06 · 12 · 25

54 years after the Halconazo

Rafael Aviña

“A vast sector of Mexico City became a battlefield yesterday, when more than ten thousand students from different colleges disobeyed orders to dissolve a protest that they were going to carry out without official permission, and with bullets, clubs and stones they were dissolved by large groups of armed youths and adults, who form the ‘Halcones’ organization. On the Mexico-Tacuba road, between the Tlacopac and Cosmos movie theaters, and in front of the National School of Teachers, the focus of activity was centralized, becoming a ‘no man’s land’ for more than five hours"
—Jorge Avilés Randolph and Elías Chávez García,
El Universal, June 11, 1971

While listening to the voice of an anonymous leader of the Halcones¹: “They are communists, we are going to teach them a lesson”, the agile camera of Jesús Chuy Elizondo, with images shifted to black and white, captures a group of young men handling chacos and bamboo sticks; a scene that alternates with that of protesters advancing through the streets of San Cosme on the bloody afternoon of June 10, 1971, in one of the most impressive credit sequences in Mexican cinema. It is El bulto (1991), directed by Gabriel Retes. In that same sequence, Lauro (Retes himself), a photojournalist for Excélsior newspaper, is trapped in that chaos and receives a merciless beating that will leave him unconscious for two decades.

Fifty-four years after the events of June 10, 1971, the opening scene of El Bulto acquires an enormous force and meaning. However, the main attraction of this unclassifiable story was its intelligence to question the past from the present and vice versa in an original and amusing way. This happens through a sort of ambiguous and disturbing denunciation in which its protagonist wakes up in 1991 to realize that the Mexican Communist Party no longer exists, that the then president Carlos Salinas de Gortari would lift the country with the North American Free Trade Agreement and that his combative revolutionary friends have been co-opted by the government.

The curious thing is that before El bulto, national cinema had already looked at the images of the so-called Halconazo of that fateful June 10, as in Tómalo como quieras (1972), by Carlos González Morantes, a story framed within the experimental and independent artistic trend of the time. Several of the still images with which the film closes refer to the events of June 10, 1971, the year in which the action of the plot takes place. Its characters represented very specific factions of the Mexican left-wing at the time: the radical and combative student, the moderate professor who was not inclined to make decisions, and the ambiguous and doubtful student.

More attractive is Ángela Morante ¿Crimen o suicidio? (1978), by José Estrada “El Perro”, whose action takes place in 1971. Roberto Lobo (Enrique Lizalde), a journalist for the newspaper La Voz, is sent to investigate the death of movie star Ángela Morante (Blanca Baldó) and to do so he reconstructs the life of the actress with testimonies from those who knew her, her lovers: the young Julio Alcántara (Miguel Ángel Ferriz), the mature and wealthy businessman Don Rodrigo (Rafael Baledón) or her best friend, Rosa Solórzano, a former sex worker, like her (Ana Martín). At the Cosmos Cinema in San Cosme, Morante's new film is being screened; she drives her car right into the middle of the fray where the ‘Halcones’ are beating and repressing students from the Teachers' College. Alcántara flees in terror from the repression and manages to get into Ángela's car, who, frightened, agrees to take him away and keeps him for several days in the mansion he shares with Rosa.

In 2006, Carlos Mendoza made the documentary Halcones, terrorismo de Estado, which gathers testimonies of surviving students and film and photographic material to reconstruct the events of the so-called “Matanza del Jueves de Corpus” or Halconazo. At the same time, it shows how that violent repression by crackdown groups trained by the army and paid by the government was orchestrated from the high commands of the police and president’s office, in continuity with the terrorism carried out by the State in Tlatelolco in 1968 and that would persist during the Mexican Dirty War.

Finally, Roma (2018), by Alfonso Cuarón, is the most memorable film to recount among its shocking black and white images, not only the brutal repression against students and civilians who were in the area of Mexico-Tacuba, but the personality and intimacy of some of these repressors or their trainers like the Incredible Professor Zovek, played by the actor and TV host Latin Lover. Here appear, in turn, the mythical covers of magazines such as Por qué?, which showed images of the Halconazo recreated in a chilling and powerful way as an evocation of a latent horror inside a furniture store or in the streets around San Cosme.

Roma is a powerful drama of enormous sensitivity that speaks of a naive Mexico that refused to imagine that a monster would soon be brewing inside it, as an allegory of that baby that grows in the womb of the young maid Cleo (a remarkable Yalitza Aparicio) pregnant by a young boy named Fermín (a splendid Jorge Antonio Guerrero), unable to hide his class frustration and resentment at the service of a repressive State that launched young sacrificable people hardened in hatred against all manifestations of social discontent. A film where the intimate moments are as powerful as the moments of violence, such as the meeting in the hotel between Cleo and Fermín, the sequence of the “Jueves de Corpus” or the training of the Halcones by Zovek in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl.

Translated by Adrik Díaz

Translator's Notes

1. TN: The 'Halcones' were a Mexican paramilitary group created in the late 1960s responsible for the Corpus Christi Massacre —also known as Halconazo— on June 10, 1971, in which nearly 120 people were killed during a student demonstration in Mexico City.