Luis Echeverría

Echeverría (third row, fifth from left) with his 6th grade class, c.1933 Luis Echeverría Álvarez was born on 17 January 1922 in Mexico City to Rodolfo Echeverría Esparza and Catalina Álvarez Gayou. His paternal grandfather was Francisco de Paula Echeverría y Dorantes, a military doctor. He was the brother of actor Rodolfo Landa. He was of Basque descent. One of his childhood friends was José López Portillo, who would eventually succeed him as president of Mexico. Echeverría met María Esther Zuno at the home of the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, with whom they were friends. The couple's social circle also included the artists David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. After a five-year engagement, Zuno and Echeverría, a law student at the time, were married on 2 January 1945. José López Portillo served as their witness. Echeverría early in his political career, c.1940s-1950s Echeverría studied law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and obtained his degree in 1945. Echeverría joined the university's faculty in 1947 and taught political theory and constitutional law.

Early PRI positions Echeverría joined the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 1944. He eventually became the private secretary of the party president, Rodolfo Sánchez Taboada, which allowed him to rise in the hierarchy of the party and acquire his first political offices. Secretary of the Interior Echeverría as Secretary of the Interior in 1965 Echeverría was Deputy Secretary of the Interior during Adolfo López Mateos's presidency, with Gustavo Díaz Ordaz as Secretary of the Interior. After Díaz Ordaz left the Secretariat in November 1963 to become the presidential candidate of the PRI for the 1964 elections, Echeverría was appointed Secretary of the Interior to serve during the remainder of the López Mateos administration. Once Díaz Ordaz took office as president, he confirmed Echeverría as Secretary of the Interior, where he remained until November 1969. He was one of four ministers retained by Díaz Ordaz from López Mateos' cabinet. Tlatelolco See also: Tlatelolco Massacre Known as the "assassin of Tlatelolco" in student circles, Echeverría maintained a hard line against student protesters throughout 1968. Clashes between the government and protesters culminated in the Tlatelolco massacre in October 1968, a few days before the 1968 Summer Olympics were held in Mexico City. To combat this, Echeverría worked to portray himself as a reformer, and sometimes even a revolutionary, in order to win approval back of students. As U.S. officials wrote, Echeverría urged "a posture of conscious rebellion" as part of a "concentrated effort" to capture youth discontent. 1970 presidential succession and campaign See also: 1970 Mexican general election On 22 October 1969, Díaz Ordaz summoned Alfonso Martínez Domínguez—the PRI party president—and other party leaders to his office in Los Pinos to reveal Echeverría as his successor. Martínez Domínguez asked the president if he was sure of his decision and Díaz Ordaz replied, "Why do you ask? It's the most important decision of my life and I've thought it over well." On 8 November 1969, Echeverría was officially announced as the presidential candidate of the PRI. Although Echeverría was a hardliner in Díaz Ordaz's administration and considered responsible for the Tlatelolco massacre, he became "immediately obsessed with making people forget that he had ever done it." A contribution bond for the Echeverría campaign. During his campaign, Echeverría adopted populist rhetoric, personally campaigning in over 850 municipalities, and is believed to have been seen by around 10 million people of Mexico's then-population of 48 million. He avoided criticizing Díaz Ordaz's administration, and barely mentioned his main opponent, the PAN's Efraín González Morfín. He also stated that his government would avoid attempting to curb Mexico's population growth, which was expected to double in the coming decade, stating it was a personal matter, not the state's. In 1969, he defined his position as "neither to the right, nor to t

Inauguration Echeverría assumed the presidency on 1 December 1970. Domestic policy Echeverría was the first president born after the Mexican Revolution. Once inaugurated as president, he embarked on a massive program of populist political and economic reform, nationalizing the mining and electrical industries, redistributing private land in the states of Sinaloa and Sonora to peasants, imposing limits on foreign investment, and extending Mexico's maritime Economic Exclusion Zone to 200 nautical miles (370 km). Various social initiatives were undertaken, with state spending on health, housing construction, education, and food subsidies significantly increased, and the percentage of the population covered by the social security system doubled. Government spending almost quadrupled between 1971 and 1975 under Echeverría's left-wing government, while public spending rose from 22% to 32% of GDP during his presidency. Shortly after his term began, he issued an amnesty to all those arrested during the 1968 protests, which is believed to have been an attempt to disassociate himself with the massacre. The last 20 prisoners from the protests were released on 20 December 1971. He enraged the left because he did not bring the perpetrators of the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre to justice. On 8 October 1974, Echeverría issued a decree creating the new states of Baja California Sur and Quintana Roo, which had previously been federal territories. Economic issues After decades of economic growth under his predecessors, the Echeverría administration oversaw an economic crisis during its final months, becoming the first in a series of governments that faced severe economic crises over the ensuing two decades. During his period in office, the country's external debt soared from US$6 billion in 1970 to US$20 billion in 1976. By 1976, for every dollar that Mexico received from exports, 31 cents had to be allocated to the payment of interest and amortizations on the external debt. The balance of services, which traditionally had registered surpluses and had been used to partly finance the negative trade balance, entered into deficit for the first time in 1975 and 1976. Despite this, the Mexican economy grew by 6.1%, and important infrastructure and public works projects were completed after stalling for decades. Echeverría nationalized the barbasco industry during his tenure. Wild barbasco was the natural source of hormones that were the key component in the contraceptive pill. Nationalization and the creation of the state-run company PROQUIVEMEX came as the importance of Mexico to the industry was waning. Changes in the electoral system Echeverría with engineer Oscar Vega Argüelles [es]. During Echeverría's administration, a new Federal Election Law was approved which lowered the number of members a party needed to become officially registered from 75,000 to 65,000, introduced a permanent voting card, and established the minimum age for candidacy for elected office at 2

Continued influence Echeverría imposed appointees on the new president, such as Hermenegildo Cuenca Díaz [es] for governor of Baja California. López Portillo's Minister of the Interior, Jesús Reyes Heroles, kept the president abreast of Echeverría's overstepping boundaries, such as use of the presidential telephone network, visits to ministers, and meetings with political elites at his residence. Reyes Heroles took a series of steps to outflank Echeverría, including recording his conversations on the presidential telephone network and suggesting the replacement of officials supportive of Echeverría. Echeverría was ambassador to Australia and New Zealand from 1978 to 1979. Despite not keeping influence over López Portillo after their break, Echeverría continued to have some influence in Mexican politics. Miguel de la Madrid, president from 1982 to 1988, said in his autobiography that the idea for his 1987 Pact of Economic Solidarity [es] to contain inflation came from a suggestion made by Echeverría at a breakfast with him, during which the former president advised De la Madrid to invite the leading figures of the economic sectors to the National Palace so that they could talk to each other and agree on proposals to overcome the crisis. After leaving office, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the president from 1988 to 1994, publicly accused Echeverría of inspiring the March 1994 murder of their party's presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, and of leading a conspiracy against Salinas's reformist allies in the party, which had led to a systemic political and economic crisis. Salinas claimed that Echeverría pressed him to replace the murdered candidate Colosio with an old-guard figure. Echeverría's brother-in-law, Rubén Zuno Arce, was convicted by a California court in 1992 and sentenced to life in prison for his role in the Guadalajara drug cartel and the murder of a U.S. federal agent seven years earlier. Echeverría repeatedly requested President Carlos Salinas to pressure Washington for Zuno Arce's release, but to no avail. After the defeat of the PRI in the general elections of July 2000, it emerged that Vicente Fox (the president from 2000 to 2006) had met privately with Echeverría at the latter's home in Mexico City numerous times during his presidential campaign in 1999 and 2000. Fox appointed several Echeverría loyalists to top positions in his government, including Adolfo Aguilar Zínser, who headed Echeverría's "Third World University" in the 1970s, as national security advisor, and Juan José Bremer [es] (Echeverría's personal secretary) as ambassador to the United States. The most controversial was Alejandro Gertz Manero, who had been accused by the Mexican press of bearing responsibility for the suicide of a museum owner in 1972, as Gertz, then working for Echeverría's attorney general, attempted to confiscate his private collection of pre-Hispanic artifacts (Echeverría also had a collection of such artifacts). Fox appointed Gertz as chie

Portrait of Echeverría's wife, María Esther Zuno On 2 January 1945, Echeverría married María Esther Zuno, whom he was married to until her death in 1999, and they had eight children: Luis Vicente Echeverría Zuno (d. 2013), married to Rosa Luz Alegría María del Carmen Echeverría Zuno, an artist Álvaro Echeverría Zuno [es] (1948-2020), an economist María Esther Echeverría Zuno, who has promoted her mother's artwork Rodolfo Echeverría Zuno (d. 1983) Pablo Echeverría Zuno, an author at UNAM Benito Echeverría Zuno Adolfo Echeverría Zuno, a writer and teacher Echeverría outlived three of his eight children. His son Rodolfo Echeverría Zuno drowned in a pool owned by his parents in 1983 due to embolism. Son Luis Vicente Echeverría Zuno died in Mexico City on 13 March 2013, after a failed heart operation. Son Álvaro Echeverría Zuno [es], an economist in the administration of Ernesto Zedillo, committed suicide on 19 May 2020, at age 71. As of 2019, he had 19 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. His brother, actor Rodolfo Landa, died on 14 February 2004, in Cuernavaca.