On the evening of 2 October, a march by a few thousand students reached the square at Tlatelolco. As the marchers prepared to listen to speeches, watched over by an army detachment, members of a government-organised plain-clothes paramilitary squad, acting as agents provocateurs, fired on the crowd from a balcony in one of the apartment blocks, wounding the army general in charge. That prompted the army to rake the square with fire from armoured cars, bazookas and machine guns, as well as small arms. The exact death toll is still not known. The student movement put the figure at 150 civilians
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