The Mail UNW ARRANTED BRUT ALITY

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I am writing this letter from Mexico City where I and Professor S.M. Lipset are participating in a conference dealing with violence, drugs, sex, and eroticism of youth. I would like to share with the Harvard community some of my thoughts about this conference.

Professor Lipset and myself have been virtually the only members of this conference to talk about the violence of Mexico in 1968 in which over 300 students were killed by the Mexican army. There are still over 100 students in jail, who are denied bail and have been kept in jail for a period of time that is longer than the Constitution provides for. I delivered a paper on Mexican students devoting much of my presentation to the events of 1968. I pointed out that it was the unwarranted brutality of the "granaderos" or riot police that provided the "trigger" and that a major predisposing background factor was the students dislike of the corruption and excessive power of the ruling Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI), a party that generally garners about 90-95% of the presidential vote. I ended by calling for the freedom of the students in prison.

All "hell" broke out in the audience and they applauded enthusiastically. A PRI functionary denounced me as a foreigner who had no right to criticize Mexico and its institutions. Professor Lipset then publicly supported my right to speak, especially since the conference was dealing with violence. He pointed out that of all student disturbances around the world, many more students were killed in Mexico than anywhere else in the world. He, too, shocked our conference hosts by publicly calling for the freedom of the students in prison. He previously had been denounced in the Mexican press as a "leader of the extreme left in the U.S." and as "agitator Lipset" for calling attention to the severe and violent repression of the students in Mexico.

Students, Mexican intellectuals, and even business executives have approached us to thank us and congratulate us for our stand. Students have warned me that the government might plant marijuana in my valise or "get" me in some other way. I treated it lightly but in the last three days the headquarters of the opposition party, National Action Party, was bombed and the editor of Por Que, a leftist journal, has been kidnapped. Also, we have been struck by the reluctance of the Mexican intellectuals and professors to speak out against the PRI. They tell us in private of their hatred of the PRI and of its corruption. Fear for their jobs prevents them from speaking in public the things they tell us in private. Instead the braver ones use jokes and double entendre to reveal some of their true feelings as well as to release their frustrations. On July 5th Mexicans go to the polls to overwhelmingly elect the hand-picked candidate of the PRI. And so goes democracy in Mexico.

I would like to end by again calling for the freedom of the student political prisoners who have rotted too long in Mexican jails. These students need our support and perhaps if there is some sort of pressure emanating from the American academic community, the Mexican government may release them or at least bring them to trial.