Noted journalist, novelist, poet and university professor Luis Gonzalez de Alba, one of the leaders of Mexico’s 1968 student movement, has taken his own life at the age of 72.
Gonzalez de Alba was found at his home in Guadalajara this week with a self-inflicted bullet wound to the thorax.
Significantly, Gonzalez de Alba died on October 2, the anniversary of the 1968 massacre in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, in which hundreds of student protesters were killed after troops were ordered to fire on them.
Gonzalez de Alba was suffering from a chronic illness and was known to have discussed the idea of suicide with friends.
One of the few well-known figures in Mexico to go public about his homosexuality, Gonzalez de Alba opened the Fundación Mexicana Contra el Sida in the 1980s to help disseminate information about the AIDS virus in the early years of its development.
Following the 1968 student uprising against the government of President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, Gonzalez de Alba spent two years incarcerated in the notorious Lecumburri prison.
The author of 12 novels and numerous texts, his 1971 work, “Los dias y los años,” relates his experiences in the student movement.
Gonzalez de Alba studied psychology at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) and published many scientific texts throughout his career. On his Twitter account he listed his likes as “physics, astronomy and evolution,” and was a fan of “Damasio, Penrose and Mozart.”