MEXICO CITY ( Associated Press) — The remains of former Mexican President Luis Echeverria were cremated on Sunday after a low-key funeral.
A small number of relatives and friends attended the funeral of the former president, who has been blamed for some of the worst political massacres of the 20th century in Mexico.
Echeverria’s defense lawyer Juan Velasquez said he was buried at a funeral home on Saturday and his remains were cremated on Sunday.
Echeveria died Friday night at the age of 100 at one of their homes. President Andres Manuel López Obrador confirmed the death on Saturday. On his Twitter account, López Obrador did not specify the cause of death of Echeverria, who ruled from 1970 to 1976.
Friends and allies indicated that Echeveria should be remembered for its devotion to foreign policy and the expansion of domestic programs and state enterprises. The former president considered himself a friend of leftist governments.
“President Echeverria did a lot for Mexico,” Velasquez said. “For example, when he began his six-year term, Mexico had ties with 50 countries. When he finished it, with 150.
However, subsequent presidents reversed Echeverria’s government expansion, as his ambitious public spending programs left Mexico deeply in debt.
But Echeveria is best remembered for what came to be known as the Tlatelolco massacre.
On October 2, 1968, weeks before the start of the Olympics in Mexico City, government snipers shot students demonstrating in the plaza of Tlatelolco, and soldiers later opened fire. According to various versions, the number of dead that night ranged from 25 to over 300 people.
Echeverria denied participating in the attack, although he was the (Interior) Secretary of the Interior, the main figure in charge of the country’s internal security.
In June 1971, when Echeverria was president, a group of students marched west of the city center near a teacher training college, one of the first large-scale protests since the Tlatelolco massacre.
The demonstrators had barely advanced a few blocks when they were attacked by a group of government agents in plainclothes who beat or shot at least a dozen people. This is known as the Corpus Thursday Massacre.
In 2005, a judge ruled that Echeveria could not be prosecuted on genocide charges stemming from the 1971 massacre because, although he may have been responsible for murder, the statute of limitations expired in 1985.
In March 2009, a federal court upheld a lower court ruling that Echeveria should not face genocide charges for her alleged involvement in the 1968 student massacre, and ordered her release. However, opponents of the former president insisted that the case against him was never closed.
“It seems to me that it is too early to identify and unfortunately the memory of Don Luis has now been corrupted by these two unfortunate incidents,” Velasquez said.
In the decades after he stepped down from the presidency, Echeveria refused to take any responsibility for the massacre.
Felix Hernández Gamundi, one of the leaders of the 1968 student movement on the day of the massacre in Tlatelolco, said that Echevería long delayed the inevitable process of democracy that had begun that year.
October 2 marks the beginning of the end of the old regime, he said, although that would take a long time to happen.
It was not until 2000 that the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had Echevería and had ruled Mexico with an iron fist for seven decades, was forced to accept its first defeat in the presidential election.
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