the Olympic spirit

Is this part of the many blessings being promised to New York if certain interests succeed in bringing the Olympics to the City in 2012?

Government troops massacred student protesters in Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City that night, on the eve of the 1968 Olympic Games, and then tried to wash away the blood, along with every trace of the killing.

. . .

"The army surrounded the square and fired from every angle on thousands of youths," the book says, leaving "hundreds of dead and wounded, thousands of arrests," followed by "the persecution and imprisonment of student leaders." [At least 275 subsequent killings were committed by the government, government investigation determined later.]

. . .

The 1968 killings were the beginning of a long government crackdown on its real and suspected enemies. Hundreds of people were killed over the next 15 years.

. . .

[The judgment of the country's leading historians is that] the killing at Tlatelolco was orchestrated at the highest levels of the government, with the intent of suppressing political unrest that could embarrass Mexico before the world at the Olympics.

Those sports fanatics go too far. And Mexico didn't even have the excuse September 11 will give our own thugs.

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Published on February 7, 2003 9:24 PM.

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