Mexico City
A special prosecutor accused former Mexican president Luis Echeverria with genocide last week, but a judge dismissed the charge a day later. The prosecutor, Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, said that Echeverria, 82, had sent a hit squad to attack peaceful student protesters on June 10, 1971. About 25 marchers were killed. Critics said Carrillo Prieto had doomed his case and set back Mexico’s efforts to confront its authoritarian past by labeling the killings as genocide, which requires proof of an intention to exterminate a racial, ethnic, or national group. Echeverria’s lawyer, Juan Velasquez, agreed. “In Mexico, there has never been genocide,” he said. “There have been clashes, deaths, and massacres, but never genocide.”
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