Luis Echeverría
Mexican president who promised democracy but was blamed for massacres in the ‘Dirty War’
LUIS ECHEVERRIA, who has died aged 100, was a president with immense ambitions at home and abroad who ended up a pariah because of his part in two massacres during the so-called “Dirty War” between the Mexican government and its Left-wing opponents.
The first took place, while Echeverría was interior minister, in the Tlatelolco district of Mexico City, which 10 days later would host the 1968 Olympic Games. Students protesting against the government and the holding of the Games were confronted by the army, which opened fire. Official figures gave the death toll as 30. Other sources put it 10 times as high.
The second, again in the capital, occurred during the first year of Echeverría’s presidency. This time the students faced a government-organised paramilitary group called Los Halcones, or the Falcons. At least 23 demonstrators were killed and hundreds more wounded.
The Tlatelolco and Corpus Christi massacres, the second named after the Roman Catholic feast day on which it took place, would haunt Echeverría for the rest of his life. After the 2000 general election had put an end to the 71-year rule by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), legal proceedings were opened against the former president, who was charged with genocide.
He denied responsibility for the killings and refused to testify. He was finally cleared of all charges by a federal court in 2009.
When he became head of state in 1970, Echeverría, no doubt aware of the national trauma provoked by Tlatelolco, promised democracy and social justice.
The voting age was lowered and tertiary education expanded. Other reforms included the nationalisation of the mining and electrical industries, redistribution of land to the peasants and increased state spending on health, education, housing, social security and public works.
These changes would seemingly appeal to the Left. Yet they were enraged by the failure to prosecute the perpetrators of the 1971 massacre and the continued use of extrajudicial measures to crush armed dissent.
The expropriation of private companies alienated business interests and led to a flight of capital from Mexico together with an unsustainable balance of payments deficit. Despite the country’s higher earnings from oil and brisk economic growth, state spending vastly outpaced revenue.
During Echeverría’s six-year term foreign debt rose from $4.1 billion to $24.1 billion and inflation reached 27 per cent. The final humiliation came in the last months of his administration, when the peso was twice devalued against the dollar.
Echeverría was no less active on the international stage, opening an embassy in Beijing, allowing the Palestine Liberation Organisation to set up an office in Mexico City, strengthening ties with the socialist governments of Cuba and Chile and, when Salvador Allende was overthrown in 1973, granting asylum to his widow Hortensia Bussi.
In 1975 the Mexican delegation to the UN General Assembly voted in favour of equating Zionism with apartheid, a move which led to a costly tourism boycott of Mexico by the Jewish community in America.
At the same time Echeverría maintained good relations with the United States. “He’s strong, he wants to play the right games,” was how Richard Nixon described him.
Looking for a role after the presidency, Echeverría campaigned to succeed Kurt Waldheim as UN Secretary-general in 1976. He was defeated by a large margin and Waldheim went on to serve a second term.
Echeverría was a creature of the PRI who believed that the party should carry the torch of the Mexican revolution into every corner of the nation’s life. His career was a paradoxical mixture of reform and repression. A prisoner of the system which had nurtured him, he overreached himself after he had emerged on top.
Speaking to The Washington Post, Kate Doyle, a veteran analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington, described him as “a failed, tragic figure in Mexican history”, a man of wide possibilities who “was ultimately destroyed by his inability to see beyond, or his inability to rescue himself from, the political apparatus that created him”.
Luis Echeverría Álvarez was born in Mexico City on January 17 1922 to Rodolfo Echeverría and Catalina Álvarez. He completed a Law degree at the University of Mexico in 1945 and returned there two years later to teach in the law faculty.
Having joined the PRI, he went to work for the party, receiving his first government post in 1952 in the navy ministry. He campaigned for the PRI presidential candidate, Adolfo López Mateos, in 1958 and, after the latter had won, became deputy interior minister under Díaz Ordaz.
Ordaz won the presidential election of 1964 and appointed Echeverría as interior minister, a post he held until 1969, when Ordaz picked him as his successor as head of state. He in turn chose José López Portillo, a childhood friend, to succeed him in 1976. Thus did the PRI monopoly of power work.
During his presidency, Echeverría passed Mexico’s first environment law, nationalised the exploitation of barbasco, a plant used in making contraceptive pills, and banned almost all rock music recorded by Mexican bands in an attempt to neutralise youthful opposition to his rule.
After he had stepped down as president, he became his country’s ambassador to Australia and New Zealand.
He married María Zuno, the daughter of the governor of Jalisco state, in 1945, the couple having met in the house of the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
María died in 1999. She and Luis had eight children, three of whom predeceased their father.
Luis Echeverría, born January 17 1922, died July 8 2022