Luis Echeverria, former Mexican president, is dead

His name remains associated with the Tlatelolco massacre. On October 2, 1968, in Mexico City, soldiers opened fire on thousands of students gathered in the Place des Trois-Cultures, a few days before the inauguration of the Summer Olympics in the capital. Snipers, posted in the surrounding buildings, aim at the crowd. On the ground, soldiers surround the demonstrators. The shooting lasted two hours, killing 25 people according to official figures, more than 300 according to victim associations. Fifty-three years later, impunity still hovers over this tragedy which taints the memory of Luis Echeverria, Minister of the Interior (1963-1969) at the time. Elected president, two years later, this one will carry out other bloody repressions against his opponents.

Read also: The massacre in Mexico City in 1968, a symbol of impunity

Mr. Echeverria died on Friday, July 8, at the age of one hundred, in his home in Cuernavaca (center). He is the only former Mexican president (1970-1976) to have been tried for genocide, but without having set foot in prison. On the international scene, his image remained that of a defender of Third World nations, campaigning for economic self-determination in the midst of the Cold War. An ally of both Richard Nixon in the United States and Salvador Allende in Chile, Mr. Echeverria gave asylum to Chilean refugees after the 1973 coup by General Augusto Pinochet. But in Mexico, the former president has gone down in history for his iron fist against the protesters of the authoritarian regime established by the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The famous PRI, hegemonic for seventy-one years until 2000, before returning to power from 2012 to 2018.

His life is linked to the history of the party. Born on January 17, 1922 in Mexico City into a family of four children, he was barely three years old when the mandate of General Plutarco Elias Calles, creator of the National Revolutionary Party, the embryo of the PRI, began. Mr. Echeverria was still a teenager when President Lazaro Cardenas nationalized oil production in 1938. With his law degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in hand, the young lawyer joined the ranks of the PRI in 1946. Twelve years later, the 30-year-old is already deputy minister of the interior before taking over as head of this ministry under the mandate of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1964-1970), whom he will succeed.

“Dirty War”

More charismatic than his predecessor, Mr. Echeverria displays, on his arrival at the presidency, the image of a progressive breaking with the authoritarianism of the PRI. But a new bloodbath, in line with that of 1968, quickly tarnished his beginning of his mandate: on June 10, 1971, students mobilized in the center of Mexico City were attacked by a shock group at the boot of the PRI, nicknamed “Los Halcones” (The Falcons). The massacre leaves at least 120 dead. In the process, Mr. Echeverria launches his “dirty war” against the guerrillas which are strengthening in the countryside and in the cities. Murders, enforced disappearances, torture… The repression is intended to be violent and systematic according to a counter-insurgency logic.

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