Luis Echeverria, former Mexican President blamed for massacres, dies

Echeverria positioned himself as a left-leaning maverick allied with Third World causes during his presidency, but his role in the notorious massacres of leftist students in 1968 and 1971 made him hated by Mexican leftists

Former Mexican President Luis Echeverria. File. | Photo Credit: AP

Former Mexican President Luis Echeverria, blamed for some of Mexico’s worst political killings of the 20th century, has died at the age of 100, current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador confirmed Saturday.

In his Twitter account, López Obrador sent condolences to Echeverria’s family and friends “in the name of the government of Mexico,” but did not express any personal sadness about the death. López Obrador did not provide a cause of death for Echeverria, who governed Mexico from 1970 to 1976.

He had been hospitalized for pulmonary problems in 2018 and also had neurological difficulties in recent years.

Echeverria positioned himself as a left-leaning maverick allied with Third World causes during his presidency, but his role in the notorious massacres of leftist students in 1968 and 1971 made him hated by Mexican leftists, who for for decades tried unsuccessfully to have him put on trial.

In 2004, he became the first former Mexican head of state formally accused of criminal wrongdoing. Prosecutors linked Echeverria to the country’s so-called “dirty war” in which hundreds of leftist activists and members of fringe guerrilla groups were imprisoned, killed, or simply disappeared without a trace.

Special prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo asked a judge to issue an arrest warrant against Echeverria on genocide charges in the two student massacres, the first of which occurred when served as interior secretary, overseeing domestic security affairs.

On October 2, 1968, a few weeks before the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, government sharpshooters opened fire on student protesters in the Tlatelolco plaza and soldiers posted there opened fire. Estimates of the dead have ranged from 25 to more than 300. Echeverria had denied any participation in the attacks.

According to military reports, at least 360 government snipers were placed on buildings surrounding the protesters.

In June 1971, during Echeverria’s own term as President, students set out from a teacher’s college just west of the city center for one of the first large-scale protests since the Tlatelolco massacre. They didn’t get more than a few blocks before they were set upon by plainclothes thugs who were actually government agents known as the “Halcones,” or “Falcons.” Prosecutors say that group that participated in the beating or shooting deaths of 12 people.

That attack was depicted in the Oscar-winning 2018 movie “Roma,” in which two characters stumble across the violence, which turns out to involve one of their boyfriends as a member of the Halcones.

In 2005, a judge ruled Echeverria could not be tried on genocide charges stemming from the 1971 killings, saying that while Echeverria may have been responsible for homicide, the statute of limitations for that crime expired in 1985.

In March 2009, a federal court upheld a lower court’s ruling that Echeverria did not have to face genocide charges for his alleged involvement in the 1968 student massacre, and ordered his absolute freedom.

Echeverria never spent a day in jail, though he was briefly declared under a form of house arrest.

Echeverria’s death came at a time that his Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI — which ruled Mexico with an iron hand for seven decades, before losing power for the first time in the elections of 2000 — is losing what little power it still had, discredited and riven by internal scandals and disputes.