Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador confirmed the death on Twitter on Saturday, offering his condolences to Echeverría’s family. As an elderly man, Echeverria fended off attempts by Mexican prosecutors to charge him with genocide for his role in two notorious massacres of student protesters in 1968 and 1971 that helped define an era of brutal state repression. Bald and bespectacled, Echeverria denied wrongdoing and said his conscience was clear. He refused to testify about crimes that are still not fully solved today. A loyal son of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for 71 years until it was ousted in an election in 2000, Echeverria believed in maintaining a universal party system that reached into every sphere of public life. His presidency from 1970 to 1976 was tainted from the start by accusations that he ordered troops to open fire on thousands of students peacefully demonstrating in the Tlatelolco district of Mexico City on October 2, 1968, while serving as interior minister. At the time, the government said just 30 people were killed and injured in the massacre, which took place just days before the start of the Olympics in Mexico City. Some witnesses said that many more bodies were removed from the scene. Hundreds of students were beaten and jailed after the protest, which came as student uprisings broke out around the world. A definitive death toll has never been given. As interior minister, Echeverria led a group of senior officials who created a response to the student uprisings, according to declassified US government documents. Wanting to wipe the slate clean during his presidency, Echeverría promised a “democratic opening.” He released people imprisoned after the massacre and courted the intellectual left, promoting them to prominent government positions. But from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, activists say PRI security forces were responsible for a brutal campaign against left-wing intellectuals and critical journalists, many of whom were killed and disappeared during the governance of Echeverria. On June 10, 1971, the day of the Catholic celebration of Corpus Christi, a paramilitary force known as Los Halcones – or Falcons – attacked a student demonstration with pistols, rifles, tear gas and batons, killing or injuring dozens of demonstrators. Born on January 17, 1922 to a middle-class family in Mexico City, Echeverria was known for adopting a left-wing foreign policy while comfortably situated in Washington. Richard Nixon loved Echeverria. “He’s strong, he wants to play the right games,” Nixon said of Echeverria in a taped conversation with the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. During his presidency, Echeverría had plans to redistribute the lands of the rich to the peasants and advocated a protectionist economic policy of high tariffs, government intervention, and a preference for domestic products. As the public sector soared and government borrowing soared, Echeverria alienated the business class, which stopped investing and sent its capital out of the country. Mexico’s foreign debt quadrupled and the value of the peso nearly halved during Echeverria’s tenure, leading to a devaluation of the currency shortly before his term ended. In 2006, a judge ordered Echeverria to be placed under house arrest for his connection to the student murders. But in March 2009, a court ruled that the military crackdown did not amount to genocide and upheld earlier rulings that the 30-year statute of limitations for the crimes had expired. In 2020, after about 10 years out of the limelight, Mexican media photographed Echeverria waiting in a wheelchair to receive a Covid vaccine, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and rolling up the sleeve of a lilac shirt for receiving.
