Students from the national university and the polytechnic had filled the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, in Tlatelolco, when the shooting started; this was 1968, ten days before the Olympic Games opened in Mexico City. The official account that evening put the dead at a few dozen, and for decades afterwards families, journalists and later government inquiries argued that the true number was far higher, in the hundreds. It has never been settled. The stepped stone platforms in the photograph, and the church behind them, were already standing there that night.
The Games opened in that same city on 12 October, ten days later, and plenty of the athletes arriving didn't know what had happened in the plaza until afterwards. Some only learned the full shape of it years later, back home.
Every 2 October since, people walk from Tlatelolco toward the Z\u00f3calo carrying names and photographs, and the sentence they say is the same one: no se olvida. The church behind the platforms, Santiago Tlatelolco, is the one where some of the wounded sheltered that night.