OPINION: The fourth-grade lesson that no longer feels settled

I recall sitting in my fourth-grade class as a 9-year-old at Alamosa Elementary School in Albuquerque in 1970. My teacher was teaching a lesson about an event that had recently occurred in Mexico. She spoke carefully, the way adults do when they are explaining something scary to children. She told us that soldiers had shot unarmed students who were protesting in a large plaza in Mexico City. It was called the Tlatelolco massacre. The military, she said, turned its guns on its own people. At that time, I wondered, weren’t soldiers supposed to protect people?

The massacre itself was brutal. On Oct. 2, 1968, Mexican armed forces opened fire on unarmed students and civilians protesting in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. The government claimed soldiers were provoked, but later-released documents showed that government snipers were used to instigate the violence. It happened just days before the Olympics were set to begin in that city.

She told us that this was one of the reasons we should be proud to be Americans. “That wouldn’t happen here,” she said. The military doesn’t turn on its own citizens. And people can protest without being killed, because the Constitution protects us.

With her words there was a sense of comfort and pride in our country. I carried that with me for a long time.

As I became older, that lesson became part of how I understood my country. I went on and served our community in a career in law enforcement, became an attorney and served as an adjunct professor of law. In these roles, I saw the Constitution not as an abstract idea, but as a living promise. Rules mattered. Rights mattered. Civilian authority mattered. The military stayed separate from everyday policing, and that separation meant something. It meant we had learned lessons from history, lessons written in blood in places like Tlatelolco.

I’d imagine the lesson was meant to teach me gratitude. And for many years, it did. I raised a family here instilling the same sense of gratitude to live in a country with constitutional ideals.

But now I find myself thinking back to that classroom with a different feeling — unease. When I hear serious talk in America today about using the military against civilians, about deploying troops domestically to handle political dissent, I feel something shift inside me. Not because I don’t understand fear or unrest or the need for public safety —  I’ve lived that world professionally. My feeling shifts because I understand how fragile lines become when we pretend they don’t matter.

The lesson our teacher gave us was not that America is perfect. It was that America is restrained. That power here is supposed to be limited. That soldiers are not police, and citizens are not enemies. Once those ideas blur, history tells us how quickly things can go wrong.

Based on the recent events in our country, I think about that 9-year-old boy in 1970. He trusted the flag on the wall, and the sincere lesson that “that wouldn’t happen here” would stand the test of time.

Today, I am still proud to be an American, but pride without vigilance is just nostalgia. Patriotism is not cheering power; it is insisting on limits. It is also remembering why we drew bright lines between military force and civilian life in the first place.

Tlatelolco is not just Mexico’s history lesson. It is a warning. And if we continue to believe that it can’t happen here, we may be closer to proving ourselves wrong than my fourth-grade teacher ever imagined.

Edmund E. Perea is a New Mexico practicing attorney and past president of the Albuquerque Bar Association. He is a career law enforcement leader and a graduate of the FBI National Academy.