Halconazo: 54 Years Since the Corpus Christi Massacre

This article by Felipe Ávila appeared in the June 10, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier leftist daily newspaper.

This June 10th marks another anniversary of the massacre committed on Corpus Christi Thursday in 1971, when the government of Luis Echeverría, through a paramilitary group known as Los Halcones, beat and murdered dozens of polytechnic and university students in the area surrounding the Santo Tomás neighborhood in Mexico City.

Just as the dictatorial regime headed by Porfirio Díaz had two emblematic events that exposed its repressive nature against popular movements in the Cananea and Río Blanco strikes, the state-party regime built by the victorious current of the Revolution, which was progressively distancing itself from its revolutionary origins and the reformist tradition of the Lázaro Cárdenas government, also had two emblematic dates that crudely showed its authoritarian, criminal and anti-popular nature: October 2, 1968 and June 10, 1971.

These two repressions demonstrated the lengths to which the Mexican state would go, within the framework of the Cold War, to suppress protests and democratic mobilizations of urban student sectors with blood and fire. Of course, they were not the first instances of repression, nor would they be the last perpetrated by Mexican governments in the decades from the 1940s to the end of the Cold War and beyond. The post-revolutionary Mexican Leviathan had repressed, sometimes savagely, agrarian rebellions, strikes, and union movements, as well as urban groups of teachers, doctors, and nurses. It had committed murders, imprisonments, and persecutions against peasant, worker, and teacher leaders and organizations, and even against some student protests.

But October 2 and June 10 were the most visible, most blatant and most cynical repressions, due to their magnitude, against thousands of people, due to the cost in blood, with hundreds dead and wounded, and because they were repressions in public view, before the eyes of Mexico and the world, employing all the repressive force of the State, legal and illegal, since in them the police, the Army and elite troops acted against the mobilizations, in the case of October 2, and paramilitary forces on June 10, the infamous Halcones.

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On Corpus Christi Thursday in 1971, students decided to organize a demonstration in solidarity with the student movement defending autonomy at the University of Nuevo León. The march in Mexico City had special significance, as it sought to reclaim the right to demonstrate in the streets, a right that had been lost after the brutal massacre of October 2, 1968, in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco.

The demonstration left Santo Tomás in an orderly fashion. Nearly 10,000 young people set off, shouting slogans and carrying banners in support of freedom and democracy. Upon reaching Avenida De los Maestros, the march was stopped by a group of riot police, who let them pass after the student contingent sang the National Anthem. It was a trap.

A few meters further on, they were attacked by young men armed with bamboo sticks, rifles and pistols, shaved heads, who shouted “Che, Che, Che Guevara!” while attacking them.

The march dispersed. Many young people were wounded in the streets; many of their classmates who tried to help them were injured by snipers stationed nearby. The manhunt continued in that area for more than five hours. The Rubén Leñero Hospital was even raided, with wounded students being forcibly removed and taken away, or to be killed. Dozens of people were killed; hundreds more were injured and beaten, including journalists and civilians passing by.

The massacre of June 10, 1971, was perpetrated by the government of President Luis Echeverría, who tried to present what happened as a struggle within the regime in which the emissaries of the past, as he called them, had staged a provocation to undermine his government. However, this lie was immediately exposed by the young survivors and by many journalists and photographers who witnessed the events and bravely reported what they saw and photographed in their newspapers and magazines.

Thus, the existence of a paramilitary group, Los Halcones, specifically recruited and trained by the government as a shock force, was exposed. The Halconazo was a state crime, organized from the highest echelons of power to prevent political freedoms and the democratic struggle. Fifty-four years later, this crime remains unpunished. None of the perpetrators or masterminds were investigated or punished. The impunity that characterized the then-current regime protected the murderers and never cared about the victims. However, the truth about the crime was revealed and exposed, and the lies of the Echeverría government were dismantled. The example of the students killed on June 10th is not forgotten and served to fuel the democratic struggle for a more just society with greater freedoms and rights in the years that followed.

Further reading

• Kate Doyle, The Corpus Christi Massacre: Mexico’s Attack on its Student Movement, June 10, 1971
• Megan DeTura, Mexico’s 1971 Corpus Christi Massacre, Fifty Years Later
• Alberto del Castillo Troncoso, La matanza del jueves de corpus, fotografía y memoria [PDF]