Luis Echeverría

Echeverría served as Deputy Secretary of the Interior during Adolfo López Mateos's presidency, with Gustavo Díaz Ordaz as Secretary of the Interior. After Díaz Ordaz left the Secretariat in November 1963 to become the presidential candidate of the PRI for the 1964 elections, Echeverría was appointed Secretary of the Interior to serve during the remainder of the López Mateos administration. Once Díaz Ordaz took office as president, he confirmed Echeverría as Secretary of the Interior, where he remained until November 1969.

He maintained a hard line against student protesters throughout 1968. Clashes between the government and protesters culminated in the Tlatelolco massacre in October 1968, a few days before the 1968 Summer Olympics were held in Mexico City.[15][16] In a separate incident, he ordered the transfer of 15% of the Mexican military to the state of Guerrero to counter guerrilla groups that were operating there.

On 22 October 1969, Díaz Ordaz summoned Alfonso Martínez Domínguez—the PRI party president—and other party leaders to his office in Los Pinos to reveal Echeverría as his successor. Martínez Domínguez asked the president if he was sure of his decision and Díaz Ordaz replied, "Why do you ask? It's the most important decision of my life and I've thought it over well." [17]

On 8 November 1969, Díaz Ordaz officially announced Echeverría as the presidential candidate. At one point during his campaign for the presidency, Echeverría called for a moment of silence to remember the victims of the Tlatelolco massacre, an act that enraged President Díaz Ordaz and almost prompted him to call for Echeverría's resignation. Although Echeverría was a hardliner in Díaz Ordaz's administration and considered responsible for the Tlatelolco massascre, he became "immediately obsessed with making people forget that he had ever done it."[18]

US President Richard Nixon (left) and Luis Echeverría reviewing US troops (1972)

Echeverría was the first president born after the Mexican Revolution. Once Echeverría inaugurated as president, he embarked on a massive program of populist political and economic reform, nationalizing the mining and electrical industries, redistributing private land in the states of Sinaloa and Sonora to peasants, imposing limits on foreign investment, and extending Mexico's patrimonial waters to 370 kilometres (230 mi). State spending on health, housing construction, education, and food subsidies was also significantly increased,[19] and the percentage of the population covered by the social security system was doubled.[20] He enraged the left because he did not bring the perpetrators of the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre to justice.

On 8 October 1974, Echeverría issued a decree creating the new Mexican states of Baja California Sur and Quintana Roo.[21]

After decades of economic growth under his predecessors, the Echeverría administration oversaw an economic crisis during its final months, becoming the first in a series of Presidencies in Mexico that faced severe economic crises during the next two decades.[22]

During his period in office, the country's external debt soared from $6 billion in 1970 to $20 billion in 1976.[11] By 1976, for every dollar that Mexico received from exportations, 31 cents had to be destined to the payment of the interests and amortizations on the external debt.

Between 1954 and 1976, the Mexican governments had maintained the value of the Mexican Peso at 12.50 MXP per 1 USD. On 30 August 1976, as a result of the mounting economic problems, the Echeverría administration devalued the Peso in 59.2%, leaving it with a value of 19.90 MXP per USD. Two months later, the Peso was devalued for a second time, now with a value of 26,60 MXP per USD.[23]

The inflation rate was at 459% at the end of his term. The trade deficit, which was of $703 million in 1971, ascended to a record high of $3769 million in 1975, and by 1976 it was of $3024 million. The balance of services, which traditionally had registered superavits and had been used to partly finance the negative trade balance, entered into deficit for the first time in 1975 and 1976.[24] By the end of the Echeverría administration, the government was issuing banknotes without value and acquiring debt.

Despite this, the Mexican economy grew by 6.1%, and important infrastructure and public works projects were completed after stalling for decades.[6]

Echeverría nationalized the barbasco industry in the late 1970s. Wild barbasco was the natural source of hormones that were the key component in the contraceptive pill. Nationalization and the creation of the state-run company PROQUIVEMEX came as the importance of Mexico to the industry was waning.[25]

Luis Echeverria Álvarez, president of Mexico with engineer Oscar Vega Argüelles.

During the administration of Echeverría, a new Federal Election Law was approved:

• Lowered the number of members a party needed to become officially registered from 75,000 to 65,000
• Increased the number of Congress seats chosen according to proportional representation principle from 20 to 25
• Introduction of a permanent voting card
• Established the age of candidacy at 21, from 30.[26]

Following the PRI tradition, Echeverría handpicked his successor for the Presidency, and chose his Finance Minister and childhood friend, José López Portillo, to be the PRI Presidential candidate for the 1976 elections. Due to a series of events and an internal conflict in the opposition party PAN, López Portillo was the only candidate in the Presidential election, winning unopposed.[22]

Echeverría addresses the U.S. Congress

The Echeverría government adopted the first national environmental law in 1971. From 1960 to 1970, Mexico City had grown from 3 million inhabitants to 7 million, with problems of pollution and urbanization. Attention on the environmental impacts came from academics at the National Autonomous University, the National Polytechnic Institute, and the Colegio de México as well as interest in the 1969 U.S. National Environmental Policy Act. The Mexican government enacted a series of regulations to control atmospheric pollution, as well as issuing new quality standards for surface and coastal waters. As a structural matter, the government created a new agency to deal with the environment, which in later administrations this became a full cabinet-level ministry.[27]

The Echeverría administration was characterized by growing political violence:

• On one hand, several leftist guerrilla groups appeared throughout the country (the most important being those led by Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vázquez) in response to the government's authoritarianism and the increasing social inequalities. The activities of these guerrilla groups mostly comprised kidnappings of prominent politicians and businessmen, bank robberies and occasional attacks on garrisons. The guerrilla violence did not subside until the administration of José López Portillo (1976-1982), who carried out a political reform that legalized leftist parties and granted an amnesty to most of the imprisoned guerrilla fighters.
• And on the other hand, the Government itself violently repressed political dissent. In addition to the notorious 1971 Corpus Christi massacre, the Army was accused of widespread human rights violations (including executions) during the fight against the guerrilla groups. The aforementioned guerrilla leaders Cabañas and Vázquez, both of whom officially died in clashes with the army, are widely suspected of actually having being extrajudicially executed by the armed forces.[7][9][10]

As a consequence of numerous student and youth protest movements during this administration, the PRI and President Echeverría attempted to neutralize the politicized youth. In late 1971, after the Corpus Christi massacre and the Avándaro Rock Festival, Echeverría famously issued a ban on almost every form of rock music recorded by Mexican bands. The ban (also known as "Avandarazo" because it was in response to the Avándaro Rock Festival, which had been criticized by the conservative sectors of the PRI) included forbidding the recording of most forms of Rock music by national groups and the prohibition of its sales in retail stores, as well as forbidding live rock concerts and the airplay of rock songs. The ban lasted for many years, and it was only gradually lifted in the 1980s.[28][29][30][31]

Echeverria with US president Gerald Ford during his visit in Washington D.C in 1975.

With the so-called "tercermundismo" ("Third Worldism") a reorientation in Mexican foreign policy took place during the presidential term of Echeverría. He showed his solidarity with the developing nations and tried to establish Mexico as the defender of Third World interests.[32] The aims of Echeverría's foreign policy were to diversify Mexico's economic links and to fight for a more equal and just international order.[33]

He visited numerous countries and had strong ties with the socialist governments of Cuba and Chile. Echeverría visited Cuba in 1975.[34] Also, Mexico provided political asylum to many political refugees from South American countries who fled their country's repressive military dictatorships; among them Hortensia Bussi, the widow of former Chilean President Salvador Allende.[35] Moreover, he condemned Zionism and allowed the Palestine Liberation Organization to open an office in the capital.[36]

Echeverría's candidacy rode a wave of anger by citizens in Northwestern Mexico against the United States for its use (and perceived misappropriation) of water from the Colorado River, which drains much of the American Southwest before crossing into Mexico. The established treaty between the US and Mexico called for the US to allow a specified volume of water, 1.85 cubic kilometres (0.44 cu mi), to pass the U.S.-Mexican border, but it did not establish any quality levels. Throughout the 20th century, the United States, through its water policy managed by the United States Bureau of Reclamation, had developed wideranging irrigation along the river, which had led to progressively higher levels of salinity in the water as it moved downstream. By the late 1960s, the high salinity of the water crossing into Mexico had resulted in the ruin of large tracts of the irrigated land along the lower Colorado.

The sudden increase in oil prices in 1973, coupled with the possibility of new Mexican oil deposits in the Bay of Campeche, gave Echeverría a strong bargaining position against the Nixon administration in the United States. Echeverría threatened to bring the issue to the World Court, prompting the Nixon administration to renegotiate the treaty to include a salinity-control agreement. The implementation of salinity control at the border (supposed to be at US expense) has been ongoing and slow, however, and the lower Colorado remains largely a desolate shadow of what it once was.

In 1976, Echeverría sought to parlay his Third World credentials and relationship with the recently deceased Mao Zedong into becoming Secretary-General of the United Nations.[3] Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim of Austria was running for a second term in the 1976 Secretary-General selection. Although Secretaries-General usually run unopposed, the People's Republic of China expressed dissatisfaction that a European headed an organization that had a Third World majority.[37] On 18 October 1976, Echeverría entered the race against Waldheim.[38] However, he was defeated by a large margin when the Security Council voted on 7 December 1976. China did cast one symbolic Security Council veto against Waldheim in the first round, but voted in favor in the second round. Echeverría received only 3 votes to Waldheim's 14, with only Panama abstaining to deny Waldheim a unanimous victory.[3]

The practice established in 1940 by Lázaro Cárdenas of leaving power entirely with the inauguration of his successor did not continue under Echeverría. Echeverría imposed appointees on the new president, such as Hermenegildo Cuenca Díaz for governor of Baja California. López Portillo's Minister of the Interior, Jesús Reyes Heroles, kept the president abreast of Echeverría's overstepping boundaries, such as use of the presidential telephone network, visits to ministers, and meetings with political elites at his residence. Reyes Heroles took a series of steps to outflank Echeverría, including recording his conversations on the presidential telephone network and suggesting the replacement of officials partial to Echeverría.[45]

Despite not keeping influence over López Portillo after their break, Echeverría continued to have influence in Mexico. After leaving office, Salinas, the president from 1988 to 1994, publicly accused Echeverría of inspiring the murder of their party's presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio in March 1994 and of leading a conspiracy against Salinas's reformist allies in the party, which had led to a systemic political and economic crisis.[46] Salinas claimed that Echeverría pressed him to replace the murdered candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, with an old-guard figure. Echeverría brushed off the accusations as absurd.

Echeverría's brother-in-law, Rubén Zuno Arce, was convicted by a California court in 1992 and sentenced to life in prison for his role as leader of the Guadalajara drug cartel and the murder of a US federal agent seven years earlier.[47] Echeverría repeatedly requested President Carlos Salinas to pressure Washington for the release of Zuno Arce but to no avail.

After the defeat of the PRI in the general elections of July 2000, it emerged that Vicente Fox (the president from 2000 to 2006) had met privately with Echeverría at the latter's home in Mexico City numerous times during the former's presidential campaign in 1999 and 2000.[48]

Fox appointed several Echeverría loyalists to top positions in his government, including Adolfo Aguilar Zínser, who headed Echeverría's "Third World University" in the 1970s, as national security advisor and Juan José Bremer (Echeverría's personal secretary) as ambassador to Washington. The most controversial was Alejandro Gertz Manero, who had been accused by the Mexican press of bearing responsibility for the suicide of a museum owner in 1972, as Gertz, then working for Echeverría's attorney general, attempted to confiscate his private collection of pre-Hispanic artifacts (Echeverría has a collection of such artifacts).[49] Fox appointed Gertz as chief of the Federal Police.