But on 2 October he found himself ducking a hail of bullets, then filed the only firsthand report in a British newspaper of the shootings of student protesters. Official sources stated that the number of dead was in the dozens, but students claimed hundreds died in what has become known as the Tlatelolco massacre.
On the evening of 2 October he went to the Square of the Three Cultures to another rally which turned into the bloodiest battle since the trouble began. Rodda was trapped in the middle of it at gunpoint and was under fire on a balcony for three hours.
His report, bordering on the hallucinatory, was the only firsthand account to appear in a British newspaper. The student speakers were in a balcony on a block of flats about three floors up. They looked out on to a vast square which on the one side has a church and the building of the Foreign Ministry, which must be about twenty storeys high, and on the right a block of buildings and the Polytechnic, which has been occupied by the police during the present disturbances.
I got there at that time, but they were late starting. As the crowd filed into the square through its main thoroughfare there were armed police on the balcony of the Polytechnic. They were getting a lot of abuse from the students but they took it with a smile and when the students screwed up their pamphlets and tossed them up to the police, the policemen read them. I then moved among the crowds, going towards the block of flats and through a back staircase.
I made my way to the balcony where the speakers were. The balcony, about the length of a cricket pitch and about four yards wide, had entrances on each side. You had to present your press card to a chap at a rope to get in. I moved over to the left of the balcony and got into conversation with one of the girl students who could speak a little English.
