By Melissa T. Castro

In the summer of 1968, Mexico was experiencing the birth of a new student movement, it was to be a short-lived one.

On Oct. 2, 1968, a few days shy of the opening of the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, the student movement came to an abrupt and bloody halt.

The ill-fated gathering at the Three Cultures Square came as a consequence of weeks of unrest and government crackdowns, which had seen the army seize the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) to quell resistance.

Chaos broke out when soldiers – positioned on the perimeters of the square, whose mission had been to disperse the crowd, instead began to shoot into it. Thousands of demonstrators fled in panic as tanks bulldozed over Tlatelolco Plaza.

When the carnage ended, dozens lay dead and hundreds of other students had been shoved into vans, many of them to be tried and imprisoned.

Twelve days later, President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz opened the Olympic Games.

The government tried to sweep the Massacre of Tlatelolco under the rug, originally reporting that only four people had been killed and twenty wounded, while eyewitnesses described the bodies of hundreds of young people being trucked away. Fifty-six years later, the final death toll remains a mystery.

Today the Tlatelolco massacre remains unpunished. To many Mexicans, impunity for that crime echoes the state’s failure to bring justice to countless other victims of murder and disappearance.

In 2000, President Vicente Fox ordered the creation of a “special prosecutor for crimes of the past” to investigate the Tlatelolco massacre, but little was uncovered about the killings or those killed.

As Mexico marks fifty-six years from the massacre, with little accountability for the atrocities committed that day, the country continues to reckon with disappearances and murders.

It would be remiss to not mention the forty-three missing students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teacher’s College who went missing on Sep. 26, 2014. Their disappearance has been linked to local government security forces, and although a commission has been established to investigate the case described it as “a crime of the state” – the who and why remains unclear to this day. No doubt something else Mexico’s politicians can sweep under the rug.