Luis Echeverría

Luis Echeverría Álvarez ( Spanish pronunciation: [ˈlwis etʃeβeˈri.a ˈalβaɾes]; 17 January 1922 – 8 July 2022) was a Mexican lawyer, academic, and politician affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) who served as the 57th president of Mexico from 1970 to 1976. Previously, Echeverría was Secretary of the Interior from 1963 to 1969. He was the longest-lived president in Mexican history and the first to reach the age of 100.

Echeverría was a long-time CIA asset, known by the cryptonym, LITEMPO-8. His tenure as Secretary of the Interior during the Díaz Ordaz administration was marked by an increase in political repression. Dissident journalists, politicians, and activists were subjected to censorship, arbitrary arrests, torture, and extrajudicial killings. This culminated with the Tlatelolco massacre of 2 October 1968, which ruptured the Mexican student movement; Díaz Ordaz, Echeverría, and Secretary of Defense Marcelino Garcia Barragán have been considered as the intellectual authors of the massacre, in which hundreds of unarmed protestors were killed by the Mexican Army. The following year, Díaz Ordaz appointed Echeverría as his designated successor to the presidency, and he won in the 1970 general election.