#Mexican #expresident #dies #aged #connection #brutal #repression
Former Mexican President Luis Echeverria Alvarez, known for his brutal repression of political opponents, has died at the age of 100, the government said on Saturday.
Echeverria, who belonged to the once-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, died in the city of Cuernavaca on Friday, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador wrote in a message of condolences.
Echeverria, a lawyer by profession, was accused of ordering massacres of students, both times in Mexico City, in 1968 when he was secretary of the interior and in 1971 when he was president.
He was on trial for the deaths of about 200 student protesters in the 1968 violence in the Tlatelolco neighborhood of the Mexican capital just before the Olympic Games.
It was the first time a former president has been indicted in Mexico.
In 2006, Echeverria was placed under house arrest, but the charges were eventually dropped due to a lack of evidence that he had ordered the killings by an elite police force.
He was also accused of being behind the violent disappearances of dissidents during a so-called “dirty war” from 1960 to 1980.
His death comes two weeks after the government allowed relatives of people who disappeared in the 1970s access to military archives to try to find out what happened to their loved ones.
On the diplomatic front, after President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a military coup in Chile in 1974, Echeverria severed ties with that country and allowed Mexico to take in Chilean refugees.
After leaving the presidency, Echeverria, a father of eight, served as Mexico’s ambassador to UNESCO in Paris, among other diplomatic posts.
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