Mexico City, October 3 (RHC)-- Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Wednesday dedicated her first morning press conference to the victims of October 2, 1968, when the Mexican State perpetrated a massacre against hundreds of students protesting just days before the Olympic Games.

“Today, on the first morning press conference of the people in the second phase of the Fourth Transformation, we are going to dedicate it to October 2nd.  October 2 is not forgotten!,” she stressed.

In this first event, Sheinbaum stated that what happened 56 years ago in Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City was “one of the greatest atrocities experienced in Mexico in the second half of the 20th century,” with over 300 people killed and hundreds of political prisoners.

“Gustavo Diaz Ordas, the then president and commander in chief of the Armed Forces, ordered the repression against students to whom he had promised dialogue but who were killed and imprisoned,” she noted.

Sheinbaum explained that the subject is “personal” and “painful” for her because she was six years old when it happened, and her mother, Annie Pardo, was a professor at the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) during the 1968 student movement and was expelled for participating in it.

Interior Secretary Rosa Rodriguez will offer a public apology on behalf of the State to the victims, a practice that former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) had begun.

“The student movement of 1968 opened the door for political participation of many young people and society as a whole for a more democratic country.  For me, the triumph of that movement was in 2018 with the electoral victory of President AMLO, who restored freedoms, democracy, and justice for the people of Mexico,” Sheinbaum stated.