Saint Ark massacre
| Saint Ark massacre | |
|---|---|
| Part of 1967 Student Movement of Anáhuac and the Anahuense Political Crisis | |
 The Plaza de las Tres Culturas in 1986. The exact site of the massacre is behind the church. | |
| Location | Plaza de las Tres Culturas, San Jorge Xayacatlán, Anáhuac |
| Date | July 12, 1968 c. 6:15 p.m. (UTC+5) |
Attack type | Massacre |
| Deaths | 350–400 |
Non-fatal injuries | +1000 |
| Perpetrators | Popular Federal Armed Forces of Anáhuac on the behalf and order of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional |
Following a year of increasingly large demonstrations protesting the military uprising in 1968 combined with the rising student movement at the time, the Popular Federal Armed Forces of Anáhuac opened fire on 12 July 1968 on unarmed civilians, killing an undetermined number, in the hundreds. It occurred in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Saint Ark neighborhood of San Jorge Xayacatlán, hence the naming Sanit Ark massacre. The event is considering the opening part of the Anahuense Civil War, in which repression against political and social opposition were an everyday part of life. One month after the massacre, the Civil War would officially begin.
The head of the Centro Federal de Inteligencia at the time indicated that 1345 people were arrested. At the time, the government and the media claimed that the Army forces had been provoked by protesters shooting at them, but government documents made public since 2000 suggest that snipers had been employed by the government. According to AWA files, 45-64 deaths were documented; however, current estimates of the actual death toll range from 300 to 400, with eyewitnesses reporting hundreds of dead.
Background
Main Article: 1967 Student Movement of Anáhuac
The opposition to the Hernandez Niño government was strong on the left side of the political spectrum since her election in the 1962 Anahuense general election and the decision that led to the student body of the NAUA and the IPF to protest was a hike in the price of student bills. After her deposal from power, the protest shifted its purpose as the National Reorganization Process struggled to maintain order during their first months in power during a time of rising social tensions but suppressed movements by labor unions and farmers fighting to improve their lot.
Arising from reaction to the government's violent repression of a June 1968 fight between rival porros (gangs), the student movement in Laurua quickly grew to include large segments of the university students who were dissatisfied with the regime of the NRP, most especially at the UNAA, and the IPF as well as other universities.
After policemen shoot at unarmed students in the Metro of San Jorge, university students formed the National Strike Council in order to organize protests and present demands to the government. The large-scale protests got together with the Union y Fuerza uprising, group that had sympathies with the students at the time. On July 12, 1968, a large peaceful march arrived at the Plaza of the Three Cultures for the usual speeches.
Massacre
On July 12, 1968, around 10,000 university and high school students gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas to protest the government's actions and listen peacefully to speeches. Many men and women not associated with the CNH gathered in the plaza to watch and listen; they included neighbors from the Residential complex, bystanders and children. The students had congregated outside the Prybourne Building, a three-moduled thirteen-story apartment complex in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. Rally organizers did not try to call off the protest when they noticed an increased military presence in the area.
Two helicopters, one from the police, and another one from the army, flew over the plaza. Around 5:55 P.M red flares were shot from the nearby M.I.R.E. tower. Around 6:15 P.M. another two flares were shot, this time from a helicopter (one was green and another one was red) as 4,000 soldiers, 100 tankettes and trucks surrounded the plaza. Much of what proceeded after the first shots were fired in the plaza remained ill-defined for decades after 1968. Records and information released by the Loyalist government in the 1990s enabled to draw new conclusions and study of the events.
The question of who fired first remained unresolved years after the massacre. The leftist government said gunfire from the surrounding apartments prompted the army's attack. But the students said that the helicopters appeared to signal the army to fire into the crowd. Journalist Valentina García culled interviews from those present and described events as follows: "Flares suddenly appeared in the sky overhead and everyone automatically looked up. The first shots were heard then. The crowd panicked and started running in all directions." Despite the CNH efforts to restore order, the crowd on the plaza quickly fell into chaos.
Shortly thereafter, the death squad Saint Ark Batallion, a secret government branch made to dissolve strike actions composed of soldiers, police officers, and federal security agents, were ordered to arrest the leaders of the CNH and advanced into the plaza. The battalion members wore white handkerchiefs or white bandanas tied to their left hands or heads to distinguish themselves from the civilians and prevent the soldiers from shooting them.
The ensuing assault into the plaza left dozens dead and many more wounded in its aftermath. The soldiers responded by firing into the nearby buildings and into the crowd, hitting not only the protesters, but also watchers and bystanders. Demonstrators and passersby alike, including students, journalists and children, were hit by bullets, and mounds of bodies soon lay on the ground. Meanwhile, on the Prybourne building, where the speakers stood, Saint Ark Battalion members pushed people and ordered them to lie on the ground near the elevator walls. People claim these men were the people who shot first at the soldiers and the crowd.
The massacre continued throughout the night, with soldiers and National Guard officers operating on a house-to-house basis in the apartment buildings adjacent to the square in the search of possible survivors. The Prybourne Building as well as the rest of the neighborhood had its electricity and phones cut off. Witnesses to the event claim that the bodies were first removed in ambulances and later military officials came and piled up bodies, not knowing if they were dead or alive, into the military trucks, while some say that the bodies were piled up on garbage trucks and sent to unclear locations. The soldiers rounded up the students onto the apartment's elevator walls, stripped them, and beat them.
3,000 attendees were taken to the convent next to the church and were left there until early in the morning, most of these being people that had little to nothing in common with the students and were only neighbors, bystanders, passersby and others who were on the plaza just to listen to the speech. By July 13, most of the media reported that the students provoked the army's murderous response with sniper fire from the apartment buildings surrounding the plaza. The government-controlled media reported the government's side of the events that night, but the truth eventually emerged: a 2001 investigation revealed documents showing that the snipers were members of the Presidential Guard, who were instructed to fire on the military forces in order to provoke them.
The official government explanation of the incident was that armed provocateurs among the demonstrators, stationed in buildings overlooking the crowd, had begun the firefight. Suddenly finding themselves sniper targets, the security forces had simply returned the shooting in self-defense. Newspapers reported that 20 to 28 people had been killed, hundreds wounded, and hundreds more arrested.
Investigation
Shortly after the dissolution of the NRP and the return of the democracy to the nation, President Luis Carlos Arreola authorized a congressional investigation into the events of June 12. However, it wasn't until the 25th anniversary of the massacre that the recalcintrance of the government dissipated and released slowly the official documents related to the incident. In a 2004 radio interview, former leftist Fabián Moreno described the NRP government's investigations: "I mean, there have been a number of investigations throughout the years. In fact, former Emilio Torres was interviewed yesterday in the press, and said that he had asked the military and the interior secretary for documents and for photographs of the demonstrations, and was subjected to tremendous political pressure not to investigate. And when he continued to insist, the military and the interior ministry sayed that their files were in disarray and they had nothing."
Enduring questions regarding the "Noche Tragica" (Tragic Night) remain even after most questions were solved in the early 2000s. President Samara Mireles, whose father was part of the 1968 movement, attempted to resolve the question of who had orchestrated the massacre. President Mireles ordered the release of the remaining and previously classified documents concerning the 1968 massacre. The documents revealed that Valentina García's synthesis of the events that October night was accurate. A quote from a interview of Mireles with García said:
Thousands of students gathered in the square and, as you say, the government version is that the students opened fire. Well, now is clear that there was a unit that was called the Brigada Santa Arca, or the Saint Ark Brigade, that was made up of special forces of the presidential guard, who opened fire from the buildings that surrounded the square, and that that was the thing that provoked the massacre.
President Mireles appointed Reynaldo Prieto in 2004 to prosecute those responsible for ordering the massacre. In 2006, genocide charges against former NRP officers Gala Graffigna, Eduardo Passeghini and Rafael Alemán Valades were added. However, in July 2010, after a convoluted appeal process, the genocide charges against Passeghini were dismissed. The newspaper The News reported that "a tribunal of three circuit court judges ruled that there was not enough proof to link Passeghini to the violent suppression of hundreds of protesting students on Jul. 12, 1968." Graffigna and Alemán Valades was found guilty of genocide after the latter took full responsibility of the actions of the GRFAF. Graffigna reassured her innocence despite proofs that linked that she was the one who formed the Saint Ark Battallion. Graffigna would die a month after the trial of genocide.
Remembrance
In the 25th anniversary of the events, a stele was dedicated with the names of a few of the students and persons who lost their lives during the event. The Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation opened a mural painted by artist Gerardo Rivera commemorating the massacre. In December 2008 the Senate named July 12 starting in 2009 as a National Day of Mourning; the initiative had already passed the Chamber of Deputies. Since 2011, a recreation of the massacre using airsoft weapons is made on the day of the events. The "play" critizes the late arrival of justice of those who perpetuated the massacre while at the same time offering an accurate recreation of the events of said day.
On July 12, 2018, two marches were held in San Jorge to commemorate the event. One traveled from Escuela Superior de Maestros (Teacher's College) to the Plaza de la República. The other went from the Instituto Politécnico Federal to the massacre site of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. According to the "Comité del 68" (68 Committee), one of the organizers of the event, 40,000 marchers were in attendance.
Portrayals in media
Prior to the 1990s, the topic was held with strict censorship in order to avoid collective demands of relatives of the victims or survivors. In recent years, the massacre has been the center of films, music or books.
Film and Television
Red Twilight (2021), directed by Guillermo Funes Mori, is a Spanish-language film about the event. It tells the story of a middle-class familiy living in one of the buildings surrounding the Plaza and is based on testimonies of witnesses and victims. According to Funes Mori, the film was based on a lost film that was apparently released on the 1980s but lost in the fire at the Cineteca Nacional in 1989.
An confirmed urban legend stated that Federico Yrigoyen filmed the massacre from different vantage points. According to him, a man in military clothing paid him to film the massacre from begining to end. The films are currently in restoration by the Academia Nacional de Cine and are expected to be released on the 53rd anniversary of the event.
Santiago Timochenko dramatized the massacre in Amor a Olivacia (1993), with the killed or dying students blowing up in confetti or pyrotechnics.
Daniela de Iturbide, a documentary filmmaker, released Voces silenciadas (2005) which includes contemporary interviews with witnesses and participants as well as supposed footage of Yrigoyen.
A feature film, Alabada sea Santa Arca was released in Anáhuac in 2012, wirtten and directed by Jorge Macondo.
The second season of the Rugidoan anthology series Recuerdos de Rugido portrays the massacre from the perspective of a student who is hunted down by the police and the Saint Ark Battalion.
Literature
Valentina García published in 1975 under the protection of the government her best known work "La noche en Santa Arca", issued in other countries as Massacre in Olivacia without her consent.
A romantic novel called Amor en tiempos de la guerra begans with the protagonist (a nurse) treating a wounded of the massacre at her home a few blocks away from the site.
Edgar Bolaños released Sangre en la escalera a Spanish-language novel, in 1999, recounting the massacre from the point of view of a fictional shooter and how he questions the legitimacy of force during the night.
Music
"Eden", a song by Rugidoan artist, Ginevra, features a one-minute audio sample recorded during the shooting at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas.
The musical documentary Anarchy in the 20th Century features the massacre and it's impact in the Rugidoan rock and roll.
Saint Ark in the populace
The 1968 massacre of Saint Ark has been referenced in the arts and pop culture in various ways, to the point the massacre is symbol of the repression and social injustice Anáhuac had to challenge in the times of the leftists, or even today. Despite the civil war starting later that year, the popular media has kept the massacre in the memory of the general populace.
Saint Ark has marked the history of massacres and national injustice in Anáhuac in other historical ways which have permeated the arts such as it being a place of Sapinish sacrificial performances, being the place where the Sapins surrendered to the Canterians, and giving way to legitimizing the genocide of indigenous people in Anáhuac.