Arrested Mexican president was CIA agent

Although the house arrest of former Mexican president Luis Echeverría (1970-1976) was not widely reported, the local press has begun to refer to the case as a historic blow to impunity. As president, Echeverría supported leftwing governments in Latin America and condemned military dictatorships in the region that tortured, murdered and forcibly "disappeared" their opponents. But he committed those very crimes in his own country, and worked undercover for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The 84-year-old ex-president is convalescing from a stroke and cannot stand alone without help, according to the fleeting glimpses filmed by the Televisa network at his house on Dec. 27. Echeverría has been under house arrest since November on charges of genocide. Due to age and infirmity, Echeverría was able to claim his right to house arrest. He could not, or would not, comply with judicial orders to testify and be booked as a suspected criminal. His defense lawyers, however, said his feelings were hurt by the accusations and that he declared himself not guilty of any of the charges. He is accused of being directly responsible for the massacre of hundreds of students in the capital city's Tlatelolco Square in 1968, when he was minister of the interior. The courts and several investigations indicate that Echeverría, who in his time was considered a progressive by intellectuals of the stature of Carlos Fuentes and Fernando Benítez, was an iron-fisted minister and, later, a president who used implacable force against leftwing opponents. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the federal security forces at the service of the governments of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), in power from 1929 to 2000, illegally detained, tortured and "disappeared" 532 dissidents, according to the governmental National Human Rights Commission. Declassified documents from Washington indicate that Echeverría was a CIA agent, code-named "Litempo-14." As interior minister and later as president he dealt with special requests from the US government to grant visas to Cubans seeking to escape Fidel Castro's socialist revolution, and he kept Washington informed about leftist movements in Mexico, according to these documents. Echeverría's arrest went almost unnoticed for a number of reasons, and probably many people think that because of his age the issue is no longer of much importance. But it is significant, said Jorge Chabat, a columnist for the El Universal newspaper and a political scientist at the Economics Research and Teaching Center. "For a judge to have ordered an ex-president's house arrest and even having him booked as a suspect," showed that justice might be slow, but catches up in the end, Chabat said. "What's important is the official recognition that what those opposed to an authoritarian system always said was true: serious crimes were being committed by people at the highest levels of the state," he said. The Office of the Special Prosecutor for Social and Political Movements of the Past, created by former president Vicente Fox (2000-2006) to investigate the so-called "dirty war" of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, ordered Echeverría's arrest and judicial investigation. The arrest of the former president is perhaps the greatest achievement of this prosecuting body, which has now been disbanded and was considered ineffective by human rights organizations. It failed to live up to its promise to bring to justice all those still alive who were responsible for crimes committed in the past. The final report issued by the Special Prosecutor's Office states that the main priority of the Echeverría administration was "to contain and curb dissidence," by all means necessary. "Echeverría fully adopted the doctrine of national security and counterinsurgency tactics which he implemented nationwide, with their consequences of crimes against humanity, and he created paramilitary groups to do the dirty work of beating and killing students and workers, without having to use the army and the police," the report said. During his administration, "the independent press was silenced, and he refused to investigate the source of official support for rightwing terrorism. Harassment of the leaders of grassroots organizations of students, campesinos, priests and unions increased sharply." Thus "a genocidal policy against national dissident groups" was established, the report concluded. Echeverría's arrest warrant was issued by Judge Ricardo Paredes, who overruled a lower court verdict that acquitted Echeverría in July because the statute of limitations on the charges against him had elapsed. Paredes considered that there was "probable cause to attribute responsibility" to Echeverría for the massacre in Tlatelolco Square on Oct. 2, 1968, when soldiers opened fire on a crowd of young demonstrators demanding more open democracy and justice. Paredes argued that the "Olympia Batallion" and other troops under Echeverría's command opened fire "against the students and the assembled crowd, unlawfully killing a considerable number of people, with the purpose of completely destroying the national group known as the '1968 student movement.'" The judge ruled that the statute of limitation had not expired on this crime, because "the statutory 30 years must be counted from the date of the crime, which was Oct. 2, 1968," the day of the massacre. He added that the time counted towards the statutory limit was suspended while Echeverría was protected under the Constitution while he was a government minister and then president, and so he concluded that the statute of limitation only ran out on Nov. 30 of 2006.