José Revueltas, the actuality of the criminal trial of 68

Abstract

Until now, the criminal process to which the writer José Revueltas was subjected as a result of the student movement of 1968 has given rise to few works. In this text we intend to demonstrate that studying and discussing this process is a particularly pertinent way to clarify this decisive moment in Mexico's recent history. In the first place, because the trial - supposedly criminal and, in reality, political - represented a moment of rupture in which the famous "legalism" of the post-revolutionary State was revealed, in broad daylight, as a mere make-up of authoritarianism. Secondly, because its study allows us to better understand the position that Revueltas held at that time as an intellectual and as a person. Finally, it leads to open the question of why the persecution of the PRI regime with Revueltas. For our part, we believe that, beyond the authoritarian nature of the regime, this question can only find a complete answer within the profoundly exclusive logic of the myth of the revolutionary state of the last century.