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MEXICO marked the 50th anniversary of the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre yesterday.
On June 10, the day of Corpus Christi festival that year, students took to Mexico City’s streets to demand democratic reform of the country.
It was the first large-scale protest since hundreds of demonstrators were killed in the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968.
The students didn’t get more than a few streets before they were set upon by plain-clothed, government-backed paramilitaries, who killed around 120 people.
At a commemoration on Thursday, assistant interior secretary Alejandro Encinas vowed that the massacre would not be forgotten.
“It is the Mexican government’s irrevocable commitment, and the will and orders of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, that these ominous events in Mexican history do not remain in silence,” Mr Encinas said.
The killings were just part of what has become known as the Dirty War, a conflict between the US-backed PRI government and left-wing opposition groups, students and guerillas across Mexico in the 1960s and ’70s.
In July 2005, a judge exonerated Luis Echeverria, who was president from 1970 to 1976, on genocide charges stemming from the 1971 student massacre.
In that case, the judge ruled that Mr Echeverria may have been responsible for homicide, but could not be tried because the statute of limitations for that crime expired in 1985.
