7/12/22, 12:44 PM Luis Echeverría Álvarez Obituary: Mexico's Former President Was Demagogue With Big Dreams

OBITUARY

Luis Echeverría Álvarez Was a

Demagogue With Big Dreams
The former Mexican president aimed to transform global imbalances. But he’ll
be best remembered for his repressive regime at home.
By Ana Sofía Rodríguez Everaert, a doctoral candidate in history at El Colegio de México.

JULY 12, 2022, 11:11 AM

When Luis Echeverría Álvarez, president of Mexico from 1970 to 1976, turned
100 years old this January, Mexican and other Hispanic media dedicated
countless television spots and profiles to him and his reign. They were
overwhelmingly negative. One journalist, speaking on an El País podcast,
declared him “one of the worst jackals in our history.”

The articles and television features mainly focused on three themes:

Echeverría’s demagoguery, his repressive politics, and the economic crisis that
marked the end of his administration. As the longest-living president from the
era of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that ruled Mexico for more
than five decades––a period Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa called “the
perfect dictatorship”—Echeverría came to represent everything that was wrong
with that era’s governing system.

That may be a somewhat unfair characterization of Echeverría, who died a few

months later, on July 8. A man of great ambition, he set out as president to
tamp down social unrest by appeasing the demands of Mexico’s population,
particularly its new middle class, while also transforming global power
balances during the Cold War in favor of the developing world. He didn’t
succeed in either case, and he certainly was guilty of much wrongdoing, yet his
legacy is nevertheless more complex than generally acknowledged.

Echeverría rose to power quietly yet ruled as an extrovert. He was politically

educated during the presidency of Miguel Alemán Valdés, at a time when the
presidency became the center of political power in Mexico, and he later held
various minor positions in the PRI. He was appointed undersecretary of the

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interior under President Adolfo López Mateos and later secretary of the interior
under President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz.

The position of interior secretary put him in line for the presidency. Echeverría
kept a low profile while working under Díaz Ordaz, particularly during and
after the violent 1968 government crackdown on Mexico’s student movement.
The low point during that period of repression was the Tlatelolco massacre of
Oct. 2, 1968, when security forces killed at least 44 protesters (other estimates,
based on eyewitness accounts, range from 300 to 400) in the Plaza de las Tres
Culturas in Mexico City, effectively ending months of protests across the
country. That spasm of violent repression has been likened by the international
press to China’s Tiananmen Square crackdown for the way it “seared the
conscience of an entire Mexican generation.”

Echeverría’s role in those events, however, was not fully known until 2003,
when a series of declassified CIA documents identified him as the head of a
“strategy committee” in charge of designing the government’s response to the
student protest movement. It remains unclear what Echeverría’s exact orders
were during this period. He forever denied involvement and attempted to
depict Díaz Ordaz as the sole culprit for the killings and for hundreds of
incarcerations.

After Díaz Ordaz tapped Echeverría as the next president of Mexico, Echeverría
quickly tried to appease foes of the regime, promising democracy and social
justice. He vowed to encourage greater opportunities for the youth, declaring in
his inaugural address, “We will stimulate their conscious and civilized
participation in political activities.” To do so, he lowered the voting age,
expanded the higher education system, and revamped his government by
bringing in younger administrators.

Some of the country’s best-known intellectuals were glad to back him.

Convinced the choice was between “Echeverría or fascism”––referring to the
escalation of anti-communism and authoritarianism during Díaz Ordaz’s
government––writers Fernando Benítez and Carlos Fuentes called on Mexicans
to support the president.

However, early in Echeverría’s presidency security forces again repressed a

student demonstration. On June 10, 1971, a government-sponsored
paramilitary group attacked thousands of protesters in Mexico City, killing at

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least 23 people and wounding hundreds more. This time, Echeverría assigned
responsibility to Mexico City Mayor Alfonso Martínez Domínguez, who
resigned from his post.

Many years later, Martínez Domínguez declared that the president himself had
directed the paramilitary group to contain the protest. The former mayor did
not repeat this, however, when he had the opportunity to testify against
Echeverría in front of a judge decades later. Still, it is hard to believe that
Echeverría was not aware or involved, especially considering the methods that
his administration later used to contain leftist guerrilla groups throughout the
country: extrajudicial detentions and incarcerations, torture, and executions.

For most of his term, Echeverría managed to conceal his repressive side while
driving social transformation in Mexico. He had promised that the glories of
the Mexican Revolution would reach everywhere—as far as the roadless desert
in the northwest of the country. And, as he told a group of students carrying an
image of Che Guevara at one of his rallies: In the country of Lázaro Cárdenas,
the former president who had nationalized Mexico’s oil industry, “no borrowed
heroes are needed.”

Echeverría wanted to play the role of national hero himself. He tirelessly toured
the country, delivering long, emotional speeches, which were often hard to
comprehend. Daniel Cosío Villegas, who dedicated a book to Echeverría’s
“personal style of governing,” attributed the sense of bewilderment often left
by the president’s remarks to his incorrect use of syntax and grammar. For his
part, Echeverría maintained that “talking about problems means starting to
solve them.”

The president, not lacking in imagination or ambition, was convinced that

Mexico’s rich resources could fuel radical transformation. A program to grow
and process barbasco––a yam then used to make contraceptive pills that grows
exceptionally well in Mexico––is typical of the kind of project he and his aides
devised: In a single initiative he aimed to create a national pharmaceutical
industry, provide jobs for the rebellious countryside, and pave the way for
population control. However, the venture eventually failed due to a mixture of
bad administration, corruption, and lack of cooperation from the
pharmaceutical industry.

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At the same time, his administration promoted birth control education

campaigns in government-sponsored telenovelas and negotiated for Mexico
City to host the United Nations’ first World Conference on Women in 1975.

The president’s many colorful ideas made him a recurring object of ridicule,
even though some were quite visionary. Recalling Echeverría’s government in a
1997 book, leading intellectual Enrique Krauze mocked the president’s
encouragement to Mexican industry to invent an electric car—today, the
Mexican carmaker Zacua has made headlines as the country’s first electric
vehicle company. While not all of his high-flying ideas got off the ground, some
institutions that reflect the echeverrista vision of government survive to this
day: Infonavit, which facilitates mortgage loans at very low rates; Fonatur, an
institution responsible for the planning and development of high-impact
tourism projects in Mexico, such as Cancun, which also serves as an investment
promotion agency; and Profeco, an agency dedicated to protecting the rights
and interests of consumers.

Such imagination was accompanied by personal discipline––he and those who

knew him said that Echeverría lived for his work and rewarded others with a
similar temperament. But his dreams also relied on money the government
didn’t have. During his six-year term, Mexico’s foreign debt mushroomed from
$7.1 billion to $24.1 billion, and inflation reached 27 percent.

To better manage and distribute wealth, his administration tried to implement

serious tax reform. However, the country’s elites, especially powerful business
groups, opposed the changes, and Echeverría’s administration ultimately
backed down.

Much has been written about Echeverría’s problematic relations with the left,
which was divided in its perception of the president—many were suspicious
that he was trying to co-opt them—yet during much of his administration, it
was businesspeople and other right-wing actors who spread rumors to
destabilize his government. These included a story that his administration was
using vaccination campaigns to sterilize people, rumors about food shortages,
and exaggerated reports about “massive” land expropriations.

Echeverría didn’t manage to fulfill most of his lofty ambitions—his biggest

failure was probably his attempt to revitalize rural regions of the country—but
he undeniably transformed the aesthetics of Mexican political culture. He wore

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guayaberas instead of the suits and ties that had been the uniform of Mexican
politicians since the 19th century, and his wife, María Esther Zuno,  wore
traditional Mexican dresses. European wines that once (and later)
accompanied government meetings were replaced by hibiscus water.

Those who visited his house said it looked like a Fonart store––a shop run by a
state enterprise for the promotion of Mexican handicrafts that was conceived
during his presidency. Echeverría’s folklorist performance can be seen as part
of a broad anti-imperialist movement across the developing world in the 1960s
and 1970s—a movement that was paradoxically very nationalistic. In
Echeverría’s case, it was also meant to decenter attention from Mexico City to
embrace the rest of the country—and it was an image he thought suited him.

According to Echeverría’s own account, three episodes in Mexican history

inspired him to dedicate his life to his country as a politician: the 1846 war with
the United States, the 1938 nationalization of foreign oil companies, and the
advent of muralism in Mexican art. It could be argued that Echeverría, in fact,
not only embodied but also invented much of Mexico’s nationalist cliche.

In the broad struggle for social justice, Echeverría elevated himself as the sole
judge of what was needed, and he adjusted his demands according to his own
priorities. This explains the oft-cited contradiction of his tenure: He was
progressive in the world and repressive at home.

Perhaps Echeverría’s greatest symbolic achievements lie in his international

activism. It was Echeverría who devised and promoted the Charter of
Economic Rights and Duties of States, a document that set out a series of rules
to govern international economic relations and the use of natural resources. It
was based on the idea that a just international order and a stable world could
only be possible if economic inequalities between countries were addressed.
Although the charter was adopted at the U.N. General Assembly in December
1974, wealthy countries actively campaigned against it and prevented it from
becoming legally binding.

At home, however, Echeverría applied different standards and broached little

criticism. The experience of journalist Julio Scherer García captures the
contradiction between the president’s international far-sightedness and
domestic myopia. In 1976, Echeverría managed to expel Scherer from his perch
as the chief editor of Excélsior, a newspaper highly critical of the president,

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along with several other journalists. Yet at the same time, Echeverría was
providing haven to Latin American dissidents from other countries.

Echeverría had openly supported Salvador Allende, for instance, before the
Chilean president was overthrown in a military coup. And afterward,
Echeverría gave orders to welcome thousands of Chilean political exiles,
allowing many of them to sustain their political activities from Mexico. This
policy would later be extended to Argentines also fleeing dictatorship.

Such policies led to some awkward moments in Mexico. A few days after
Scherer was removed from his job, for instance, Hortensia Bussi, Allende’s
widow, showed up at Scherer’s house. The journalist and the Chilean, who were
friends, did not know what to say to each other as they struggled to avoid even
mentioning Echeverría. Bussi could not speak badly of the president because
she was “grateful to President Echeverría, as all other Chilean exiles were,”
Scherer recalled.

Beyond censoring journalists, Echeverría blocked political reforms that would

have allowed leftist parties more room to participate in elections and battled
more radical opponents in what became known as the Dirty War. His security
forces perpetrated human rights abuses against whole communities while
trying to suppress armed leftist groups. (The extent of the abuses would not
become known until later.)

These authoritarian measures undercut his own ambitions for economic and
social transformation. As historian Ariel Rodríguez Kuri explained, “Perhaps a
more robust presence of the left could have given fresh air” in response to the
president’s diatribes against entrenched elites. At the end of his six-year term,
however, the president had no allies beyond usual party loyalists.
 
Some critics believe that Echeverría’s international activism, in fact, was
mainly intended to divert attention from his domestic shortcomings. That
critique, however, is oversimplified. At the time, U.S. President Richard Nixon
was pursuing policies of militant anti-communism and economic
protectionism that had a great impact on the Mexican economy. Echeverría
had to navigate a path that would appeal to the social and economic demands
of his people while keeping his powerful northern neighbor at bay.

“It is impossible to understand why the United States does not use the same
boldness and imagination that it applies to solving complex problems with its

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enemies to the solution of simple problems with its friends,” he told the U.S.
Congress on June 15, 1972, in regards to U.S. pollution contaminating Mexican
agricultural lands. In that same speech he assured that Mexico would no longer
tolerate “those who try to reduce world politics to dealings among powerful
nations.”

In his efforts to be a Cold War player, Echeverría opened an embassy in Beijing,

met with Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai,
and voted against a U.S.-supported motion at the U.N. to allow Taiwan to
maintain independent representation in the multilateral organization. Yet
compared to Fidel Castro’s revolutionary path in Cuba, Echeverría’s approach
appeared moderate, calling for systematic reform. His appeal in the developing
world gave him some international political leverage, but never as much as he
wanted.

His legacy will forever be tainted by human rights abuses that received little
attention while he was in office. This April, three months after Echeverría’s
centennial, his main symbolic adversary—human rights leader Rosario Ibarra
de Piedra—died. Ibarra’s son, a member of the guerrilla September 23rd
Communist League, had been detained and disappeared during Echeverría’s
reign. Those who knew their shared history lamented that Ibarra had passed
away without seeing justice in her son’s case.

In 2006, the activism of Ibarra and others resulted in a sentence of house arrest
against Echeverría for human rights abuses. The sentence was imposed by the
Special Prosecutor’s Office for Social and Political Movements of the Past, an
initiative established during the presidency of Vicente Fox––the first non-PRI
government in Mexican modern history. That attempt at justice was eventually
overturned by a judge, but it ensured Echeverría would live the rest of his days
as a political pariah, with no greater relevance than that granted to him by the
groups that protested annually in front of his stone house in Mexico City on the
anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre. His place on the wrong side of history
seemed to have been confirmed.

Some years after his trial, when asked by a journalist if he had anything to
regret from his time in office, the former president said, “I have always worked
hard; I neither ask for forgiveness from anyone nor give it to myself.” With a
slight martyr’s posture, his testimonies about the past came to reflect the
loneliness of a man routinely trapped between internal and external pressures.

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In the solitude of his last decades, the former president spent his days sorting
through his personal archives and memorabilia. In his house, he created a
personal museum—a collection of books, documents, objects, and photos
worthy of an egocentric, but also of an orderly and meticulous personality.
Perhaps at the heart of this effort was Echeverría’s anticipation of his own
passing, and with it a new opportunity to challenge public perceptions.
Perhaps he was trying to evade the end that writer Carlos Monsiváis had
predicted for him: a death “surrounded by a thousand conversations that he
neither undertakes nor allows to be undertaken, feverish in the hustle and
bustle of a thousand actions that lead to nowhere.”

Ana Sofía Rodríguez Everaert is a doctoral candidate in history at El Colegio de México. She specializes in
political and intellectual Latin American 20th-century history, the history of leftist social thought and
movements, and feminism. She worked as an editor at the Mexican magazine Nexos for over a decade. She is the
co-author of El intelectual mexicano: una especie en extinción and Las décadas de Nexos: una antología.

TAGS:
HISTORY,
MEXICO

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