Shoes on the Plaza as told by Larry

My wife and I met in college while we were both students. We dated and eventually got married while we were still in school. She was here from Mexico and she needed to get her Visa so we she could stay in the US.  Right after finals, we took a trip to Mexico to get the Visa and visit her family. It was October, 1968.

While we were at her family's place, the university was nearby and there was a student protest going on. The protest was something about the government's overreaction to two schools and a soccer game. This  was right before the Olympics.

We had dinner and were with my wife's sister when we heard the demonstration nearby at the Plaza of Three Cultures. It was a loud and raucous crowd. The dumb gringo in me, said let's go look. And so we did. We stood on the north side of the plaza looking at the commotion and watching the crowd. We were not participators, just observers, and could see the tension rising.

When it seemed to get really bad, my sister-in-law said let's leave, and so we did. That's when the soldiers appeared. We walked past them and were a ways behind them when they started shooting into the crowd. Not over the crowd or to the side of the crowd. But into the crowd. There was screaming and pandemonium. And then the soldiers brought out a cannon and shot it off into an apartment building.

Students were screaming, running, hiding. We went back to my wife's family's place. But we heard later soldiers went from apartment building to apartment building looking for protestors. Some of the women students pretended that the men hiding in the building were their boy friends, and got them out safely that way. My sister-in-law was a nurse and helped with the injured and wounded students.

The next day we went back to the Plaza.  What we saw at the plaza was eerie. Pools and pools of blood. And there were shoes, hundreds of shoes. The women simply could not run in shoes and took them off.

And there were belts on the ground. Hundreds of belts. The soldiers made the men they arrested take off their belts so they couldn't use them for weapons.

The news said the army admitted to 85-95 people being killed, but other sources said that many more died or simply disappeared.