MEXICO CITY - When soldiers massacred as many as 300 people at a student protest in Mexico City's Tlatelolco plaza on Oct. 2, 1968, the killers wore uniforms. Today, students in Mexico say they are still under attack, but now from thugs, drug cartels, paramilitaries or rapists.
Today's student activists - and even the graying veterans of the 1968 democracy movement - acknowledge they now have free speech, something the `68 generation fought for. But they say the impunity remains the same; nobody was ever convicted for the 1968 killings.
As Mexico marks the 50-year anniversary of Tlatelolco on Tuesday, the massacre remains something of an open wound: Nobody knows exactly how many died when soldiers opened fire on a peaceful demonstration. Estimates range from the official version of 25 dead to a more recent investigation that identified 44, but activists at the time claimed large numbers of bodies were carted off in garbage trucks.
It wasn't until last week that a government agency acknowledged for the first time that it was "a state crime.''
Nor - say both those who survived the attack and the generation that has inherited their activist mantle - has the country learned crucial lessons from the tragedy, with nearly all the crimes of today similarly going unresolved and unpunished, by both state and non-state actors.
With the exception of a few charred bone fragments, nobody has ever found the bodies of 43 students at a rural teachers' college who were kidnapped by police and turned over to a drug gang in September 2014 - another grim anniversary that Mexico marked in recent days with no sign of resolution in sight. The students from the Ayotzinapa teacher's college were never seen again.
"We are possibly worse off today. Young people are under attack, with the economy, inequality, there are fewer opportunities,'' said Enrique Espinosa, who at 69 remains tall and thin just as he appeared in a famous 1968 photo showing student protesters stripped to their underwear and held at gunpoint by soldiers against a wall in a Tlatelolco apartment building. "This is not the Mexico we wanted.''
Despite the governmental Victims' Commission's recent acknowledgement of the massacre as a "state crime that continued beyond Oct. 2 with arbitrary arrests and torture'' and a pledge for reparations, justice remains elusive. For example, the government is still fighting a court order that it allow a truth commission to investigate the fate of the 43 students who disappeared in 2014.
"Tlatelolco is a government crime that has remained unpunished, and today the big fight is to break that impunity,'' said Felix Hernandez, one of the leaders of the `68 movement.
Even Hernandez, then an engineering student, acknowledges things have changed for the youths of today. Back in 1968, "finishing a university degree was a guarantee of getting a secure job. That's not the case today.''
Times today are different in other ways. In 1968 students struggled against a monolithic government that presided over a booming economy and was at the height of its power. Just a few days after the Tlatelolco massacre Mexico hosted the Olympic Games.
While the games were marked by dissent - U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in a Black power salute - today's situation is much more chaotic with a government that is barely in control of many aspects of society, battered by violent drug cartels that are often supported by rogue cops and mayors.
"In 1968 the repression was carried out by the army and riot police; today, it is done through paramilitary groups ... it is a very important difference,'' said Victor Guerra, another former leader of the `68 movement. "Back then, the government was extremely authoritarian, it didn't allow freedom of expression or demonstrations. Today, thanks to the 68 movement, we have that possibility, we can protest in the streets.''
Ironically, right before the 50th anniversary, students were back on the street demonstrating after thugs known as `porros' attacked a student demonstration at the National Autonomous University in September; two students were seriously injured, one knifed in the back. That student's girlfriend was punched in the face repeatedly as she tried to protect him.
The violence shocked Mexicans who thought "porros'' - ghost students who register but don't take classes, and instead serve as hired thugs for politicians - were a relic of the past, like the June 10, 1971, march in which "porros'' killed at least a dozen students.