Former Mexican president Luis Echeverria, who has been blamed for some of Mexico’s worst political killings, has died at the age of 100.
In his Twitter account, current leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador sent condolences to Mr Echeverria’s family and friends “in the name of the government of Mexico”, but did not express any personal sadness about the death.
Mr Lopez Obrador did not provide a cause of death for Mr Echeverria, who governed Mexico from 1970 to 1976.
He had been taken to hospital for pulmonary problems in 2018.
In 2005, a judge ruled Mr Echeverria could not be tried on genocide charges stemming from a 1971 student massacre in which as many as 37 people were estimated to have been shot or beaten to death, an event depicted in the Oscar-winning movie Roma.
The judge ruled that Mr Echeverria may have been responsible for homicide, but could not be tried because the statute of limitations for that crime expired in 1985.
In 1971, students set out from a teacher’s college just west of the city centre for one of the first large-scale protests since hundreds of demonstrators were killed in a far larger massacre in 1968.
They did not get more than a few blocks before they were set upon by plain-clothes thugs.
The main female characters in Roma are depicted as incidental witnesses to the slaughter when they go to buy baby furniture at a store near the scene.
Roma won the Oscar for best foreign language film.
Mr Echeverria had battled respiratory and neurological difficulties in recent years.
In 2004, he became the first former Mexican head of state formally accused of criminal wrongdoing.
Prosecutors linked Mr Echeverria to the country’s so-called “dirty war” in which hundreds of leftist activists and members of fringe guerrilla groups were imprisoned, killed, or simply disappeared without a trace.
A motion filed by special prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo asked a judge to issue an arrest warrant against Mr Echeverria on genocide charges in the two student massacres: first for the 1968 killings at the Tlatelolco plaza, when Mr Echeverria was interior secretary.
On October 2 1968, a few weeks before the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, government sharpshooters opened fire on student protesters and army troops in the Tlatelolco plaza, leading soldiers to open fire.
Estimates of the dead have ranged from 25 to more than 300. Mr Echeverria had denied any participation in the attacks.
According to military reports, at least 360 government snipers were placed on buildings surrounding the protesters.
In March 2009, a federal court in Mexico upheld a lower court’s ruling that Mr Echeverria did not have to face genocide charges for his alleged involvement in the 1968 student massacre, and ordered his absolute freedom.
Mr Echeverria was sworn in as president on December 1 1970, supporting the regimes of Cuba’s Fidel Castro and leftist Salvador Allende in Chile.
After Allende was assassinated in 1973 during a bloody coup led by Gen Augusto Pinochet, Mr Echeverria opened Mexico’s borders to Chileans fleeing Pinochet’s dictatorship.
He travelled the world promoting himself as a leader and friend of leftist governments. But within Mexico, he was developing a reputation for cracking down on dissent and guerrilla groups.
Mexican prosecutors allege that Mr Echeverria ordered an elite force of plain-clothes state fighters known as the “Halcones” or “Falcons” to attack suspected government enemies.
It was that group that participated in the beating or shooting deaths of as many as 37 people during the student demonstration on June 10 1971.
Despite decades of calls by activists and opposition politicians for justice, Mr Echeverria never spent a day in jail, though he was briefly declared under a form of house arrest.
