Luis Echeverria Alvarez
Luis Echeverría Álvarez (Mexico City, January 17, 1922-Cuernavaca, Morelos, July 8, 2022) was a Mexican lawyer, diplomat, and politician who served as president of the Mexico from December 1, 1970 to November 30, 1976.
Graduated with a Law Degree from the National School of Jurisprudence, in 1946 he began his career as private secretary to the president of the PRI, Rodolfo Sánchez Taboada. In December 1958, he was appointed Undersecretary of the Interior by Adolfo López Mateos; in November 1963 he became Secretary of the Interior after Gustavo Díaz Ordaz resigned, until he finally resigned in 1969 when his party named him presidential candidate.
During his tenure, the Mexican economy grew at a level of 6.1%, promoted the development of seaports such as Puerto Madero and Lázaro Cárdenas, created the Institute of the National Housing Fund for Workers, the Mexican Institute of Commerce Foreign and his foreign policy was active. After his presidency he served as Ambassador of Mexico to UNESCO from 1977 to 1978 and as Ambassador of Mexico to Australia from 1978 to 1979, and later retired from political life.
In 2002, he was accused by the Special Prosecutor for Social and Political Movements of the Past (FEMOSPP) of forging, together with Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, the massacre of October 2, 1968 and implementing a strategy of state terrorism during his government, the "Dirty War", in order to annihilate people and dissident movements to his government. He became the first former Mexican president to receive two arrest warrants charged with genocide and to serve house arrest for two years and four months. In 2009 he was released subject to legal reservations and died with a preliminary investigation opened before the Attorney General's Office of the Republic (FGR).
Origin, family and studies
Luis Echeverría Álvarez was born in Mexico City on January 17, 1922, the son of Rodolfo Echeverría Esparza and Catalina Álvarez Gayou and the older brother of Mexican actor Rodolfo Landa.
Her father, Rodolfo Echeverría Esparza, held several mid-level public positions; Among them, between 1931 and 1933 he served as paymaster for the Mexican Army in Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, the city to which the family moved their residence during that period, after which they returned to Mexico City. Later, he was an official of the Federation Treasury.
Residing in Ciudad Victoria, he began his primary education at the "Nancy L. Lee" school and upon returning to Mexico City, he attended the last grade of primary school at the "Alberto Correa" school and then went to Secondary School No. 3, and he studied high school at the French College. From this time, she dates her friendship with José López Portillo, who would be her successor in the presidency of Mexico. During his years as a high school student, which coincided with the government of Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, Echeverría stood out as a determined supporter of his government, maintaining a deep admiration for the figure of Cárdenas throughout his life. he.
In 1940 he entered the then National School of Jurisprudence of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he graduated with a law degree in 1945. As a student, he founded the magazine “Mexico and the University”, and in the company of his friend López Portillo, managed to obtain a scholarship that led them to study in Santiago de Chile and to get to know Argentina. He graduated with his thesis «The System of Balance of Power and the League of Nations»
Before completing his professional studies, on January 2, 1945, he married María Esther Zuno, daughter of the governor of Jalisco between 1923 and 1926 José Guadalupe Zuno, they both had eight children:
- Luis Vicente Echeverría Zuno (f. 2013), married first to Rosa Luz Alegría and then to Leticia Samperio, had four children.
- María del Carmen Echeverría Zuno, married to Arnoldo Porras, had three children.
- Álvaro Echeverría Zuno (1948-2020), first married to Ruth Valverde and then with Rubí Hernández, had four children.
- María Esther Echeverría Zuno, married to Alain Desvignes, has two children.
- Rodolfo Echeverría Zuno (f. 1983), married to Patricia Pérez-Montero, had two children.
- Pablo Echeverría Zuno, married to Ana Lilia Cepeda, has a son.
- Benito Echeverría Zuno, married to Amada Cadaval, has two children.
- Adolfo Echeverría Zuno, married to Maria Elena Sicilia, has a son.
The couple remained married until her death on December 4, 1999.
During the life of the former president, three of his children died: Rodolfo Echeverría Zuno died in 1983 at the age of 31, drowning in a swimming pool belonging to his parents due to a stroke, Luis Vicente Echeverría Zuno died in Mexico City on March 2013 after a heart operation and Álvaro Echeverría Zuno was found dead on May 19, 2020 having committed suicide with a shot to the head.
Political career
First public office
In March 1946, he began his political career when he was appointed auxiliary secretary to the president of the national executive committee of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, General Rodolfo Sánchez Taboada, who in December of the same year promoted him to the position of his private secretary. At the same time, he began teaching activity as an adjunct professor of State Theory at the National School of Jurisprudence of the UNAM, from which he was a graduate.
Along with Sánchez Taboada, along with Echeverría, some other young politicians were formed who later held important positions, among whom were Hugo Cervantes del Río or Milton Castellanos Everardo.
Without leaving the private secretary of Sánchez Taboada, he was from 1949 to 1952 general director of Press and Propaganda for the PRI; and he received various political commissions in those years, serving as party delegate in various states of the country. On December 1, 1952, President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines appointed Sánchez Taboada as Secretary of the Navy and he appointed Echeverría as Account and Administration Director of the same agency. Upon the death of Sánchez Taboada, he left office and was appointed by Ruiz Cortes as a senior officer of the Ministry of Public Education, where he could never come to an understanding with its head, José Ángel Ceniceros. On October 29, 1957, he was appointed Senior Officer of the national executive committee of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, with General Agustín Olachea Avilés as its president, and dedicated himself to participating in the organization of the presidential campaign of Adolfo López Mateos.
Subsecretary of the Interior
He remained in the senior office of the party until December 16, 1958, when López Mateos, who had assumed the presidency on the 1st day before, appointed him as Undersecretary of the Interior, being Secretary Gustavo Díaz Ordaz in charge. In the Undersecretary of the Interior, Echeverría supervised branches such as population, immigration policy and federal criminal justice and social rehabilitation, achieving the appointment of his close friends Mario Moya Palencia as general director of Cinematography and Carlos Gálvez Betancourt as senior officer of the secretariat.
On November 15, 1963, the Secretary of the Interior, Díaz Ordaz, was postulated as the PRI's candidate for the presidency of Mexico and consequently presented his resignation from the agency. President López Mateos then appointed Echeverría as undersecretary in charge of its office, until the end of his government, on November 30, 1964.
Secretary of the Interior
At the beginning of the student movement of 1968, in a press conference on the night of July 30, 1968, Luis Echeverría tried to disassociate President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz from his responsibility for the intervention of the army repressing the students and knocking him down with a bazooka projectile the door of a high school. At that press conference, Echeverría said that he had requested, along with the Head of the Department of the Federal District, the intervention of the army, a power that was reserved for the head of the executive, so that Echeverría declared that he had committed an illegal act. The illegality of the act and the political nature of the repression exercised by the regime were pointed out at that time by the journalist Edmundo Jardón in an unusual reply at the time.
On November 8, 1969, he was appointed candidate for the presidency of the Republic by the PRI, on July 5, 1970 he was elected, and on December 1 he would assume office.
President of Mexico
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Since the beginning of his administration, Luis Echeverría tried to distance himself from his responsibility in the repression of the 1968 student movement, through an opening speech towards university students; especially with those of the UNAM. During 1968 and 1971 the budget of the UNAM grew by 1688 %[citation required], the bureaucratic sector increased from 600,000 in 1972 to 2.2 million in 1976, employing largely amount to university graduates of the 1960s. In the cabinet there were 78% of UNAM graduates, including a leader of the 1968, named Francisco Javier Alejo, who was appointed director of the Fondo de Cultura Económica.
State terrorism and repression of social movements
The mostly left-wing social and political movements —including workers, students, and peasants— in the late 1960s and early 1970s sought, among other things, solutions to social demands, but mainly the search for an authentic democracy in Mexico before the authoritarianism of the Government of Mexico controlled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party that served as a hegemonic party that placed Echeverría in the presidency after an agreement between him and his predecessor. From using legal and institutional methods, said struggles of At the end of the 1960s, the Left passed to a peaceful resistance such as the 1968 Movement, which had as its violent outcome the massacre perpetrated by the government of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, of which Echeverría was the Secretary of the Interior, on October 2, 1968.
On June 10, 1971, a student demonstration took place in Mexico City in support of the students of Monterrey. These were received by a paramilitary group at the service of the state, called Los Halcones. The president ordered the repression of it, although he publicly distanced himself from the facts and consequently requested the resignation of the then head of the Department of the Federal District, Alfonso Martínez Domínguez. These events became known as El falconazo or the Corpus Thursday Massacre.
In the face of the massacres of 1968 and 1971, various left-wing groups assessed in their committees that peaceful resistance and institutional means had been exhausted, and they saw that the Mexican State was determined to annihilate the movements, so they decided to move to clandestinity and opt for the guerrilla's armed option given the political assessment that it would be impossible to democratize power through peaceful means. Revolutionaries and groups related to Genaro Vázquez and Lucio Cabañas such as the Peasant Execution Brigade and the Party of the Poor. These armed political groups carried out acts that they considered part of actions of revolutionary expropriation such as kidnappings and bank robberies; The most famous case was the attempted kidnapping and murder of the Monterrey businessman Eugenio Garza Sada, the kidnapping of one of his secretaries and his father-in-law José Guadalupe Zuno.
It is thus that Echeverría would have ordered —testimonies from his collaborators confirm it although he denied it in court— the implementation of a strategy of state terrorism in the process known as the "Dirty War" in order to annihilate said movements dissidents. Among the serious human rights violations committed in this period of at least 2,500 people by the government and its institutions such as the Federal Security Directorate (DFS) —intelligence agency of the Mexican government under the Ministry of the Interior— the Mexican Army and others, include the forced disappearance of hundreds of people, extrajudicial murders —including the so-called death flights—, systematic torture, raids and searches of homes without a warrant, inhuman and degrading treatment, surveillance and interception illegal communication, rape, smear and fabrication of media campaigns against opponents, and denial of l access to justice and due process. The strategy of terrorism was recognized in 2006 by the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation as imprescriptible in its judicial punishment given the seriousness of the crimes, particularly forced disappearance, in this case, that of Jesús Piedra Ibarra, who was kidnapped by elements of the DFS in 1975. the DFS, integrating it with 240 elements from that unit, the Attorney General of the Republic, the Federal District Attorney, the General Directorate of Police and Traffic of the Federal District Department and the Attorney General of the State of Mexico. The brigade operated in the states of Guerrero, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Nuevo León, Jalisco, Puebla, Morelos, the State of Mexico, and Mexico City. That brigade and other state bodies operated a network of clandestine detention and torture centers that included the following places: Military Camp Number One, Avenida de la República 20 and Circular de Morelia in Mexico City; the Atoyac de Álvarez Military Headquarters and the Military Air Base No. 7 at Pie de la Cuesta in Guerrero, the La Peña ranch in Higueras, Nuevo León and others.
From 1972 to 1976 he ordered different sabotages of the Excelsior newspaper, which was directed by Julio Scherer García and carried out critical work against his government. Echeverría then ordered a strategy to censor the newspaper's freedom of expression, achieving it with the Excelsior Crisis of 1976, which led to the forced departure of Scherer and his team.
Economic policy
In addition to the international crisis caused by the oil shortage, public spending increased considerably, issuing worthless paper money and contracting debt. During his tenure, the first economic crisis occurred since the beginning of the so-called "Mexican Miracle." In addition, he has launched into the purchase of companies on the verge of bankruptcy to sustain jobs, but at the cost of inefficiencies and corruption. During his government, the fixed exchange rate that had existed since 1954, of $12.50 per dollar, was abandoned; at the end of his six-year term it reached $25.50 per dollar. Foreign debt rose from the manageable $6 billion that Díaz Ordaz had inherited to more than $20 billion.
Foreign Policy
He traveled to countries in Europe, Asia, Oceania, Africa and Latin America. His government was very close to the socialist regimes of Chile and Cuba. He gave asylum to Hortensia Bussi, wife of Chilean President Salvador Allende, when he died in 1973 after being overthrown by Augusto Pinochet's coup. He also gave political asylum to a large number of exiles from the dictatorships of South America. But as mentioned above, he had a strong hand with the movements of the national left. From the presidency, he promoted the Mexico Declaration on the equality of women and their contribution to development and peace, proclaimed by the World Conference of the International Year of Women ( later United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379) in which Zionism was equated with South African apartheid and as a form of racial discrimination. The foregoing produced a tourist boycott by the American Jewish community against Mexico that made visible internal and external conflicts of Echeverría's policies.
Rock music ban
As a consequence of the numerous student and youth mobilizations and protests that arose during his presidency, the PRI and President Echeverría attempted to neutralize the highly politicized youth. At the end of 1971, after the Corpus Christi Massacre and the Rock and Ruedas de Avándaro Festival, Echeverría decreed the prohibition of practically all types of rock music recorded by national groups. The prohibition (also popularly known as the "Avandarazo", since it arose in response to the Avándaro Festival, which had been harshly criticized by the conservative sectors of the PRI) included the restriction of recording almost any type of rock music, as well as the prohibition of its sale in music stores; massive rock concerts and the radio broadcast of rock music were also prohibited. The ban was in place for several years, only beginning to be gradually lifted in the 1980s.
Presidential Succession
He handed over the presidency to José López Portillo, who had served as Secretary of the Treasury in the second half of his six-year term. Echeverría sought the position of secretary of the United Nations Organization, but did not obtain it. Kurt Waldheim was reelected.
After the presidency
Ambassador
On May 16, 1977, Echeverría was appointed by Mexican President José López Portillo as extraordinary ambassador and plenipotentiary of Mexico on special mission, this with the purpose of carrying out analytical studies in institutions related to countries in the process of development, this This commission allowed him to represent his country before UNESCO and before Australia and New Zealand until he left that position in 1979.
Conflict with Carlos Salinas de Gortari
On December 3, 1995, former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari sent a letter to the media in which, among other things, he accused Echeverría of carrying out an offensive against him, which some of his main opponents at that time (Augusto Gómez Villanueva, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, Adolfo Aguilar Zínser and Ignacio Ovalle Fernández) were collaborators of Echeverría as well as that Echeverría wanted to impose a candidate from his group after the Assassination of the presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta occurred a year before Faced with these accusations, Echeverría himself responded a day later with another letter in which he denied the statement that the aforementioned characters were coordinated by him and that Salinas' opinion was far from reality.
Legal proceedings against you
The FEMOSPP determined to accuse Echeverría and other officials of his cabinet such as his secretary of the interior, Mario Moya Palencia and the then regent of the city, Alfonso Martínez Domínguez, among others; for genocide, derived from his alleged responsibility for the massacre of students in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco in 1968, the massacre of 1971 and the forced disappearance of people and other crimes in the so-called Dirty War in Mexico, accusations that remained established in the preliminary investigations PGR/FEMOSPP/002/2002 (Tlatelolco Massacre) and PGR/FEMOSPP/011/2002 (Corpus Thursday Massacre). On July 2, 2002, he became the first former Mexican president summoned to testify before the Mexican courts.
In 2004, PRI and PAN legislators approved an express legislative reform to Mexico's Federal Penal Code to allow people over 70 who are subject to criminal proceedings to have access to house arrest and not to pretrial detention.
Corpus Thursday Massacre
On July 22, 2004, the Second District Judge of Criminal Procedures of the First Circuit, José César Flores Rodríguez, consigned the investigation PGR/FEMOSPP/011/2002 regarding the events of June 10, which dismissed the accusations of the FEMOSPP when considering without a substantive study in its sentence that the crime of genocide had already prescribed. The prosecutor's office behind the case appealed the judge's ruling, taking the case to the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation. The SCJN issued a ruling in 2005 considering that the crime had prescribed but that in the case of Echeverría and Moya the constitutional jurisdiction had protected them from being indicted as of December 1, 1976 and not before, for which reason it reversed the decision of the Supreme Court. Judge Flores because the statute of limitations had not yet entered into force. The SCJN, chaired by Olga Sánchez Cordero, decided not to enter into the matter of genocide, leaving the decision to the Fifth Unitary Circuit Court in the Federal District. The then minister Juan Silva Meza gave a dissenting vote to the ruling, arguing that according to international legal standards, the crime of genocide did not prescribe.
Subsequently, magistrate Ana Herlinda Velasco Villavicencio, in charge of the Fifth Unitary Court in Criminal Matters of the First Circuit, decided not to issue arrest warrants against Echeverría and Moya Palencia because, according to her resolution, she did not find binding evidence against the former president for genocide, but if for homicide. According to Velasco's interpretation, the definition of genocide in the Federal Criminal Code in its article 49 bis applies to social groups of national scope and in his assessment the victims of state terrorism were not part of "a national group". The resolution judicial proceedings were challenged by the victims of state terrorism before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Deputies and activists of the 68 Committee requested a political trial against Judge Velasco.
October 2
In September 2005, the FEMOSPP made a new accusatory document for October 2 against Echeverría and other officials, an accusation that Judge Ranulfo Castillo Mendoza dismissed on the same grounds of prescription. On June 30, 2006, a federal judge, magistrate Ángel Matar Oliva, of the Second Unitary Criminal Court, ordered the refusal of the arrest warrant for the 1968 massacre to be revoked and house arrest was decreed given the 2004 reform. which also benefited the person Echeverría appointed as director of the White Brigade, Miguel Nazar Haro. He was acquitted on July 8, 2006, due to the prescription of the crime in November 2005. On November 30, 2006, Judge Ricardo Paredes Calderón, of the Second Unitary Court of the First Circuit of Federal Criminal Proceedings, ordered him formally imprisoned for the crime of genocide for the massacres of students in 1968 and 1971, but on March 20, 2009, magistrates Guadalupe Malvina Carmona Roig, María Eugenia Estela Martínez Cardiel and magistrate Manuel Bárcena Villanueva Echeverría decided after review appeal 132/2007 to rule against the now extinct FEMOSPP and thus Echeverría obtained a order of release with legal reservations.
Along with the two legal proceedings, a media smear campaign was carried out against FEMOSPP, particularly its head, Ignacio Carrillo Prieto.
On August 19, 2015, the INAI ordered the Attorney General's Office (PGR) to deliver a public version of the preliminary investigations PGR/FEMOSPP/002/2002 and PGR/FEMOSPP/011/2002, related to the events that occurred on October 2, 1968, and June 10, 1971, in which several people were charged with the crime of genocide, including former President Luis Echeverría Álvarez. (INAI) the National Institute of Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data. The PGR indicated, at first, that both files were not locatable. Then, that they did exist but they were in an ongoing investigation.
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of October 2, 1968 in 2018, the Committee 68 Pro Libertades Democráticas promoted an amparo for the alleged "inaction" and "omission" of the FGR to investigate the former president before the Fifteenth Court of Amparo District in Criminal Matters, the same that recorded it with file number 796/2018-1 and the preliminary investigation went from PGR/FEMOSPP/002/2002 to SEIDF/GCI/262/07. On January 2, 2019, Echeverría received a notification at his home as part of the investigations against him, which remained open until his death.
Health problems and later years
On January 23, 2006, Luis Echeverría was admitted to the National Institute of Cardiology for an intestinal and respiratory tract infection as well as dehydration. On January 26, 2006, it was reported that Echeverría was stable and responding well to treatment. On February 13, 2006, it was reported that Echeverría's state of health was delicate due to a blood supply problem in the posterior part of the brain and, because that area controls balance in humans, it was forbade him to walk.
On April 4, 2006, 9 lots located in Cozumel, Quintana Roo, were seized for a debt of 1,800,000 pesos of property tax to the government of that municipality.
On June 13, 2010, it was reported that he was hospitalized at Hospital ABC without knowing the date of admission to the hospital or the condition he suffered from. He was discharged on June 20 of that year after having undergone to surgery to place a pacemaker which was placed because he had a decrease in his heart rate.
On October 28, 2016, at the invitation of the Chinese ambassador to Mexico Qiu Xiaoqui, Echeverría visited the Chinese embassy in Mexico recalling the restoration of relations between those countries 44 years earlier.
On January 16, 2018, he was hospitalized for mild pneumonia, although it was reported that this was to facilitate treatment against that disease. On June 21 of that year, he was hospitalized again for the same condition.
On October 18, 2018, he visited the then Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto at the official residence of Los Pinos, being accompanied to that meeting by his private secretary Jorge Nuño Jiménez.
On January 19, 2021, the relatives of Luis Echeverría launched a website that compiled his biography and part of his personal files.
On April 21, 2021, his last public appearance took place at the Estadio Olímpico Universitario, where he went to receive the second dose of the vaccine against COVID-19.
On January 17, 2022, on the occasion of his 100th birthday, 30 friends and former collaborators of the former president paid tribute to him through a Zoom session that, although he did not attend, was attended by his daughter, María Esther Echeverría Zuno, who recorded said session with the aim of presenting it to him later.
Death
He passed away in the city of Cuernavaca, Morelos, on July 8, 2022 at the age of 100. His funeral was held at the Gayosso Lomas Memorial funeral agency in Santa Fe, Cuajimalpa, Mexico City, to which his body arrived at 3:15 p.m. (UTC-05:00) on July 9, 2022, among those who attended the funeral were Jorge de la Vega Domínguez, Sergio García Ramírez, Everardo Moreno Cruz and his lawyer Juan Velázquez. At 08:00 (UTC-05:00) on July 10, 2022, his body left the aforementioned funeral home to the Spanish Pantheon for cremation.
CIA informant and KGB influence
According to the book Inside the Company: CIA Diary (Dentro de la Compañía: Diario de la CIA), by Philip B. Agee, Echeverría was a collaborator of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), like his predecessor Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. Declassified agency documents several decades later assign Echeverría the Litempo-8 code.;select senior officials" from Mexico.
According to the book The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World, by Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin, although the KGB could not have direct access to Echevarría, it did influence those close to him "to influence the president." Through an agent with the code name URAN and two confidential contacts, code names MARTINA and OLMEK, the KGB influenced the decisions of the Mexican president regarding foreign policy.
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