The impact of the pictures from Myanmar are not only stark, but revive memories of 39 years ago on October 2, when I lay face down on a balcony in Mexico City awaiting death.

Here was a sports reporter, in Mexico to cover the Olympic games, caught up in what started as student protests against government spending on the games when the country was racked with desperate poverty.

The protesting students were joined, first by their tutors and then by trade unionists, as the country edged towards a civil war. On October 2, the students staged their largest rally, in the Square of the Three Cultures on the edge of the city.

It was the time when the Mexican junta decided to snuff out this stain on their Olympic image. With the square packed — with about 10,000 people — I joined the student leaders on the balcony from where they made their speeches. The military surrounded this arena, occupying some of the flats around the square, and opened fire.

Everyone on that balcony flattened themselves. In the confusion, able only to listen and not see, I began to realise that some flats were occupied by armed students who were retaliating.

As the army started firing bazooka-type shells into some of the flats, I thought it was only a matter of time before they went for our balcony, which would mean no Olympic coverage from me.

The carnage went on for five hours before the Mexican secret police sorted the foreigners from the Mexicans on our balcony and I was released from the horror. Two pieces on the front page of the Guardian followed, but this was the only first-hand account in a British newspaper. Here and elsewhere it was soon back to Olympic coverage.

After almost 40 years, changes in the media and communications industry have had a profound effect on such events. There is a strong argument that it was the pictures from Vietnam that brought the beginning of the end to that war. It is an optimistic hope that the secret filming and mobile images from Myanmar will ultimately have a similar impact on the generals.

Meanwhile the International Olympic Committee, which does not use a democracy tape measure when awarding the games to a city, must take a deep breath again. Unwittingly, they lifted the curtain on Nazism with the games of 1936, but no one seemed to read the signs; the first time they awarded the games to a Communist country, the Olympics were brought to their knees as Jimmy Carter’s boycott campaign persuaded 60 countries to stay away from Moscow in 1980.

Beijing are next and they will not need reminding that anything akin to pictures of the Burmese monks parading their opposition, coming out of China in the next 12 months, will draw an emphatic response from those who see the internet, TV pictures and mobile phone images.

Guardian