When a Mexican prosecutor brought formal charges against former president Luis Echeverría this summer for having ordered the 1971 massacre of some 40 student protesters, we seemed to be witnessing another signal event in the dismantling of impunity in Latin America. Maybe so, but the reality is complicated. We can think of Echeverría’s legal encounter as a “Pinochet moment”: important, but a far cry from justice.
As with the 1998 arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, the incident concerned an octogenarian who had comfortably ridden out his period of political power before, some three decades later, being exposed to a measure of public embarrassment for his crimes. Like Pinochet, Echeverría will likely escape trial—unless the Mexican Supreme Court overrules the July 24 dismissal of the charges for having exceeded the 30-year statute of limitations.
Families of Echeverría’s victims hope the dismissal will be reversed. Let us hope the same; former heads of state should be held accountable for murdering political dissidents.
But even if the case succeeds, justice should be more timely. The criminality of an Echeverría or a Pinochet would be better proclaimed and prosecuted at a time when this might actually mitigate or halt their crimes. Alas, this is nearly impossible when the criminals in question are themselves the arbiters of legality within a sovereign state. All the more so when they are protected and supported by the world’s foremost power, as has so often been the case in Latin America.
The United States has been a supportive ally of the worst criminal regimes in the recent history of the hemisphere. This includes Pinochet’s infamous dictatorship but also lesser known and perhaps less bloody regimes such as the Mexican administrations that oversaw the “dirty war” that ran from the 1960s to the early 1980s. But no high U.S. official has been brought to trial on related charges. No Pinochet moment disturbed the later years of recently honored former President Ronald Reagan, for instance, though he supported death squads, genocide and illegal aggression in Central America during the 1980s.
In discussions of impunity in the region, one seldom hears mention of Washington’s impunity. Some commentary on Echeverría so erases this broader context that it borders on Orwellian. The New York Times, for instance, recently posed the question: “How will Mexico come to grips with its past? Other nations have. The United States saw the 9/11 commission illuminate the darkest moment in recent American history…” Mexico, according to the Times, must come to terms with the atrocities committed by its government, but the United States has no gory criminal past to confront: only its recent victimhood requires investigation. In this Times article’s analysis of “Latin America, where the cold war saw systematic torture, disappearances and murders of suspected dissidents from Mexico south to Chile,” it seems the United States has nothing “to come to grips with” in that past.
The same article, to further substantiate Echeverría’s guilt, refers to declassified U.S. government documents that indicate “[U.S.] State Department officials in Mexico thought Mr. Echeverría was supporting the Falcons [the paramilitary gang that directly perpetrated the 1971 massacre] as a force against the student movement…” The article does not mention that U.S. officials, despite this knowledge, fully supported their Mexican ally—including through complicity in the post-massacre cover-up, evidenced in the same declassified documents. Nor does it mention that U.S. officials had their own ties with the Falcons whose leader, Col. Manuel Díaz Escobar, received U.S training.
Such commentary prefers to see state crimes and impunity as strictly Latin American problems. Yet no other political entity has as much to answer for in terms of supporting state terror in the Americas as does the United States.
Echeverria’s Pinochet moment may not lead to a trial. But in a world overrun with criminality at high levels, we must extract all the encouragement and symbolic mileage that we can from these glimmers of justice. We must do this, however, without succumbing to the illusion that the battle against impunity concerns only the past and the crimes of others.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marshall Beck is editor of the NACLA Report.
