Mexico City – Mexico’s Supreme Court refused Monday to investigate a massacre of students that occurred in this capital in 1971, with the argument that the case had already been tried.
A court spokesman said that seven of the 10 magistrates present at the session considered that the Supreme Court should not investigate the events of June 10, 1971, when between 17 and 40 peaceful student demonstrators were killed in Mexico City by a government death squad known as “The Falcons.”
The judges handed down their verdict in response to a plea by the capital’s mayor, Alejandro Encinas, who asked the Supreme Court to investigate the episode with the argument that the incident represented the violation of the human rights of “dozens of people.”
Encinas had also requested that the Supreme Court define who was responsible for the 1971 massacre, an episode of Mexico’s “dirty war” against leftists, which was waged from the late 1960s to around 1980 under Presidents Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, Luis Echeverria and Jose Lopez Portillo.
Hundreds of peasant leaders and activists were persecuted – and scores killed – by Mexico’s security apparatus during the repressive period.
The Mexican judiciary has blocked efforts by the office of the special prosecutor probing dirty-war crimes to indict Echeverria for genocide in connection with the ’71 killings and with the Oct. 2, 1968, massacre of protesters in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco square, which came just days before the capital hosted the Olympic Games.
Hundreds are believed to have been slain in that incident, most of them students, at the hands of security forces under the command of Echeverria, then serving as interior minister in the 1964-1970 government of Diaz Ordaz.
In Mexican law, the term “genocide” is often used to refer to mass murder, rather than its common U.S. definition, which implies the attempted extermination of an ethnic, racial, religious or other such group. EFE
