Festival Rock y Ruedas de Avándaro

The Festival Rock y Ruedas de Avándaro (also known as the Festival de Avándaro or simply Avándaro) was a historic Mexican rock festival held on September 11–12, 1971, on the shores of Lake Avándaro near the Avándaro Golf Club, in a hamlet called Tenantongo, near the town of Valle de Bravo in the central State of Mexico. The festival, organized by brothers Eduardo and Alfonso Lopez Negrete's company Promotora Go, McCann Erickson executive and sports promoter Justino Compean and Telesistema Mexicano producer Luis de Llano Macedo, took place at the height of La Onda and celebrated life, youth, ecology, music, peace and free love, has been compared to the American Woodstock festival for its psychedelic music, counterculture imagery and artwork, and open drug use. A milestone in the history of Mexican rock music, the festival has drawn anywhere from an estimated 100,000 to 500,000 concertgoers.
The festival originally scheduled 12 bands booked by music impresarios Waldo Tena and Armando Molina Solis' agency, but a total of 18 acts performed outdoors during the first, sometimes rainy weekend, before a massive crowd. The event was captured in film by, among others, Cinematográfica Marco Polo, Telesistema Mexicano, Cablevision and Peliculas Candiani. Audio was captured by Polydor Records and a live radio broadcast was sponsored by The Coca-Cola Company. Images of the festival were captured by professional photographers like Nadine Markova, Graciela Iturbide, Pedro Meyer and others.
The Super 8 short films Avándaro produced by Gutiérrez y Prieto of Cablevision and directed by Alfredo Gurrola and Tinta Blanca en Avándaro produced by Raul Candiani of Peliculas Candiani and directed by Humberto Rubalcaba were the only films exclusively about the first festival. They were exhibited at international film festivals and theaters in 1972. Other movies, which partially used footage of the festival, were the Cinematográfica Marco Polo film "La verdadera vocación de Magdalena" produced by Anuar Badin and directed by Jaime Humberto Hermosillo and the Super 8 films "The year of the rat" by Enrique Escalona and "La segunda primera matriz" by Alfredo Gurrola.
An accompanying soundtrack with a selection of the live recordings produced by Luis de Llano's company LUDELL/BAKITA Records and named Avandaro, por fin... 32 años después (Avandaro, at last ... 32 years later), was finally released in 2003.
By 1971 Mexico, ruled by the PRI, had organized two of the most important sporting events in the world: the 1970 FIFA World Cup and the 1968 Summer Olympics, gaining a fresh and modern image its government wanted to show to the outside world. At the same time, its government had violently repressed political youth movements known as the Tlatelolco massacre and the Halconazo, which in turn gave way to the so-called Mexican Dirty War of the early 1970s.
The Mexican hippies, called "jipitecas" by Catholic priest and scholar Enrique Marroquin, created a multidisciplinary movement called La Onda (The wave). In accordance to their hippie values, La Onda did not advocate a violent overthrow of the PRI, but it did advocate change. By 1969 the government had already banned the musical Hair after a unique performance of it in Acapulco, censuring the rock band Los Shakes (which included stars Pixie Hopkin, Mayita Campos and Nono Zaldivar), investigating impresario Alfredo Elias Calles (grandson of late president Plutarco Elias Calles) and deporting foreign actors and producers like Michael Butler, Gerome Ragni and James Rado. Such actions were heavily covered by local and American media like The New York Times and Time. Writer Carlos Monsivais, who witnessed the event, wrote an extensive article about the incident in his book Dias de guardar. Also in 1969, the band Pop Music Team had suffered censorship due to their hit "Tlatelolco" (which only had two weeks of radio airplay) and in February 1971 in Monterrey, a collective band called Sierra Madre, led by Teja Cunningham, and a state-of-the-art lights spectacle named "Music and light show" had faced repression after a failed attempt to hold a three-day concert, called Concierto Blanco (white concert) inside the State government palace in Monterrey's main square. The violent incidents after the White concert, which were extensively covered by the media, seriously damaged then Nuevo Leon governor Eduardo Elizondo's political career.
News from Cuba (Varadero '70), Colombia (Festival de Ancon), Argentina (Festival Buenos Aires Rock), Chile (Festival de los Dominicos "Piedra Roja"), England (Isle of Wight) and films from American festivals like "Monterey Pop" and "Woodstock" fueled the desire for the jipitecas to host their own major counterculture event. The opportunity arrived in the spring of 1971.
Trying to resurrect their popular auto racing spot, Circuito Avándaro, after being cancelled in 1969 as a result of the fatal accident of racing driver Moisés Solana, Promotora Go owners brothers Eduardo and Alfonso López Negrete in partnership with McCann vice-president Justino Compeán decided to organize a massive auto race with live rock music acts and consulted then Telesistema Mexicano promoter Luis de Llano Macedo to video-record the motoring event and to hire Javier Bátiz and La Revolución de Emiliano Zapata, two of the most popular Mexican rock acts of the time. Luis de Llano was at the time producing a section named La onda de Woodstock in the Jacobo Zabludovsky's program Hoy Domingo (Today Sunday). De Llano assembled a team of around 330 individuals to organize the music part of the festival, among them reporter/musicologist Jaime Almeida, screenwriter Armando Molina, publicist Carlos Alazraki, and MCs Roberto Naranjo and Eduardo Davis. Molina, himself an impresario and musician from La Maquina del Sonido fame, was appointed Music Coordinator. The music coordination was in the hands of the company ArTe, owned by Molina and Waldo Tena (of Los rebeldes del Rock fame). After many negotiations and declining invitations Molina proceeded to book 12 bands. Designer Joe Vera was hired to design the official poster and tickets were sold at AUTOMEX-Chrysler agencies across the country for MX$25. Jacobo Zabludovsky heavily supported and promoted the festival in his daily news program "24hrs" and he was one of the few mainstream broadcasters to defend it in its aftermath.
According to Justino Compean, five hours were bought to live-broadcast the auto-race to be intercalated with the rock concert videotaped the previous night. As was reported in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, a maximum of 25,000 attendees, 122 pilots with their staff (with their number expected to reduce after the technical inspections) and 12 Mexican bands with a possible last-minute inclusion of American bands to bolster the event was expected. The bands were going to play from Saturday 7 pm to Sunday 7 am, making way for the auto race to start in public roads around the lake. 2 weeks before the event, the 5 hotels in town were already booked. In the TV Azteca documentary "Historias Engarzadas: Alex Lora" Alex Lora explained that this possible "inclusion of American bands" was going to be a surprise visit by Santana.
Sports promoter Justino Compean and Radio Juventud General Manager Ramiro Garza made a deal with then Coca-Cola Company Marketing Director, Vicente Fox Quezada, to sponsor the live radio broadcasting of the music and the live-TV broadcast of the auto racing event.
Héctor Yaber from Telesistema Mexicano was in charge of the lighting system and Gustavo Cota from the company Audiorama S.A. of the PA system. All equipments were transported by the company Mudanzas Galván of José C. Galván Castro.
The security was going to be in charge of the State of Mexico's Judicial Police chief Cuauhtémoc Cardenas (not the politician of the same name), who was going to receive support from 200 state troopers, 120 army troops and 50 Special Agents from the Secretariat of the Interior as well as Valle de Bravo's Fire Department. Nevertheless, reports of the total amount of security agents were mixed. Variety reported a total of 700 law-enforcement agents.
The festival president Eduardo Lopez Negrete and Valle de Bravo's then-mayor Juan Montes de Oca Loza agreed that no liquor was going to be sold. Beer would be sold only with a meal. In an in-depth radio/video interview with radio host Rafael Catana, Armando Molina stated that mayor Montes de Oca suggested to Valle de Bravo's inhabitants to be polite with the hippie crowd as they felt being overwhelmed by the excessive numbers of them. In the end, not a single Valle de Bravo inhabitant complained about the hippies.
Early Saturday morning it was decided, as stated by Alfonso Lopez Negrete, in an on-site interview made by a Telesistema Mexicano, to cancel the auto race due to the quantity of festival attendees which surpassed all expectations.
The Circuito Avandaro auto-race was going to be suspended for decades to come since authorities tied the sport with massive crowds.
As stated by Armando Nava, Alex Lora and De Llano in the Memorias de un cierto dia: Avandaro documentary, tens of thousands of jipitecas were already on-site since Thursday 9, so activities begun (Thursday) with special shows and even some impromptu concerts bands like El Amor, Dug Dug's and Three Souls in my Mind offered while doing their sound-check. By Saturday 11 at 6AM, the number of attendees were already in the hundreds of thousands, so Molina and De Llano decided to formally start the festival with a "Pre-festival". The acts which performed were:
La Fachada de Piedra concluded their act at approx. 5pm. After a brief pause the festival resumed as follows:
At around Sunday 9am, Three Souls in my Mind finished their act and the massive exodus started.
As stated by Armando Molina in the official soundtrack (narration part) and by his then assistant Jaime Almeida, the whole festival was held in peace with the only problem being that the attendees destroyed the barricade and invaded reserved areas of the light towers and even the stage. In the official soundtrack desperate calls for order from Molina's assistant Roberto Naranjo and band members from Dug Dug's, El Epilogo, and Peace and Love can be heard. At one point, an attendee fainted and Tequila's world-class Mexican-American singer, Maricela Durazo, ordered the crowd to take good care and protect her. As many thousands of jipitecas were on-site since Friday 10, co-organizer Luis de Llano stated the famous phrase: "They survived for three days sharing rain and mud; that was in attempt to have an identity."
Francisco Martinez Gallardo, chief of the medical team and voluntaries of the improvised in-site hospital stated: "There was one case of acute appendicitis, 20 intoxicated with pills, 50 with marijuana, 5 with alcoholic congestion, 5 cases of gastroenteritis and some with wounded heads, ankle fractures and burns."
Photographer Nadine Markova's truck caught fire in the wee hours, with no casualties. Images of Valle de Bravo firefighters attending the debris were captured by Sergio Garcia and can be seen in the film Avandaro: Imagenes Ineditas. Luis de Llano also recalled the incident in his book and on the festival's 50th anniversary on the internet-TV program Platicando con Alazraki.
State governor Carlos Hank agreed to send 300 buses to pick up some of the attendees. The news were cheered with a rarely seen approval for a Mexican president from his country's youth. Although wrongly crediting president Echeverria for sending the bues, Luis de Llano announced the news to the crowd: "Lets cheer up Luis Echeverria, who is gonna send 300 buses of 50 seats each so we can go back...is a good guy that fella" (un aplauso para Luis Echeverría que nos va a mandar 300 camiones de 50 pasajeros para el regreso ... a todo dar el chavo ese). As can be seen in the Gurrola film, thousands upon thousands of hippies were walking from the site and many of them were overwhelming the buses.
As can be heard in the soundtrack, the band Peace and Love performed the songs "Marihuana" and "We got the power", that were considered controversial to Mexican society. At the same time, Peace and Love front-man Ricardo Ochoa used some foul language in order to cheer up the crowd, echoing what Country Joe McDonald did at Woodstock. Since the festival was being broadcast live through Radio Juventud and relay stations all over the country, some segments of society took this as a direct threat to the establishment ("Marihuana" for advocating open drug-use and "We got the power" for wrongly associating it with a possible popular uprising). The possible association of jipitecas with subversive and radical political movements is what caused the so-called Avandarazo.
In the aftermath of the post-festival turmoil, several interviewed concertgoers stated that the whole festival was held in peace and without major incidents; however, Moya Palencia, then Secretary of the Interior, accused the organizers of acting with intent and governor Hank González stated that the festival organizers "... were given permission to perform a sporting event, but instead they presented a rock festival" but, as stated by Armando Fuentes Aguirre Caton, his political opponents took this as an opportunity to destroy his presidential aspirations.
Opinions from the world of politics, religion and academia were deeply divided. While influential university professors and La Onda writers such as Parménides García and José Agustín mostly gave the festival a fairly positive review, and some intellectuals like Paco Ignacio Taibo I, Elena Poniatowska, Octavio Paz and José Emilio Pacheco gave a fair evaluation. Others such as Roberto Blanco Moheno and Eduardo "Rius" del Rio criticized it negatively, while Carlos Monsiváis gave the festival a negative review but changed his mind afterwards. As Guadalajara Cardinal José Garibi y Rivera condemned it, popular liberal priest and festival attendee Enrique Marroquin praised it, publishing in Piedra Rodante a controversial article in its defense called "God wants the rain so we can unite." There was also a notable incident at La Profesa, when during mass in homage to Mexico's Independence figure Agustin de Iturbide, a group of about 250 individuals belonging to a conservative civil movement left the building in protest as mass was being served by Monsignor Rafael Vazquez Corona, a strong supporter of the festival. Monsignor Vazquez Corona was then heavily criticized by then rector of the University of Guadalajara, Dr. Garibay Gutiérrez, in his 1972 book about the festival "El gran desafio: Volver a pensar".
Union leader Fidel Velazquez simply called the festival "a Bacchanalia", Attorney General Ojeda Paullada labelled it as a "witches' Sabbath" and President of the Senate, Enrique Olivares Santana, yelled in a press conference: "Let there be no more Avandaros in the Republic!". Finally and under pressure, president Luis Echeverría made a strong statement against the festival, saying: "While we regret and condemn the phenomenon of Avándaro, it also encourages us in our belief that only a small part of our youth are in favor of such acts and entertainment."
President Echeverria then proceeded to crack down La Onda. Some early 1970s hit-songs like "Avandaro" from Rosario, "Seguir al sol" by Pajaro Alberto and other songs which commemorated the event, were banned from radio air play, Radio Juventud DJs Félix Ruano Mendez, Jaime Marin and Agustín Meza de la Peña were temporarily suspended but, contrary to popular belief, they were not terminated. On the other hand, the influential Piedra Rodante magazine was indeed terminated in early 1972 and festival co-organizer Justino Compean left the country for a while.
The band Tinta Blanca and other rock musicians tried, unsuccessfully, to hold a meeting with president Echeverria with a famous protest outside Los Pinos. After a short time the protest was peacefully dissolved.
In May 2009 and then in May 2014, Luis de Llano, of Televisa, formally announced that he was preparing a soap opera with the Avándaro festival as its background.
Among many others, the most notorious ones were:
In spite the spirit of the age and that many people were completely naked swimming in the lake, walking in the middle of the crowd or even on stage without a problem as can be seen in the film, one woman, as the band La Division del Norte was playing, performed a striptease and caught the attention of the cameras. Her strip-tease was captured in the Gurrola film and shots of her appeared in many other media. When the footage and pictures were shown, the public baptized the woman as La encuerada(the naked woman). The woman was interviewed on-site by Elena Poniatowska; however, another interview, thought to have been real for decades, was published in the rock magazine Piedra Rodante in late 1971. In 2001, a bitter dispute between the owner of the magazine Manuel Aceves and then collaborator and music critic Oscar Sarquiz about the veracity of the interview took place in La Jornada newspaper. Finally, it was confirmed by Federico Rubli and further explained in the TV Azteca documentary that the interview was completely bogus. A few years after the festival the band Three Souls in my Mind composed a song called La encuerada de Avandaro which would become a hit in the underground movement.
Shot by Telesistema Mexicano cameramen under direction of Carlos Alazraki, those tapes were destined to become part of the planned TV special but were confiscated by their own company as soon as Luis de Llano showed up for work. Some footage of these tapes has been released since 1971 in movies and documentaries. In a 2001 interview, Luis de Llano recalled this situation and stated that may he find the tapes he will produce a movie with them though it is widely believed that they were sent to a storage in Tijuana, and that years later the whole place burnt out. He also made clear that, contrary to popular belief, the Secretariat of the Interior did not confiscate the tapes. An independent investigation, as shown in the Las glorias de Avandaro documentary, made as a request through the Federal Institute of access to information (IFAI) produced the official document proving that, indeed, the government did not confiscate the tapes.
The festival remains a controversial issue in Mexican society. After the festival, Mexican rock music was almost banned and was segregated to the so-called Hoyos Funkies, illegal gatherings in abandoned warehouses and supported mostly by the proletariat. A few years after the festival the hippie movement around the world collapsed and Mexico's La Onda was no exception, giving way to the ascension of other music genres of the mid-1970s such as Disco, Urban rock, Punk, Romantic Ballads, Heavy Metal, Progressive rock and, exclusively in the Mexican scene, the Rupestre movement championed by Rockdrigo Gonzalez.
The world-class quality of the bands that participated is generally praised by critics and public alike and the festival was little by little being acknowledged by official publications from respected institutions such as INEGI and COLMEX and in November 2019, right after the death of Armando Molina, Senator Marti Batres via Twitter gave his sympathies to the Molina family and made the announcement about the official recognition that the Senate would do to the Festival. On November 25, 2019, the Mexican Senate gave a formal recognition to different musicians who took part on the festival as well as a tribute to Molina, effectively putting an end to 48 years of Government censorship to Avandaro.
The festival is often regarded as a milestone in the history of rock music, the hippie movement and post-WWII Mexican society in general.
Three main events took place to commemorate the festival. One organized by Valle de Bravo's municipal government which included the participation of Luis de Llano and Carlos Alazraki as attendees. Other organized by the Mexico City government, which included the participation of Maricela Durazo and other Avandaro musicians together with the Symphony Orchestra of the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico, conducted by Enrique Barrios, and another organized by producer Ricardo Ochoa -from Peace & Love- who organized several acts including live rock concerts with limited room capacity due to the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as live streaming events such as a conference by Luis de Llano, a videotaped message by filmmaker Alfredo Gurrola, an interview with father Enrique Marroquin, different contemporary rock bands, an Angel Blanco performance of Blas Galindo's electric guitar piece and a special homage to Armando Molina.
Photographer Pedro Meyer, himself an Avandaro attendee, produced a collection named Avandaro 1971, available online.
In 2016, the Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico City, exhibited a collection of Avandaro photographs taken by Graciela Iturbide.