Plaza de las Tres Culturas

This guide to Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City opens on the evening of October 2, 1968, when flares fall over thousands of students hemmed in by soldiers and gunfire erupts from the apartment towers ringing the square. It traces the gap between the official death toll and what foreign reporters counted that night, and the decades it took for anyone to open the files or bring a case to court. The guide also reaches back to August 1521, when the last defenders of the Aztec empire fell here to Hernan Cortes.