Stele at Tlatelolco with names of the known dead (courtesy Nuno Tavares)

Servando González was the Mexican government’s official documentary filmmaker during the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre of student demonstrators by the country’s military. He was also an award-winning filmmaker and directed one of the most expensive films produced in Mexico during the 1980s, “El último túnel.” He died Saturday at age 85. 

González said in a 2007 interview that he was approached by a “military type” who asked him to make a movie about what was then planned as a student protest of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City’s Plaza of Three Cultures.

He agreed, for a fee, and went about his business. The military type later came to see him while he was in the midst of developing the negatives and carried the footage away. He told the interviewer in La Jornada of Mexico that he never saw the footage again — and that he doesn’t know what happened to it. 

Of what he witnessed, he said:  ”La historia lo va a juzgar un día. Lo van a poner como un héroe, al presidente Díaz Ordaz.” (“History will judge it one day. It will show that President Díaz Ordaz was a hero.”) 

To read the rest of what he said in Spanish, in which he describes what he filmed and how, go here.

The National Security Archive also recently released a report on the Tlateloco massacre, published on the 40th anniversary of the killings. The report states in its introduction: “The events of that terrible day remain shrouded in the kind of secrecy that characterizes repressive dictatorships rather than the modern, developed and democratic nation that Mexico is today.” 

Needless to say, González footage, if it yet exists, could shed critical light on what happened that day.