Luis Echeverría, a polarizing Mexican political figure who served as president from 1970 to 1976, has died at 100, according to current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Echeverría, secretary of interior at the time, was indicted and later acquitted for his role in the deaths of student protestors in Tlatelolco months before the October 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games—30 were proclaimed dead by the government, but witnesses said the death count was closer to 300, The New York Times reported. He continually denied that he ordered soldiers to shoot the peaceful protestors and was acquitted in 2007. Echeverría was appointed president by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, but his term was marked by economic crisis, taking foreign debt from $3.5 billion to more than $20 billion. After his presidency, Echevarría didn’t make too much noise, serving as Mexico’s ambassador to Australia and a representative to UNESCO. “[He] was a failed, tragic figure in Mexican history,” Kate Doyle, a Latin America human rights scholar, told The Washington Post. “He contained the possibility of... some kind of forward-thinking. And he was ultimately destroyed by... his inability to rescue himself from the political apparatus that created him.”
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