Luis Echeverría
Luis Echeverría was president of Mexico from 1970 to 1976, the interior minister who had been in charge of the police on the night of 2 October 1968, when the army fired on the students in the Plaza of the Three Cultures at Tlatelolco ten days before the Olympics and killed a number that has never been established. Chosen by Díaz Ordaz as his successor the next year, he spent his own presidency trying to be the students' friend. There was the populist spending that doubled the public sector, the land distributions in Sonora, the third-world rhetoric, the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States he had the UN adopt, the sheltering of Allende's Chileans, and the quarrel with Israel over the Zionism resolution that cost Mexico its Jewish tourists. At home there was the dirty war against the guerrillas in Guerrero and the cities, in which hundreds were disappeared, and the Corpus Christi massacre of 10 June 1971, when a paramilitary group called the Falcons killed some hundred and twenty marching students in the capital while the police watched. He was born in Mexico City in 1922, studied law at the national university, and married a governor's daughter. He rose inside the party's secretariat and the interior ministry, whose under-secretary he was from 1958 and secretary from 1964 under Díaz Ordaz, who later said that choosing him had been the mistake of his life. The economy that had grown at six per cent for thirty years with a fixed peso ended in his last year, when the deficit, the foreign debt, which he tripled, and the inflation brought the first devaluation since 1954, from 12.5 to 20 pesos, and the capital flight. He expropriated the Sonoran wheat lands in his last weeks and handed López Portillo a country in the IMF's hands. He wanted to be the UN's secretary-general and got an ambassadorship to Australia and then to UNESCO instead. In 2006, at eighty-four, he was charged with genocide for Tlatelolco and the Corpus Christi killings, and put under house arrest. He was cleared in 2009 on the statute of limitations, the only president tried for the dirty war. He lived on in Cuernavaca, silent, and died in July 2022 at a hundred, having outlived every other actor of 1968.
- Lived: 1922 CE – 2022 CE
- Nationality: Mexican
- Roles: president, politician
