By IPS Correspondents
MEXICO CITY, Sep 22 1998 (IPS)

The massacre of 300 students in Tlatelolco Plaza 30 years ago is being commemorated here with exhibitions, concerts, drama presentations and film showings.

“The idea is to learn a lesson from history and open up space for reflecting on an important moment of the century that influenced all aspects of life,” said Jose de Santiago, director of the Coordinating Committee for Cultural Extension of the National Autonomous University of Mexico UNAM.

Writer Elena Poniatowska, author of one of the best-known books on the Oct. 2, 1968, massacre, said UNAM, whose authorities never did confront the government about the killings, was years late in remembering the events.

It may be late, but it’s not too late, “because forgetting is the worst thing that can happen in history,” responded historian Paco Ignacio Taibo.

The various cultural activities at UNAM running until Oct 7. present a general overview of the events that occurred 30 years ago, and not only political aspects, said de Santiago. They include a special exposition on Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, the Cuban guerrilla leader – an icon of the 1960s.

But the main activity is the exhibition ‘Thirty Years Later’, which includes information on Mexico and the world in 1968: photos, videos, documentaries, posters, records, political flyers and paintings by members of student brigades.

De Santiago said the 1968 massacre occupied a special place in the exhibition because there was now “openness and courage to appreciate and reflect on the events” at UNAM three decades ago.

What happened 30 years ago was that Mexican students, influenced by the student protests all over the world, held many demonstrations against the lack of democracy in Mexico. This culminated in what historians refer to as the ‘Red Dawn’, Oct. 2, when the army fired on a crowd of 4,000 students in Tlatelolco Plaza.

Unofficial figures published in the international press placed the number of dead at 300. Opposition politicians still argue today that more than 350 were killed, whereas the government claimed in a report it issued in October 1996 that only 26 people died, many of them soldiers “murdered by the students” and that there were 100 wounded and 1,000 arrested.

The army and certain sectors of the government – controlled since 1929 by the Institutional Revolutionary Party – have refused to open up the archives of the period so as find out who ordered the shooting of the students.

Congressional representatives and senators, however, are now promising to find out who ordered the massacre committed by the army 10 days before the inauguration of the XIXth Olympic Games and to analyse the political consequences of the events.

The lectures and debates on the 1960s held in the Mexican capital during the commemoration period will be issued on compact disc to enable future generations to consult them.

The commemoration also includes the airing by UNAM’s radio station of a series of 10 programmes titled ‘The Radio Within the Radio’, covering programmes of the period and commemorating the time when the station was taken over by the students to promote their protests.

Ahead of the UNAM expositions, the daily ‘El Universal’ published photographs in early September showing current president Ernesto Zedillo being attacked by police in 1968. At the time he was 16 and a member of an “independent, moderate group”

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