Luis Echeverría, Mexican academic and politician, 50th President of Mexico
Luis Echeverría Álvarez (Spanish pronunciation: [lwis etʃeβeˈri.a ˈalβaɾes]; born 17 January 1922) is a Mexican lawyer, academic and politician affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), who served as the 57th President of Mexico from 1970 to 1976. Previously, he was Secretary of the Interior from 1963 to 1969. At 100, he is the oldest head of state in the country's history, as well as the only centenarian.
His tenure as Secretary of the Interior during the Díaz Ordaz administration was marked by a notorious increase of political repression in the country; dissident journalists, politicians and activists were subjected to censorship, arbitrary arrests, torture and extrajudicial executions. This culminated with the Tlatelolco massacre of 2 October 1968, which put an end to months of social protests across the country; Díaz Ordaz, Echeverría and Secretary of Defense Marcelino Garcia Barragán have been considered as the intellectual authors of the massacre, in which hundreds of unarmed protestors were killed by members of the Army. The following year, Díaz Ordaz appointed Echeverría as his designated successor to the Presidency, which he assumed on 1 December 1970.
Echeverría was one of the most high-profile Presidents in Mexico's post-war history; he attempted to become a leader of the so-called "Third World", the countries that were not aligned with either the US or the USSR during the Cold War. He offered political asylum to Hortensia Bussi and other refugees of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile, established diplomatic relations and a close collaboration with the People's Republic of China after visiting Beijing and meeting with Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai, and tried to use Mao's influence among Asian and African nations in an ultimately failed attempt to become Secretary-General of the United Nations. Echeverría strained relations with Israel (and American Jews) after supporting a UN resolution that equated Zionism to racism.Domestically, Echeverría achieved significant economic growth, with the Mexican economy growing by 6.1%, and aggressively promoted the development of infrastructure projects such as new maritime ports in Lázaro Cárdenas and Ciudad Madero. However, his presidency was also characterized by authoritarian methods (in fact, the first documented instances of death flights in Latin America occurred in Mexico under Echeverría), the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre against student protesters, the Dirty War against leftist dissent in the country (despite Echeverría himself adopting a leftist-populist rhetoric), and the economic crisis that occurred in Mexico towards the end of his term. In 2006, he was indicted and ordered under house arrest for his role in the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre and the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre, but in 2009 the charges against him were dismissed.