Luis Echeverria Alvarez (17 January 1922-8 July 2022) was President of Mexico from 1 December 1970 to 30 November 1976, succeeding Gustavo Diaz Ordaz and preceding Jose Lopez Portillo. He was a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party.
Biography[]
Luis Echeverria was born in Mexico City, Mexico in 1922, and he was a professor of jurisprudence before becoming General Secretary of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, serving from 1957 to 1968. As Minister of the Interior from 1964 to 1970, he was responsible for the brutal suppression of the student riots around the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. However, he realized the need to reduce social tension through reforming the grossly unequal income distribution in Mexican society. As President from 1970 to 1976, he improved the rural infrastructure to benefit the peasants, and introduced strict price controls for food on the urban population. Increased state spending could only be met through increased borrowing, which caused inflation. However, a stubborn commitment to maintain the exchange rate of an increasingly overvalued peso against the US dollar resulted in a tremendous capital flight which reached panic proportions during the last months of his presidency and finally forced the peso's devaluation by almost 100 per cent. To restore his popularity, less than two weeks before the end of his presidency he expropriated northern landlords for the benefit of landless peasants. Nevertheless, his hopes of becoming United Nations Secretary-General were in vain. He died in Cuernavaca in 2022, having lived to the age of 100.