Mexican ex-president linked to brutal repression dead at 100

Former Mexican president Luis Echeverria Alvarez, known for brutal repression of political opponents, has died at the age of 100, the government said Saturday.

Echeverria, who belonged to the once dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, died Friday in the city of Cuernavaca, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador wrote in a message of condolence.

A lawyer by trade, Echeverria was accused of ordering massacres of students in 1968 when he was interior minister and again in 1971 when he was president, both times in Mexico City.

He stood trial over the death of some 200 student protesters in the 1968 violence in the Tlatelolco district of the Mexican capital right before the Olympic Games.

It was the first time a former president was indicted in Mexico.

Former Mexican President Luis Echeverria, the architect of a dirty war of forced disapprarances, dies at 100.

In the 2000s, there was as an effort to indict him that largely faded as Mexico fell into even worse bloodshed. His victims never got justice.
https://t.co/lXMjWMWyHB

— Ioan Grillo (@ioangrillo) July 9, 2022

A house arrest warrant was issued for Echeverria in 2006 but the charges were eventually dropped on grounds there was a lack of evidence that he had ordered the killings by an elite police unit.

Durante gobierno de comenzó una investigación para intentar que pagara por su responsabilidad en las masacres de. 1968 y 1971. En 2006 estuvo en arresto domiciliario, pero en 2007 quedó libre de cargos. La consulta de AMLO sobre enjuiciar a expresidentes no lo incluyó. pic.twitter.com/gSFshXLnDK

— Verónica Calderón (@veronicalderon) July 9, 2022

He was also accused of being behind forced disappearances of dissidents during a so-called "dirty war" from 1960 to 1980.

His death comes two weeks after the government gave relatives of people who disappeared during the 1970s access to military archives to try to learn what happened to their loved ones.

On the diplomatic front, after president Salvador Allende was ousted in a military coup in 1974 in Chile, Echeverria severed relations with that country and allowed Mexico to take in Chilean refugees.

After he left the presidency, Echeverria, a father of eight, served as Mexico's ambassador to UNESCO in Paris, among other diplomatic postings.