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2022-01-17T00:41:51.116Z


Linked to the repression of dissidents in Mexico, the former president reaches the age of 100 vaccinated against covid, sheltered in his home, oblivious to public life


Luis Echeverría turns 100 this January 17 and Mexico looks askance, without expecting too much from the oldest of its former presidents (1970-1976).

Attempts to bring him to justice for his role in suppressing dissident movements in the 1960s and 1970s came to nothing.

In the interviews he has given, the last one in 2017, he does not seem to harbor even a doubt about his actions in the Dirty War, the persecution of the student left, the extermination of rural and urban guerrillas.

Echeverría survives like a ghost, both present and absent from the country's public life.

His last appearance dates back to June of last year, when he went to the Olympic University Stadium in Mexico City to get vaccinated. The media said then that he received his second dose there. It is not known where the first one was placed nor if the third one has been placed. In the photos that emerged from his university visit, Echeverría appears in a wheelchair, wearing a blue vest, plexiglass glasses and a straw hat. Crossed hands, staring straight ahead. He didn't say anything and if he did, nobody noticed.

His life is the life of the PRI, which is the life of Mexico in the 20th century. When he was born, Álvaro Obregón was still alive and the Revolution had become a constellation of battles between caudillos that had only just begun to die down. He learned to walk during the administration of General Plutarco Elías Calles, creator of the National Revolutionary Party, embryo of the PRI. He came of age two years after Lázaro Cárdenas nationalized oil. "Echeverría is one of the best examples of the type of politician that developed in Mexico in the last century," says Rogelio Hernández, a doctor in Social Sciences from UNAM and a researcher at the Colegio de México.

The former president joined the PRI in 1946 and twelve years later he was already Undersecretary of the Interior, under the wing of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. Dupla for the memory, their names fly over the most disastrous days of the second half of the 20th century in Mexico, the Tlatelolco massacre in October 1968 and the Corpus Christi massacre in June 1971, both in the capital. First as Secretary of the Interior in the six-year term of Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970) and later as president, Echeverría experienced both events closely. He has always tried to distance himself from the two. He blamed Díaz Ordaz of Tlatelolco and the regent of Mexico City for the falcon.

Beyond the symbolic peaks of state repression, the academy agrees in pointing out that his government generalized, systematized and deepened the hunt against everything that smacked of dissidence and guerrillas. In his book on forced disappearance in Mexico at the time,

Suspended Time

, historian Camilo Vicente Ovalle points out that it was then "when the counterinsurgency strategy escalated (...) reaching phases of elimination." Ovalle adds: "The central characteristic of this escalation was the coordination of the various public security agencies around (...) the forced disappearance."

The escalation of repression occurred above all in rural areas, particularly in Guerrero, but also in Sinaloa and Jalisco. For the historian Alexander Aviña, who has investigated the Dirty War in Guerrero, “the year 1972 marks a turning point. It is when the guerrilla of Lucio Cabañas begins to ambush the military. Then, in 1973, the attempt by the September 23 Communist League to kidnap businessman Eugenio Garza in Monterrey, and his subsequent death, is another watershed. It marks the end of any attempt at negotiation with the guerrillas”, he argues. “I understand Echeverría from those two moments. He became a butcher and began a policy of extermination with disappearances, torture and executions”, ditch.

Luis Echeverría Álvarez, a politician and also a lawyer, began his career in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 1946, where he served as the private secretary of Rodolfo Sánchez Taboada.

In December 1958 he was appointed Undersecretary of the Interior. Pedro Valtierra/CUARTOSCURO

Populism and economy

Unlike Díaz Ordaz, Echeverría was a charismatic leader. In his electoral campaign, "he traveled throughout the country to meet different communities, with his guayabera," explains Aviña. “When he becomes president, he formulates a Cardenas-style populism. He knew that there were several crises. He had been Secretary of the Interior and tried to manage a populist profile in the domestic sphere”, he adds. In this logic, he tried to approve a tax reform to increase the pressure on big capital and signed an electoral reform to win the favor of disaffected youth. Nothing worked out for him. The young people went after him because of the

falcon

and the businessmen called him a communist.

But that doesn't mean he didn't try. As a good populist, Echeverría abandoned himself to the specter of political schizophrenia. In Mexico, the Army and the Federal Security Directorate launched themselves against the guerrillas, while abroad, the president cultivated his friendship with Salvador Allende and presented himself as a defender of Third World nations. Not surprisingly, it was his government that promoted the signing of the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States in 1974, an attempt to promote a fair growth model for developing nations.

By then, the so-called Mexican Miracle was beginning to show signs of wear. Fifteen years of economic growth rates above 6%, with inflation more or less controlled, allowed the birth of an urban middle class. But the model was exhausted and announced a stagnation difficult to resolve. The Bretton Woods agreements, which had laid the foundations for economic development after World War II, were crumbling. Based on a fixed exchange rate between the dollar and gold, the United States Government, suffering from the Vietnam War, released the exchange with the noble metal.

"For Mexico, this generated problems of external financing and internal inflation, in addition to currency instability, because currencies began to fluctuate freely," says Vanni Pettinà, a researcher at the Colegio de México and an expert in contemporary history in Latin America. “In the Mexico of Echeverría, this translated into a problem of inflation and, therefore, of social anger,” he adds.

His colleague Rogelio Hernández clarifies that the most disadvantaged sector was precisely the middle class. “Expectations of growth, income and social mobility are plummeting. The protests and mobilizations would no longer be of manual workers as before, but of the middle classes: teachers, doctors and of course, students. This is the context in which he must act, a context that contrasts with Echeverría's profile and his attitude: defend institutions and try to recover growth. They are the two variables that are going to mark his six-year term”, he argues.

Pettinà explains that the times were complicated, although not everything was justifiable for that.

“There were multiple pressures, in many directions, from many ideological angles, which partly explain his figure.

This is to understand, eye.

I do not want it to be thought that the scenario he faces justifies his way of acting in other aspects.

He is a character who understands repression as part of politics," he says.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-01-17

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