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Luis Echeverría Álvarez, former president of Mexico who was credited with having orchestrated two massacres with hundreds of dead students, died this Saturday at the age of 100, authorities in the country confirmed.
Echeverría Álvarez, of the once hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), held the position of head of state between 1970 and 1976.
His government was marked by support for leftist governments in Latin America, such as that of Fidel Castro in Cuba, that of Salvador Allende in Chile and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, as well as by his reception of refugees from that political tendency.
Behind closed doors, however, he applied a strong crackdown to the social and student movements of the left.
Came to ban rock music in Mexico by decreeing the so-called “avandarazo” (for the Avándaro rock festival in 1971, which was called the “Mexican Woodstock”), with which it made concerts, recordings and radio broadcasts of this genre illegal in the country.
A lawyer by profession, he also stood out for his strong internationalist vocation by promoting the unity of third world countries and the self-determination of peoples, in line with the main current of Latin American lefts in the midst of the Cold War.
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Luis Echeverría Álvarez and former Argentine President Juan Domingo Perón (1895-1974) in a meeting in Paris.
His economic policies, marked by the international oil crisis of 1973, stood out for the increase in the size of the State and the strong increase in public spending, which caused strong inflation and the first major financial crisis in Mexico following decades of stability.
More than 500 youths killed
But he is remembered more for his involvement in the forced disappearances of dissidents during the so-called “dirty war”, which lasted from 1960 to 1980, and above all for his responsibility in two bloody massacres of students.
One of them was the Tlatelolco Massacrewhen Mexican security forces and paramilitaries shot student demonstrators in Mexico City on October 2, 1968, ten days before the start of the Olympic Games in the capital.
The massacre left between 300 and 400 dead and a thousand wounded.
Echeverría Álvarez, who was then Secretary of the Interior of President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970), was identified as responsible.
Already as president, he was accused of having orchestrated the “hawk”also known as the Corpus Thursday massacre of June 10, 1971, when the “hawks” (paramilitaries organized by the government) killed 225 students -according to unofficial estimates- who were demonstrating in Mexico City.
Echeverría Álvarez was tried and sentenced for both crimes, but never entered prison – he was only briefly under house arrest in 2006 – and finally was exonerated of all charges in 2009 due to lack of evidence.
He is, until now, the only former Mexican president prosecuted by justice.
He had eight children – three of whom have already died – and held various diplomatic positions, including ambassador to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris.
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