Former Mexican President Faces Warrant

[Rose Siding]

MEXICO CITY -- A Mexican court issued a house-arrest warrant Friday for former President Luis Echeverria on charges of genocide in a 1968 student massacre, his attorney told The Associated Press.

It was the first time an arrest warrant of any sort has been issued against a former Mexican president.
...
Echeverria has been accused of various crimes for his alleged involvement in the killings of dozens of students in two separate Mexico City protests: in 1968, when he was interior secretary, and in 1971, when he was president. But until Friday, courts had blocked his prosecution in cases brought by Special Prosecutor Ignacio Carillo.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-mexico-dirty-war,0,5613588.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines

[Recursion]

1. See, the other half of "never again"...

...is being damned careful what we call "genocide".

White Americans killing the First Nations was genocide
Turks killing Armenians was genocide
Germans killing Roma and Jews was genocide
Hutu killing Tutsi was genocide
Echeverria killing students was mass murder

He still deserves the gallows (yes, btw, I'm pro-death-penalty in certain Crimes Against Humanity cases), but that's not "genocide".

[rusty_parts2001]

2. How old is he now?

He was Predident of Mexico when I was in high school.

[struggle4progress]

3. ... Echeverria was interior secretary, a powerful position overseeing ..

.. domestic security, when Mexican troops ambushed mostly peaceful student protests at Mexico City's Tlatelolco Plaza on Oct. 2, 1968, just before the capital hosted the Olympics. Officially, 25 people were killed, though human rights activists say as many as 350 may have died.

Special prosecutors say they have reviewed military documents indicating 360 sharpshooters fired from buildings surrounding Tlatelolco Plaza. The attack is considered one of the darkest moments of modern Mexican history ...

Ex-Mexican president under house arrest
E. EDUARDO CASTILLO
Associated Press
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/14944545.htm

[Rose Siding]

4. Do you know whether or how this could affect Sunday's election?

My ignorant impression is that a reminder of this could energize the left, but moderates might be mollified by Fox seeming to fulfill his promise. :shrug:

[NorthernSun]

7. Rove-like timing

Must be a Lefty

[struggle4progress]

9. To whose timing do you refer?

[NorthernSun]

11. Presidente Fox

But the BBC story says Leftists were killed so this should not hurt the Left any. (I hope)

[struggle4progress]

14. Fox expressed his own views some time ago that publication of ..

.. Carillo's report should end the matter completely -- so perhaps the timing of the arrest can't be laid at Fox's door, since Fox has already indicated he didn't expect prosecutions ...

[struggle4progress]

8. Rilly dunno; perhaps not much. PRI was firmly in control in 1968:

Mexico
Authoritarianism Unveiled, 1964-70

... As the Olympic Games approached, the PRI and Díaz Ordaz were preparing the country to show foreign visitors that Mexico was politically stable and economically sound. Student unrest grew louder and more violent, however. Student demands included freedom for all political prisoners, dismissal of the police chief, disbanding of the antiriot police, guarantees of university autonomy, and the repeal of the "law of social dissolution" (regulating the punishment of acts of subversion, treason, and disorder). Luis Echeverría Álvarez, the new interior minister, agreed to discuss the issues with the students but changed his mind when they demanded that the meeting be televised. The students, their demands unmet, escalated the scale and frequency of their protests. In late August, they convened the largest antigovernment demonstration to date, rallying an estimated 500,000 protesters in the main plaza of the capital. Seeking to bring a halt to the demonstrations, Díaz Ordaz ordered the army to take control of UNAM and to arrest the student movement leaders.

To show that they had not been silenced, the students called for another rally at the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Mexico City's Tlatelolco district. On October 2, 1968, a crowd of about 5,000 convened on the plaza in defiance of the government crackdown. Armed military units and tanks arrived on the scene and surrounded the demonstrators, while military helicopters hovered menacingly overhead. The helicopters began to agitate the crowd by dropping flares into the densely packed gathering. Shortly thereafter, shots rang out (according to some accounts, the shooting was started by the military, while others claim the first shots were fired at soldiers by antigovernment snipers in the surrounding buildings). The panicked crowd suddenly surged toward the military cordon, which reacted by shooting and bayoneting indiscriminately into the crowd. Estimates of the number of people killed ranged from several dozen to more than 400. Despite the violence, the Olympic Games proceeded on schedule. However, the Tlatelolco massacre had a profound and lasting negative effect on the PRI's public image. The authoritarian aspects of the political system had been starkly brought to the surface ... http://www.country-data.com/cgi-bin/query/r-8712.html

But the PRI stranglehold was loosened a few years back. Mexico's having local elections, too, aren't they? But what difference could it make in locales where the PRI isn't a real contender?

[MisterP]

5. he appears to have been Diaz Ordaz's finger man in most things

presumably including this massacre. I think it may've been even higher than hundreds.

[ShockediSay]

10. ...which is how Reich Wingers deal w/ dissidents >>

This is why warrantless eavesdropping and data mining of our email and phone calls, and their violation of our Bill of Rights, is
EVIL
:evilgrin:

This whole business about the Times and the Belgian Banking connection is just a big smokescreen and distraction for the more serious far ranging eavesdropping and data mining w/out any judicial check/balance/warrant!

[killbotfactory]

6. Declassified documents from that time

The Archive directly sparked a national debate about freedom of information in 1998. On the 30th anniversary of the infamous Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, the Archive drew press coverage across Mexico by publishing on the Web and in several major Mexican magazines a revelatory set of declassified U.S. documents including U.S. embassy reporting on the massacre and the CIA's analysis of the Mexican security forces' responsibility. Those newsmaking Tlatelolco documents came from the Archive's partnership - beginning in July 1994- with the Mexican newsmagazine Proceso, to open U.S. files on the past three decades of U.S.-Mexican relations.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/mexico/

[annabanana]

13. kick. . . . . . n/t

[Judi Lynn]

12. I hope people in Mexico remember Nixon really liked Echeverría

and realize they need a President who isn't in the pocket of the U.S. Republican Party.

The Nixon Tapes:
Secret Recordings from the Nixon White House
on Luis Echeverría and Much Much More


by Kate Doyle
Richard Nixon and Luis Echeverría shared a common vision - and some common problems. Each considered himself a true world leader, not merely a head of state. When they met, Nixon was fresh from ground-breaking talks with the leaders of China and the Soviet Union, meetings that led to the "opening" of China and the first disarmament agreement between the United States and the Soviets. Echeverría, who used foreign policy during his sexenio as an actor uses the stage, was at the start of a grand American tour, with stops scheduled in cities that hosted large Mexican-American communities. Before that he was in Latin America where he met with heads of state, including Chile's President Salvador Allende. He, too, would later travel to Peking and Moscow.

Both men were waging secret wars. In 1969, the Nixon administration had begun the covert bombing of Cambodia, while Echeverría fought a clandestine "dirty war" against his own people. And each man wrestled with popular dissent - across the United States, nation-wide protests were at a fever pitch against the war in Vietnam, and in Mexico Echeverría faced growing demands for democracy and justice.

It is clear from the tapes that Richard Nixon felt a great affinity with Echeverría. He referred to him warmly in a dozen different conversations with White House aides as "bright, energetic," "a vigorous fellow," "a very attractive guy," and told his CIA Director Richard Helms, "he's strong, he wants to play the right games."

The two Presidents, speaking through a translator, barely touched upon the bilateral issues that normally crop up between the United States and Mexico, such as drugs, immigration or trade. They were too busy talking about geopolitics. Echeverría spent much of his time discussing communism's threat to the region. Latin America was in imminent danger, he told Nixon, beset by poverty and unemployment and bombarded by Soviet propaganda touting Fidel Castro's Cuba as the answer to the hemisphere's problems. The solution, he insisted, was private capital. Echeverría urged Nixon to promote American business investments in Mexico and the region.
(snip)

Transcript 25

March 27, 1972
7:51 - 8:04 pm

Conversation No. 22-34
Cassette No.1820
White House Telephone

The President and Henry Kissinger discuss ideas for a trip by President Echeverría to the United States. Nixon calls Echeverría a very attractive guy.
(snip)

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB95/



Luis Echeverría. Attractive compared to what?



Masacre de Tlatelolco

2 de Octubre de 1968

México

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
TLATELOLCO MASSACRE:
DECLASSIFIED U.S. DOCUMENTS ON MEXICO AND THE EVENTS OF 1968
By Kate Doyle
Director, Mexico Documentation Project

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mexico's tragedy unfolded on the night of October 2, 1968, when a student demonstration ended in a storm of bullets in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco, Mexico City. The extent of the violence stunned the country. When the shooting stopped, hundreds of people lay dead or wounded, as Army and police forces seized surviving protesters and dragged them away. Although months of nation-wide student strikes had prompted an increasingly hard-line response from the Diaz Ordaz regime, no one was prepared for the bloodbath that Tlatelolco became. More shocking still was the cover-up that kicked in as soon as the smoke cleared. Eye-witnesses to the killings pointed to the President's "security" forces, who entered the plaza bristling with weapons, backed by armored vehicles. But the government pointed back, claiming that extremists and Communist agitators had initiated the violence. Who was responsible for Tlatelolco? The Mexican people have been demanding an answer ever since.
(snip/...)

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB10/intro.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~snip~
CIA on the Ground

While the Embassy struggled to make sense of the regime's strategy, the CIA was busy gathering raw intelligence on events as they unfolded. Curiously, most of the CIA records declassified on 1968 come from its covert directorate, and represent field reporting from the agency's station in Mexico City. The documents have the advantage of being vivid snapshots taken from the ground; they have the disadvantage of containing little analysis or "finished intelligence" that would help put the events into context.

It is clear from the declassified record that the CIA station in Mexico reported almost daily on the disturbances of July 26 - October 2, using sources that included Fernando Gutierrez Barrios and other officials within the DFS, Luis Echeverría, officials within the President's Office, an official in the Education Secretariat, university contacts (including administrators and students), and intelligence gathered by "trained observers" - which could be American officers from the station or Mexican "liaison" intelligence officers.

Information was gathered on every aspect of the crisis, but the CIA's resources were most intensively focused on leftist students and "known agitators" (such as UNAM students Luis González de Alba, Gilberto Guevara Niebla, Romero González Medrano, Jesus Rodríguez, Roberta Avendano and Ignacio Rodríguez), radical professors (such as the IPN's Fausto Trejo Fuentes and Eli de Gortari), political tendencies within the various schools at UNAM, and the activities and whereabouts of known Communist Party members.
(snip/...)

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB99/

[cascadiance]

15. Hope this can set a precedent for OTHER North American leaders here!

Since the current administration has been trying to find a way to create the trappings of an EU like union of North American States to benefit corporations in getting cheap labor, perhaps by setting the precedent of being able to arrest a former president of what will be in this administration's eyes one of our new "union"'s states, we can feel justified in sending Shrub and his cronies to the Hague when he leaves office too!