The movement had a list of demands for Mexican president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and the government of Mexico for specific student issues as well as broader ones, especially the reduction or elimination of authoritarianism.

Díaz Ordaz refused to negotiate and placed his Minister of the Interior, Luis Echeverría, in charge of the government intervention, occupying the campus.

In the traditional presidential speech to the legislature on 1 September 1966, just before the occupation of the Morelia campus, Díaz Ordaz made a threat against universities and students.

"Neither claims of social and intellectual rank, nor economic position, nor age, nor profession nor occupation grant anyone immunity.

Some students fled to the San Ildefonso Preparatory School, where police blew open the 18th century carved wooden door with a bazooka.

"[14] The Attorney General of the Republic, Julio Sánchez Vargas, issued arrest warrants against "people linked to the disorders", among them were several members of the Mexican Communist Party (PCM).

He then gave an emotional speech he advocated protection of university autonomy and demanded the freedom of political prisoners, referring to the UNAM-affiliated preparatory students who had been arrested.

[18][page needed] The CNH was a democratic delegation of students from 70 universities and preparatory schools in Mexico; it coordinated protests to promote social, educational, and political reforms.

[20] Raúl Álvarez Garín, Sócrates Campos Lemus, Marcelino Perelló, and Gilberto Guevara Niebla served as the four de facto leaders of the CNH.

[21] As the world focused on Mexico City for the Olympics, the CNH leaders sought to gain peaceful progress for festering political and social grievances.

[23] The brigadistas boarded buses to speak to the passengers about the government's corruption and repression, while others distributed leaflets and collected donations.

[21] On 9 September, Barros Sierra issued a statement to the students and teachers to return to class as "our institutional demands... have been essentially satisfied by the recent annual message by the Citizen President of the Republic.

[21] The CNH emphasized that it had no "connection with the Twentieth Olympic Games...or with the national holidays commemorating [Mexico's] Independence, and that this Committee has no intention of interfering with them in any way.

The Silence March was a silent demonstration that took place on 13 September, meant to prove that the movement was not a series of riots but had discipline and self-control.

[21] The physician Justo Igor de León Loyola wrote in his book, La Noche de Santo Tomás (Saint Thomas' night): "Today I have seen bloodier fights, unequal battles: Both sides are armed... but what a difference in the weapons, .22 caliber handguns against M-1 military rifles, bazookas against Molotov cocktails.

The massacre was planned and executed under the code name Operation Galeana, by the paramilitary group called Olimpia Battalion, the Federal Security Direction (DFS), then the so-called Secret Police and the Mexican Army simulating a shooting in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas after the conclusion of a concentration of the CNH.

On 2 October 1968, at 5 pm in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, a neighborhood of Mexico City, almost 10 thousand men, women and children stood waiting for a meeting to start.

However, when the leaders of the several student organizations and movements arrived, policemen and the military, sent by President Díaz Ordaz and commanded by Luis Echeverria, decided to dissolve the meeting.

[28][29] During the presidency of Vicente Fox (2000–2006), his administration created a commission to investigate the Mexican government's activities during the so-called dirty war.

[30] The report documents the multi-pronged strategy by President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and his Minister of the Interior, Luis Echeverría, to contain, control, and suppress the student protests.

Members of police and other organized government units posed as students, inciting them to act criminally, then hiding their identity in prosecutions, skewing the judicial system.

Octavio Paz resigned from his post as Mexican ambassador to India as an act of protest against the government's harsh repression of the student movements.

[31] After the reopening of the case, it was concluded that the movement marked an inflection "in the political times of Mexico" and was "independent, rebellious and close to civil resistance", the latter officially recognizing the main argument of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz's official version that the reason behind the movement was the aim to install a Communist regime as false.

[31] With this argument the Mexican government justified its strategy to combat the movement and characterizing it as a foreign risk with terrorists pretensions.

[31] In that order the Mexican government planned and ordered an extermination campaign during the months of the movement and after based on a massive strategy of Human rights violations as false imprisonments, abuses, torture, persecution, espionage, criminalization; also crimes as forced disappearances, homicides and extrajudicial killings.

Some political scientists, historians and intellectuals like Carlos Monsiváis agreed in pointing out that this movement and its conclusion incited a permanent and more active critical and oppositional attitude of civil society, mainly in public universities.

As well, it provoked the radicalization of some survivor activists who opted for clandestine action and formed urban and rural guerrillas, which were repressed in the so-called Dirty War during the 1970s.