most damaging information about the event, has refused to open a single
                  folder, saying the records should remain classified for national security
                  reasons.

                  U.S. documents recently declassified as a result of a Freedom of
                  Information Act request by the private National Security Archives in
                  Washington have provided some of the most incriminating evidence against
                  Mexican authorities.

                  A State Department analysis, for example, concluded that the Mexican
                  government permitted the demonstration on Oct. 2 in order to arrest
                  student leaders and "was prepared to use force in whatever degree
                  necessary to achieve this objective."

                  Although it goes unmentioned in most tour guides, there is perhaps no spot
                  in the capital today that better reflects the conflicted history of Mexico than
                  the Plaza of Three Cultures.

                  On one side of the plaza are the sunken temple foundations of the
                  once-grand 14th-century Aztec City, Tlatelolco, including a platform
                  where Aztecs displayed skulls of human sacrifices. A concrete monument
                  denotes the bloody fall of Tlatelolco to the Spanish conquerors on Aug.
                  13, 1521, and thus the "painful birth of . . . what is Mexico today."

                  On an adjoining side is a hulking 17th-century Catholic church constructed
                  from the rose- and coffee-hued stones of the Aztec temples destroyed by
                  the new Spanish rulers.

                  Flanking the other two sides are the shabby, concrete-block
                  middle-income government housing projects of the 1960s, named for the
                  revered dates of later revolutionary victories against imperialist rule. And
                  standing near the center of the paved plaza is a simple pink sandstone
                  tablet that, in the rain, turns the color of dried blood. It was erected by the
                  remnants of the 1960s student movement a decade ago on the 20th
                  anniversary of the massacre to honor "our fallen companions." Twenty
                  names are inscribed in the stone followed by the notation "and many others
                  . . . whose names and ages we don't know."

                  Expressing a bitterness reflected on no other memorial, the words pose
                  still-unanswered questions:

                  "Who? Who? Nobody. . . . By the following dawn, the plaza was swept of
                  the dead. . . . On the television and on the radio . . . there was nothing. . . .
                  Nor a moment of silence at the banquet (in fact, the banquet continued)."
 

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