Mexico 1968: A Question of Planning

Perhaps most important though, is the legacy of the government investment. In Mexico, a total of $98.96 million dollars was spent on the new installations, city works, and villages (in terms of inflation, this number would equal 542 million USD in 2005). The majority of my time in Mexico was spent visiting these Olympic installations, analyzing their function, condition, and the benefit provided to the public. According to MOC at the time, “Though built to fill specific needs during the competitions, these installations were designed to provide lasting service and utility.”

For the most part, this remains true nearly 38 years after the Games. By spreading the installations throughout the city, a greater number of people are able to benefit from their use. Except for one, all of the installations are government-run and operate to develop youth sport. In spite of their frequent use, almost all sites are in dire need of renovations. Each has long past the shelf-life for your average sports facility.

These sites though, are hardly remembered for their Olympic past. Little of the design lends itself to admiration or praise. They are, in a word, pragmatic – and little else. In none of the installations, nor the rest of the city, are there any memorials or museums to the glory of the ’68 Olympics. Each has a small plaque that displays the date of construction and the Olympic rings, but little else. These installations, which remind me of junior college facilities, led me to seek noted Olympic scholar, Ariel Rodriquez, to ask him, “What if dutiful, cost-efficient planning steeped in pragmatism and moderation leads to a weak memory, or legacy, of hosting the Olympic Games? Or in other words, does a city need a white elephant or pervasive memorial to ensure a strong legacy?” Professor Rodriquez then leaned back in his chair, thought for a moment before remarking, “That’s a good question, I don’t know.”

Map of the Olympic Installations

Behind the 1968 Olympic Games

In October of 1963, at the International Olympic Committee (IOC) meeting in Baden-Baden, Germany, Mexico City was selected to host the XIX Summer Olympic Games. Though highly controversial due to the debate over the effects of altitude, the selection was particularly significant as Mexico represented the first Third World country to ever host the event. The choice should perhaps be regarded more as a sign of the times and less a result of unwavering merit and IOC morality. The other two serious candidate cities were Detroit, Michigan and Lyon, France – both embedded in the Cold War conflict as members of NATO. Mexico, on the other hand, was able to parlay their relative neutrality into a successful bid. According to the Mexican Organizing Committee (MOC) the success of the bid was based on the existing facilities and the noteworthy experience hosting similar events.

By June of 1966, only two years before the scheduled Games, the Organizing Committee was in shambles suffering from internal squabbling and varied ineptitude. Little had been accomplished in terms of planning and the growing criticism threatened to embarrass the rising nation and its leadership. With the resignation of the previous chairman, the MOC appointed Pedro Ramirez Vazquez, a prominent architect as the head of the committee. A man of the government system, Ramirez Vazquez was hardly a sports enthusiast and was able to play his insider-outsider status to his advantage. His rather heretical position inevitably changed the course of the Olympic planning.

Upon assuming leadership of the Organizing Committee, Ramirez Vazquez had two principal obstacles. The first was instigating the construction of the major Olympic installations in the face of financial restraints. His response was pragmatic planning steeped in moderation and grounded in its projections. Embodying this principle, he stated, “the design is not a drawing, it is a service” and, “if the Olympic installations aren’t the most beautiful in the history of the Olympic Games then by any consideration they are practical and functional.”

Looking back, the purpose of his rhetoric was not to appease Mexico’s lower class or quell student-provoked criticism of government spending as one might assume. Upon my investigation of the sites, I found that the planning and the execution were in fact carried out in a pragmatic manner. Additionally, Ramierz Vazquez had the valuable foresight to arrange the Olympic installations on vacant fields of outlying areas that would be engulfed by development years later. This has led some scholars to argue that Mexico conceived and sold the idea of a “cheap Olympics.” Though some overemphasize this notion (overlooking the comparable number of participants) it still should be dully noted. In fact, the Mexican Olympics have proved to be one of the least expensive Games since Rome in 1960 – comparable only to Los Angeles in 1984. This may though be a result of time restraints and less of free will.

The second obstacle faced by Ramirez Vazquez and the Organizing Committee was a more abstract, discursive element, one that Eric Zolov terms the “burden of representation.” Preceding the Games, the foreign press frequently mocked the “land of manana” and the paltry preparations of a lazy country (to be sure some of the criticism was well deserved as one member of the MOC once remarked, “We are not sure we can guarantee the organization of these games. But the weather will be nice”). Addressing the racialized foreign stereotypes of Mexico’s underdevelopment was necessary to accrue the intangible benefits of hosting the Games.

The Mexican economy had been booming for years and the international event was to provide a stage to validate Mexico’s cosmopolitan belonging in the developed world. According to the MOC, the Games would project an image of Mexico as a nation where economic development was coupled with social justice and modernity balanced with tradition. The government believed the opportunity to refute the popular stereotypes would not only have exceptional touristic implications, but also an important psychological impact on the Mexican township.

As Mexico was hardly a sporting powerhouse, the Organizing Committee acknowledge that the most effective way to overcome the entrenched stereotypes was with a creation and projection of an image of the Olympiad in Mexico through a Program of Olympic Identity and the organizing of a Cultural Olympiad. In the graphic design of Olympic logo we find the focal point of this initiative.

Through the flawless Mexico68 logo, the MOC was able to accomplish the projection of an image that acknowledged its unique cultural heritage without sacrificing its modern aspirations. Surprisingly, it was an American invited to participate in the design competition who was principal in creating the final design. After multiple trips to the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, Lance Wyman and Eduardo Terrazas came up with a design rooted in both Huichol indigenous art and the Op Art aesthetic of the day. The Mexico68 design, which blanketed the city, was a graphical feat and was cited in the book, “A History of Graphic Design” as “one of the most successful in the evolution of visual identification.”

In addition to the successful design component, one of the most original ideas of the Mexican experience was the Cultural Olympiad, which was a world in itself. In fact, Mexico was the first host country to emphasis culture as an integral aspect of the Olympic Games. It was an attempt to reunite the Olympics of sport with culture and peace. During the Olympic year, over 1,500 events were dispersed throughout the entire republic. Thus all towns benefited from the Olympic experience. For the Games themselves, Ramirez Vazquez invited the participating countries to send a cultural delegation. Each of the twenty sports were then replicated by twenty spheres of cultural activities including, dance, poetry, visual arts.



















Performances during the Games included everything from Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington to the Senegal Ballet. A fitting example of this dichotomy between sport and art was the reading by famed Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko in front of 12,000 people at the Arena of Mexico, which was used for boxing during the Olympics. He was introduced, to the delight of the crowd, in typical boxing announcing: “Esteeeeeeemed public… in thisssssss corner… at 72 kilos, standing at 184 cm... YYYYeeeeevtushenko.”

Ultimately, the Program of Olympic Identity and the Cultural Olympiad provided the Games with the ambiance of the ultimate fiesta. Streets and buildings were awash in blazing colors while the symbol of a silhouetted white dove of peace was on display, rather ironically, at every turn. One couldn’t step outside without being surrounded by the Op Art design of the Mexico68 logo, which adorned everything from dresses to large balloons. Along major avenues, newly built billboards proclaimed the official motto “Everything is Possible in Peace” in a wealth of languages while looming pyrotechnic figurines marked the site of the installations. The general message radiating from the Olympic host city was that Mexico was alive with change – a political and cultural statement to be sure.

Tlatelolco Massacre

The year 1968 is considered one of the most tumultuous in world history. In the US, it is remembered for demonstrations and assassinations. That year we lost Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, and were witness to the beginning of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and the clash at the Democratic National Convention. In Mexico, things were equally as unstable. In the summer of 1968, only months before the Olympic Games, nation-wide student strikes and protests had prompted an increasingly repressive response from the Diaz Ordaz regime. On October 2nd, just ten days before the Opening Ceremonies, the protest reached its pinnacle.

With the army occupying the university campus, thousands of students marched through the streets of Mexico City demanding democratic reforms. By nightfall, roughly 5,000 unarmed protesters, accompanied by spouses and their children, had congregated in Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco Section of Mexico City.

Beginning at sunset, army and police forces had begun to surround the plaza. From here, the details of the night remain vague as the Mexican government has kept information confidential, citing matters of national security. Something prompted the government forces to begin shooting live rounds into the crowd. Families, students, and protesters alike were caught in the fire. While the government claimed that “student snipers” had fired first at officers, many from Mexican academia contend that government snipers, from a highly secret battalion, had fired on the police to instigate the conflict.

Civilian reports claim that the bodies were then carried away in ambulances and garbage trucks to a near by military post where they were incinerated. The army worked well into the night washing away the blood with fire hoses. The official government reports put the death toll at around 30. This number is laughable. Nearly every other source, including the US embassy, estimated casualties somewhere between 300-400 dead with hundreds more injured. Without as much as a moment’s pause, the Olympics commenced as if nothing happened.

Today, the Tlatelolco Massacre remains deeply embedded in the minds of those who were alive at the time. Each year, the anniversary is marked with a march to the same plaza and a protest for the release of government records. From the interviews I have conducted and my general observations, the 1968 student protests overshadow any legacy of the ’68 Olympics. Until the government formally acknowledges its role, the people have room for only one memory of that summer.

In recent years, progress has been made. In June of 2002, President Fox released secret police files and named a special prosecutor to determine the role of the government in the massacre. In 2003, the National Security Archive at George Washington University published a series of US government records. Surprisingly, the information from US agencies remains the most cohesive body of information. In June of 2006, former President and Mexican Interior Secretary at the time of the massacre, Luis Echeverria, was charged with genocide and put under house arrest. Yet in typical fashion, a federal judge threw out the charges just this July, ruling that a 30-year statute of limitations had run out.

What is perhaps more interesting though, is that the younger generations have very little comprehension of what happened and the significance of it. The massacre fails to appear in most History textbooks. Yesterday when I asked high school headmaster Samuel Gonzalez Montano how this could be, he replied, “You can’t teach anything that didn’t officially happen.” Thus for now, the newest generation of Mexicans are only to have a general understanding of the Tlatelolco Massacre and the ’68 Olympic Games, as they are unavoidably intertwined. Without a reconciliation of one, a remembrance of the other is nearly impossible.

During a visit to the plaza, I encountered a group of boys playing soccer. When I inquired from one of them if he knew what happened in October of 1968 here in the plaza, he shrugged and looked around. I told him some 300 people died. He seemed lost and turned slowly to read the memorial he was sitting in front of and had lived near his whole life. The end of it reads:

Who? Whom? No one. The next day, no one.
The plaza awoke swept;
The newspapers said for news
the state of the weather.
And in the television, en the radio, en the theaters,
there was not a single change in the program,
not a single announcement.
Nor a moment of silence at the banquet
(or following the banquet).