Mexico's top prosecutor on Tuesday shrugged off threats of political retaliation by the former ruling party if charges are filed against an ex-president in the massacre of student demonstrators three decades ago. Leaders of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, urged their officials, who govern most states, to reconsider cooperation with President Vicente Fox's government if charges are brought against Luis Echeverria and top officials when he served as president in the early 1970s. The PRI was in power for 71 years before Fox took office 2000. A special prosecutor named by Fox, Ignacio Carrillo, said Tuesday he would say by July 24 whether Echeverria should face charges in a 1971 killing of the unarmed protesters -- charges that would be without precedent in modern Mexican history. That case is among several past crimes that Carrillo's office is probing, including a larger 1968 massacre of unarmed demonstrators and the disappearance and apparent killing of hundreds of leftist rebels and suspected sympathizers during the 1960s and 1970s.
The PRI's Permanent Political Commission said all elected PRI officials "should evaluate dialogue and negotiation with the head of the federal executive branch" as long as it maintains "criminal cases against civil and military authorities implicated in the pursuit of guerrillas in the 1970s," the commission said. When Fox took office in 2000, he promised his administration would finally investigate massacres of dissidents and a so-called "dirty war" against leftists in the 1960s and 1970s, a long-standing demand of Mexico's left. But the PRI already has stalled many of Fox's main proposals and the new warning could make it even harder for Fox to pass any legislation. The PRI commission, headed by party President Roberto Madrazo, called on party lawyers to come to the defense of "the Mexican state and its armed forces." Retired Gen. Ramon Mota Sanchez, a PRI senator, said the cases were part of "a joint attack on our political institutions," according to the party statement.
| Gen. Ramon Mota Sanchez is the hero of the Battle of... uhhh... |
"We are not speaking only about a specific ex-president," the commission said. "We are speaking about the chief of the Mexican state, of the presidential institution, of historical legitimacy that gave political stability to the country for more than 70 years." Echeverria's attorney Juan Velazquez said in a televised interview on Tuesday that he has seen the investigator's file against his client and "there is no proof, absolutely no proof" of responsibility. He also said that the statute of limitations had expired even for the most extreme charges officials could lodge.
| "Yeah! And the witnesses are all dead!" |
Fox's own defense secretary, Ricardo Vega, recently issued a call for national reconciliation that was widely seen in Mexico as a call by the military to drop prosecution of past crimes. And on July 1, the country's top organized crime prosecutor, Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, said the country should pardon former officials investigated for their roles in past crimes. |