Tag #137551 - Interview #78465 (Egon Lovith)

While we were already living there, the time of the elections came. I know that my father put me onto his shoulders – which means that I must have been about five years old, so it must have been in 1928 – and we arrived to a big open square in Mexico City, the capital. There was an enormous crowd. The Indians came from the countryside; there were so many people in sombreros, supposedly one million people on the square. The result of the election was announced on speakers, but the microphone was so bad, we couldn’t understand anything. Than came Alvaro, the president, a brown-skinned, gray-haired man with Native American origins, who announced that he had been elected. This was Mexico’s first democratic election in which someone of Mexican-Indian origin was elected. Up until then the presidents were Spanish dictators. My father wasn’t particularly tall so he couldn’t really see much, so sitting on his shoulders I was telling him what was happening. Then all of a sudden I heard a gun or a pistol shot and I could see the new president falling to the ground. There was a huge mess, everybody took his pistol out and there was shooting everywhere. My dad and I could hardy get out in one piece. So, as a five-year-old kid I was already an eyewitness of an assassination.