Luis Echeverria, a polarizing Mexican political figure who served as president from 1970 to 1976, has died at the age of 100, according to current President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Echeverria, the interior minister at the time, was accused and later acquitted of his role in the deaths of student protesters in Tlatelolco months before the October 1968 Mexico City Olympics – 30 were declared dead by the government, but witnesses said the death toll was close to 300, The New York Times reported. He has consistently denied ordering soldiers to fire on peaceful protesters and was acquitted in 2007. Echeverria was appointed president by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, but his tenure was marked by an economic crisis, with foreign debt rising from 3.5 billion dollars to over $20 billion. Since his presidency, Echevarria has kept a low profile, serving as Mexico’s ambassador to Australia and representative to UNESCO. “[He] was a failed, tragic figure in Mexican history,” Kate Doyle, a Latin American human rights scholar, told The Washington Post. “It contained an opportunity for … some kind of forward thinking. And in the end, he was destroyed by…his inability to save himself from the political apparatus that created him.
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