The Police and the Military Kill Your Best Children

On October 2 of 1968, 10 thousand university and high school students met at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas to protest President Díaz Ordaz's suppression of labor unions and farmers' rights, chanting "¡No queremos olimpiadas, queremos revolución!" ("We don't want Olympics, we want revolution!). The Student Movement of 1968 was accompanied by marches and rallies in public, comprised mostly of students and the working class. The government's official explanation of the incident was that, atop the buildings that overlooked the crowd, there were armed demonstrators who had begun the firefight. The statement was that security forces had no choice but to return the shooting as an act of self-defense. The truth is, the peaceful protestors were already surrounded. By the next morning, it was reported that 20-28 people had been killed, hundreds were wounded, hundreds had been arrested, and many more had simply disappeared.

This poster, created by a UNAM student for a protest, has been archived by the university in hopes to commemorate those who fought for what they believed in. In this piece, the military police had been represented as a gorilla, a common motif in the posters made for this rally, because of their aggressive efforts to "deescalate" gatherings like these. This design is an importance piece of student resilience and the impact that art has on social change.