Mexican foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard and Tijuana major Montserrat Caballero have installed near the border a segment of the Berlin Wall bearing the inscription: “May this be a lesson to build a society that knocks down walls and builds bridges.” The lesson is actually about something else.
Built in 1961, the Berlin Wall was the project of a Stalinist East German regime to prevent captive Germans from fleeing to West Berlin, where freedom prevailed. Of 140 deaths at the wall, 91 were shot dead by Communist guards. The order to shoot was not lifted until April 1989, same year the wall came down.
Mayor Caballero acknowledged that “the social and political conflict is different than the Berlin Wall.” Foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard is a more interesting case.
Ebrard served as mayor of Mexico City from 2006-2012 and mounted a failed campaign for president in 2011. After a stint with the Global Network of Safer Cities, Ebrard became involved in American politics.
“How a One-Time Political Star in Mexico Ended Up Campaigning for Clinton,” headlined a November 6, 2016 New Yorker profile of Ebrard by Francisco Goldman. “It was after hearing Donald Trump speak,” Ebrard explained, “that I decided to get much more involved, beyond just giving opinions. The risk represented by el Señor Trump, the things that he says, in particular about Mexico, but in general, too, are like nothing else I’ve encountered.”
According to Ebrard, Mexicans in the USA for three generations still felt threated by the “xenophobia” of Trump. As the Mexican politician said, Trump’s wall “is a publicity scheme,” and “he, like Hitler, is a good communicator.” Ebrard “decided to get more involved” by getting out the vote for Hillary Clinton.
As Goldman notes, Ebrard had “previously worked with Voto Latino, and with other voter-registration and participation groups in California, Arizona, Florida, Chicago, and elsewhere, and he is working with those groups again now.” During the 2016 campaign, Ebrard explained, he went “from being a consultant to somebody committed to direct political action.”
So a ruling-class Mexican politician openly participates in an American election, deploying “direct political action” on behalf of open-border Democrat Hillary Clinton. This all went down without any charges of collusion or election interference by American politicians and the establishment media.
Ebrard is now running for president of Mexico with the Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (MORENA) party. If the candidate wants to teach an historical lesson, Ebrard might dial it back to 1968, in the run-up to the Mexico City Olympics.
On October 2, 1968, several thousand students gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, the main square in the Tlatelolco neighborhood of Mexico City. According to British journalist Robert Trevor, in the crowd that day, “The majority of these protesters throughout this era were college and high school students who sought to make a better Mexico for them and their children to grow up in. These protests never turned physical for the students.”
In Trevor’s account, Mexican government troops began firing on the crowd from the surrounding rooftops, joined by helicopters. The government claimed only 25 casualties, including seven policemen, but Trevor knew that hundreds had been killed. The official figures and names of those murdered, arrested and imprisoned were never released.
The ruling Partido Revolutionario Institucional (PRI) regime, which had dominated Mexico since the 1920s, conducted no investigation. President Diaz Ordaz and interior minister Luis Echeverria faced no charges and Echeverria, who became president in 1970, maintained the same pattern of violence.
On June 10, 1971, government-trained paramilitary forces attacked peaceful protesters at the Santo Tomás campus of the National Polytechnical Institute. An estimated 120 perished in what has become known as the Corpus Christi Massacre. Nobody faced charges and the PRI regime continued to cover up both attacks and smother dissent across the country.
The PRI regimes continued until 2000 when Coca-Cola magnate Vincente Fox of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) took power, but this was little more than a change of labels. The PRI continued to dominate Mexican institutions and Fox maintained the coverup.
In 2001 Fox ordered a special prosecutor for the crimes of the past but nothing came of it, and the president blocked release of information. In 2007, architect Rosa Maria Alvarado found bodies buried under a hospital near the massacre site. Mexican police threatened violence if she went public with the revelation.
In 2014, students at a Mexican teacher college commandeered busses to attend demonstrations commemorating the a1968 massacre. Mexican police attacked the students, killing six and dragging off 43 others. The PRI government claimed they had been taken by a drug gang and incinerated in a garbage dump.
Six months after the murder-kidnapping former president Vincente Fox appeared on Univision and said “it’s about time” the parents give up their demands on the Mexican government and “accept reality.”
In September 2018, Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, showed up at Tlatelolco plaza pledging to “never ever use the military to repress the Mexican people.” As far as an investigation into the 1968 slaughter, holding PRI bosses to account, and advocacy for victims’ families, AMLO had nothing to say.
Statements on the massacre by Marcelo Ebrard are hard to find. Maybe he’ll make one on October 2, the 55th anniversary. The “one-time political star” wants to teach the USA a lesson, but as Mexicans know, he has plenty to deal with at home. Maybe Hillary Clinton can help him get out the vote.