Prosecutors linked Echeverria to Mexico's “dirty war” in which hundreds of leftist activists were imprisoned, killed, or simply disappeared without a trace.
FILE- Former Mexican President Luis Echeverria, center, leaves the prosecutors' office surrounded by bodyguards in Mexico City, July 9, 2002. Echeverria, blamed for some of Mexico’s worst political killings of the 20th century, has died at the age of 100, current President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador confirmed Saturday, July 9, 2022.
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 for decades tried unsuccessfully to have him put on trial. On Oct. 2 1968, a few weeks before the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, government sharpshooters opened fire on student protesters in the Tlatelolco plaza, followed by soldiers posted there. Estimates of the dead have ranged from 25 to more than 300. Echeverria had denied any participation in the attacks.
That attack was depicted in the Oscar-winning 2018 movie “Roma,” in which two characters stumble across the violence, which turns out to involve one of their boyfriends as a member of the Halcones. “The death of ex-President Luis Echeverría is regrettable because it occurred in total silence, because despite his his very long life, Luis Echeverria never decided to come clean about his actions," Hernández Gamundi said.
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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