MEXICO CITY (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 Andr…
By E. Eduardo Castillo and Mark Stevenson | Associated Press
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 decades tried unsuccessfully to have him put on trial. According to military reports, at least 360 government snipers were placed on buildings surrounding the protesters.
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.While few people in Mexico mourned the passing of Echeverria, Félix Hernández Gamundi — a 1968 student movement leader who was in Tlatelolco plaza on the day of the massacre, and who saw his friends gunned down — mourned what might have been.
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.
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