Former Mexican President Luis Echeverría passed away on Friday. The current president of Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced this on Saturday. Echeverría, who ruled the country from 1970 to 1976, has turned 100.
Domestically, Echeverría is remembered as an authoritarian leader, under whose rule hundreds of opponents of the government disappeared. A judge ruled in 2005 that Echeverría was involved in the bloody crackdown on student protests in 1971 and 1968, while he was still foreign minister. However, Echeverría was not convicted because the crimes were time-barred.
Fallen student protests
The first massacre took place in 1968, a few weeks before the Olympic Games started in Mexico. As interior minister, Echeverría was in charge of the large-scale student protests in the country. He is said to have ordered the army to open fire on students in Tlatelolco Square on October 2. The official death toll from the massacre was 30, but according to testimonies, nearly 300 people died that day.
In 1971, when Echeverría had just been president of Mexico for a year, a student protest on a Catholic holiday was crushed by a paramilitary force. Protesters were attacked with firearms and batons and dozens of students were killed. The protest is portrayed in the Mexican film Romawhich won an Oscar for best foreign film in 2019.
Echeverría’s reign was also not very successful in economic terms. Sky-high government spending was offset by even higher taxes and private companies were nationalized. Foreign investors withdrew en masse from the Mexican economy and both inflation and the budget deficit soared under Echeverría’s government.
Abroad, the president presented himself as a leftist leader, with close ties to Fidel Castro in Cuba and Salvador Allende in Chile. When Allende was killed in a coup in 1973, thousands of Chileans fled to Mexico, where they were granted political asylum.