The former Mexican president Luis Echeverría, who has died aged 100, positioned himself at the beginning of his tenure, in 1970, as a left-leaning maverick promising reconciliation and reform in a country reeling from the army’s massacre in Tlatelolco of hundreds of students in 1968, but exited six years later with an ignominious devaluation, and a legacy of hundreds of people “disappeared” in a dirty war against guerrillas and dissidents.
The murderous storm that had descended at Tlatelolco – in which, as interior minister, Echeverría was complicit – would hang over his term. He fostered an image that was tolerant of pluralism, but the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre – a bloody replay of 1968 – determined within what limits.
Echeverría’s succession reflected an awareness among the bosses of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI) of the nature of the crisis they faced and of the need for reform. An austere, non-smoking teetotaller, Echeverría embodied a new type of leadership. Yet his career up to then within the federal bureaucracy and the PRI meant he took to the presidency his bureaucratic baggage: interventionist, obsessed with detail and hungry for control.
The persistence of acute inequality in Mexico, beneath the “miracle” of industrialisation, and the very real threat of rural insurgency, had fuelled calls for greater public spending, and Echeverría responded with an expansionary strategy that was as much political as economic, co-opting a radical leftwing generation smarting from the bloodshed of 1968. He pardoned many of the student leaders jailed during the crackdown, and actively sought to recruit intellectuals with government jobs and money. Yet the continuation of the merciless dirty war against leftist activists and members of fringe guerrilla groups illustrated the yawning gulf between Echeverría’s public image, and his private intentions.
As the public sector and subsidies swelled, the money supply soared, the deficit increased sixfold and Echeverría turned to foreign banks. The resulting inflationary spiral, exacerbated by the world recession following the oil crisis, damned the peso. Capital flight accelerated and on 1 September 1976, two months before the end of his presidency, it was devalued, ending 22 years of parity with the dollar.
Echeverría’s economic inflexibility must be assessed in terms of his disastrous relations with the private sector, which he denounced as instigators of a reactionary plot to destabilise his administration. Worst of all, he failed to markedly improve the lot of the poor.
His presidency has been depicted as an experiment in socialist populism, but this misrepresents his objective: to reconstruct Mexico’s shattered myth of consensus in which the PRI maintained the lie that it was managing a society free of class and ethnic divisions. He sought to stifle at birth a leftwing insurgency, and to use a supine left against his conservative enemies – not to institutionalise an independent left wing.
In his foreign policy, Echeverría tried to establish himself as a leader and defender of “third world” nations. He allied himself with Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende in Chile; after Allende was assassinated in 1973, Echeverría opened Mexico’s borders to Chileans fleeing Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Washington was irritated by his global pretensions, but was not unduly fretful as long as the war against leftwing guerrillas continued and US banks were at the forefront of the flood of lending to Mexico.
In 2000, the first non-PRI president, Vicente Fox, was elected, ending 71 years of one-party rule. This led to the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the student massacres of 1968 and 1971, and the dirty war that was waged from the late 1960s to the early 80s. During Echeverría’s presidency alone, 342 leftist activists and members of fringe guerrilla groups were imprisoned or killed, or simply disappeared without trace, according to data compiled by Mexico’s National Commission for Human Rights.
Echeverría was indicted on genocide charges for the 1968 massacre, but denied wrongdoing and said his conscience was clear. He refused to testify about crimes that have not been fully cleared even to this day. In 2005, a federal magistrate ruled that not enough evidence existed to try him; in 2006 government investigations into the Corpus Christi massacre petered out as Fox wound down his six-year term as president; and in 2009 the charge of genocide for Tlatelolco was dismissed.
Born in Mexico City, into a well-to-do family, Echeverría was the son of Rodolfo Echeverría Esparza, an army paymaster, and his wife, Catalina Alvarez Gayou. He graduated in law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1945, and married María Esther Zuno, the daughter of a prominent party boss, in the same year.
He held posts in the navy and education departments before advancing to chief administrative officer of the PRI, organising the presidential campaign of Adolfo López Mateos (1958-64), and was thereafter rewarded by the succeeding president, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, with the appointment as interior minister in 1964.
On 2 October 1968, a few weeks before the Olympic Games 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. Echeverría denied participation in the attacks, blaming the mayor of Mexico City. The following year, Díaz Ordaz named Echeverría as his successor.
On 10 June 1971, the day of the Corpus Christi Catholic celebrations, a large student protest was set upon by plainclothes goverment agents known as Los Halcones, or Falcons, injuring or killing dozens.
His term as Mexican president ended in November 1976, following the unopposed election of his nominated successor, the finance minister José López Portillo. In later years, Echeverría served as Mexico’s ambassador to Australia and was a representative to Unesco. He also ran a centre for “third world” studies.
Félix Hernández Gamundi, a student leader in Tlatelolco plaza on the day of the 1968 massacre, said the former president’s death was “regrettable” because “despite his very long life, Echeverría never decided to come clean about his actions … He delayed for a long time the inevitable process of democracy.”
Maria, with whom he had eight children, died in 1999.
• Luis Echeverría Álvarez, politician, born 17 January 1922; died 8 July 2022
