Worst Mass Shooting in North America Still Unsolved

At this writing, the mass shootings in Gilroy, California; El Paso, Texas; and Dayton, Ohio, have claimed 34 lives. On October 1, 2017, Stephen Paddock gunned down 58 in Las Vegas, Nevada. For all the horror, carnage, and sheer evil on display, these were not the worst mass shootings ever to take place in North America. 

In the late 1960s, Mexico was into its fourth decade of rule under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), whose outgoing presidents essentially appointed their successors. When Mexico was awarded the Olympics in 1968, some 8,000 Mexican students took the opportunity to protest their country’s one-party dictatorship. On October 2, 1968, Mexican police and soldiers, deploying helicopters, snipers and armored cars, gunned down at least 300 of the peaceful protesters, and by some accounts the death toll is much higher.

PRI bosses launched a coverup and nobody was held to account. Luis Echeverria, interior minister at the time and later to become president, was charged in 2006 with genocide over the massacre, but three years later the charges were dismissed. In 2008, on the 40th anniversary of the massacre, Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard told reporters Mexican democracy “was intact largely because of the people who died” in 1968, and “Mexico had a duty to be grateful to them.” Ebrard claimed to support attempts to uncover the truth and get the Mexican government to accept responsibility. The Mexican government has never done so. 

Ebrard was a presidential hopeful in Mexico, but as Francisco Goldman noted in the New Yorker, Ebrard campaigned openly for Hillary Clinton in the American presidential election of 2016. This foreign interference failed to gain attention from election officials and the establishment media. Mexican presidential winner Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO, made Marcelo Ebrard foreign secretary and after the El Paso mass shooting directed Ebrard to take swift legal action, and against what he called an “act of terror” against Mexican citizens. 

Police arrested Patrick Crusius in the El Paso shooting and charged him with murder. Yet, to this day, nobody has been jailed over the 1968 massacre in Mexico City, the worst mass shooting by far in North America. AMLO and Marcelo Ebrard would do better to focus on the mass murder and state terrorism Mexico has denied and covered up for more than 50 years.