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An appeals court in Mexico has found that there is insufficient evidence to prosecute former Mexican president Luis Echeverria in the 1968 mass killings of student protesters in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Square. Echeverria was the head of the federal police at the time of the massacre.
Federal agents fired on a peaceful pro-democracy protest in Tlatelolco Square on the evening of October 2, 1968, days before the start of the Mexico City Olympics. Five thousand students and others were participating in the rally, and estimates of the number of dead range into the hundreds. (The official government tally was just thirty.)
The killings provoked an appalled response from Mexico’s citizens, and helped to spur a new resistance to the country’s repressive government. Mexico’s current president, Ernesto Zedillo, has called 1968 “the watershed of the country’s political life, when a real public outcry began for a more democratic country.”
Echeverria served as president of Mexico from 1970 to 1976. Since 2006 he had been held under house arrest in connection with the Tlatelolco Square killings.
A statement from Amnesty International yesterday called the court’s ruling “a symptom of the failure of successive Mexican governments and legislatures, as well as the courts and prosecutors, to live up to Mexico’s international human rights commitments.”
Two campus police officers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been suspended without pay after they were caught dumping several hundred copies of the MIT student newspaper.
The March 17 issue of The Tech carried a front-page article reporting on the arrest of an MIT campus cop on charges of trafficking prescription painkillers. That officer, Joseph D’Amelio, had been arrested three days earlier in possession of nearly a thousand OxyContin Roxicodone tablets.
On March 18 two MIT police officers came forward to admit that they had been removed three hundred copies of the previous day’s edition of The Tech from stands in the university’s student center, depositing them in a recycling bin outside the building.
The two officers have each been working at MIT for more than a decade, and the Executive Editor of The Tech has been quoted as saying that he does not wish to see them fired over the incident.
April 4 update: The Tech reports that one of the two officers has been fired, and the other remains under suspension. MIT refused to comment on the reason for the difference in punishment, and has not released either officer’s name.
Quick hit, via Inside Higher Ed:
“A new research study … has found that ending the [SAT] requirement would lead to demonstrable gains in the percentages of black and Latino students, and working class or economically disadvantaged students, who are admitted.”
“You can be as well versed in anti-oppression theory as you like, but it won’t stop you being an asshole.”
–From the blogpost “A note to McGill student activists” by Sita Balani.
“Student power is not so much something we are fighting for, as it is something we must have in order to gain specific objectives. Then what are the objectives? What is our program? There is much variety and dispute on these questions. But there is one thing that seems clear. However the specific forms of our immediate demands and programs may vary, the long-range goal and the daily drive that motivates and directs us is our intense longing for our liberation. In short, what the student power movement is about is freedom.”
–Carl Davidson, National Secretary, Students for a Democratic Society, 1967.
studentactivism.net 
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