Mexico City – A Mexican court issued a house-arrest warrant Friday for former President Luis Echeverria on charges of genocide in a 1968 student massacre, his attorney told The Associated Press.
It was the first time an arrest warrant of any sort has been issued against a former Mexican president.
Echeverria’s lawyer, Juan Velasquez, said officials had not yet arrived at the former leader’s house in Mexico City to formally present the warrant. He said his client was innocent because the killings were not part of any explicit government policy.
The lawyer also said Echeverria would not serve any jail time because he is 84, and under Mexican law suspects 70 and older may be sentenced to house arrest.
Echeverria has been accused of various crimes for his alleged involvement in the killings of dozens of students in two separate Mexico City protests: in 1968, when he was interior secretary, and in 1971, when he was president. But until Friday, courts had blocked his prosecution in cases brought by Special Prosecutor Ignacio Carillo.
Echeverria has been briefly hospitalized twice in the past year and is considered to be in poor health.
Echeverria was interior secretary, a powerful position overseeing domestic security, when Mexican troops ambushed mostly peaceful student protesters at Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Plaza on Oct. 2, 1968, just before the capital hosted the Olympics.
Officially, 25 people were killed, though human rights activists say as many as 350 may have died.
Military reports reviewed by the special prosecutor show that 360 sharpshooters fired from buildings surrounding Tlatelolco Plaza. The attack is considered one of the darkest moments of modern Mexican history.
The president at the time, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, died in 1979.
Echeverria is also accused of leading a ruthless crackdown against leftist activists when he served as president from 1970 to 1976.
In February, a leaked draft of a government report on Mexico’s “dirty war” alleged the government ordered soldiers to torture, rape and execute people as part of a counterinsurgency campaign from 1960 to 1980. The government of President Vicente Fox said it did not endorse the draft, and would release a complete version later, but has yet to do so.
The unedited draft alleges the crimes were committed during the administrations of Echeverria and Diaz Ordaz, as well as those of presidents Jose Lopez Portillo, in office from 1976 to 1982, and Adolfo Lopez Mateos, in office from 1958 to 1964.
The most brutal period occurred under Echeverria’s rule, when military bases allegedly served as “concentration camps” and the government “implemented a genocide plan that was closely followed during his reign,” according to the report. During that time, guerrillas were blamed for a series of kidnappings and attacks on soldiers.
Hundreds of suspected subversives in the southern state of Guerrero were killed or disappeared.
The report says investigators found evidence that under Echeverria’s so-called “Friendship Operation,” launched by the military in 1970 in Guerrero, the army conducted “illegal searches, arbitrary detentions, torture, the raping of women in the presence of their husbands, and the possible extrajudicial executions of groups of people.” Fox promised to prosecute Mexico’s past crimes after his 2000 election victory, which ended 71 years of rule by the iron-fisted Institutional Revolutionary Party. He named the special prosecutor Carillo shortly after taking office.
Fox steps down Dec. 1, constitutionally barred from seeking re-election. Mexicans will vote this Sunday to choose Fox’s successor, choosing between front-runners Felipe Calderon of Fox’s conservative National Action Party and leftist former Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Roberto Madrazo, of Institutional Revolutionary Party, once led by Echeverria, is trailing in the polls.
