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.
