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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | July 2006 
Ex-Mexican President Under House Arrest in Massacre
 Lorraine Orlandi - Reuters
| | Juan Velasquez, lawyer for former Mexican president Luis Echeverria, speaks to the media outside Echeverria's Mexico City home June 30, 2006, after a judge ordered his arrest on genocide charges for a 1968 student massacre. (Daniel Aguilar/Reuters) |
Former Mexican President Luis Echeverria was under house arrest for a 1968 student massacre and will soon make an initial statement to the courts, his lawyer said on Saturday.
Two days before the country's presidential election, an appeals court said on Friday it had enough evidence to support a charge of genocide against Echeverria and ordered the former leader's arrest and trial.
Echeverria's lawyer, Juan Velasquez, told Reuters his client was served with the arrest order late on Friday and that a judge would visit Echeverria's home on Saturday or Monday to take his first statements.
The former president has denied any wrongdoing and his lawyer Velasquez said the charges are unfounded. He predicted his 84-year-old client would be exonerated quickly. "I think this could be over in around 10 days," he said.
Echeverria, president from 1970 to 1976 at the height of a so-called dirty war against leftists, was expected to be held under house arrest due to his age and health concerns.
He was interior minister in charge of national security when government troops stormed a student rally in the capital on October 2, 1968, days before the opening of the Mexico City Olympics in a tragedy that remains an open wound for many.
Officials said about 30 people were killed in what came to be known as the Tlatelolco massacre. But witnesses and rights activists put the death toll as high as 300.
The arrest, after two failed attempts to charge Echeverria with genocide, is a breakthrough in outgoing President Vicente Fox's halting drive to punish those responsible for past government brutality. Fox leaves office in December.
Voters go to the polls on Sunday in the first presidential election since 2000, when Fox ousted the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for seven decades, at times using repression to crush dissent.
It was not clear what impact, if any, the arrest order could have on the vote, which is seen as a test of Mexico's young democracy after a history of authoritarian and often corrupt presidents. |
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