Luis Echeverría

Luis Echeverr?a ?lvarez (born 17 January 1922) was the President of Mexico from 1970 to 1976.

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Echeverr?a joined the faculty of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1947 and taught political theory. He rose in the hierarchy of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and eventually became the private secretary of the party president, General Rodolfo S?nchez Taboada. Echeverr?a was the Mexican Interior Secretary under President Gustavo D?az Ordaz between 1964 and 1970. He maintained a hard line against student protesters throughout 1968, when the Olympics were held in Mexico City. He ordered the transfer of 15% of the Mexican military to the state of Guerrero to counter guerrilla groups operating there, and under Echeverr?a's secretaryship, the air force allegedly used napalm against rural communities in Guerrero. Clashes between the government and the protesters culminated in the Tlatelolco massacre in October 1968.

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At one point during his campaign for the presidency, Echeverr?a called for a moment of silence to remember the victims of the Tlatelolco massacre, an act which enraged D?az and almost prompted him to call for Echeverr?a's resignation. Once Echeverría was elected president, he embarked on a far-reaching 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, opposing what he called US American "expansionism," supporting the leftist Chilean leader Salvador Allende, condemning Zionism, allowing the Palestine Liberation Organization to open an office in the capital, and imposing limits on foreign investment, and extending Mexico's patrimonial waters to 200 miles. At the same time, he enraged the left because he did not bring the perpetrators of the Corpus Christi Massacre to justice, and he enraged the business community with his populist rhetoric and his moves to nationalize industries and redistribute land. He was also unpopular within the rank and file of his own party.

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Echeverr?a's candidacy also rode a wave of anger by citizens in northwestern Mexico against the United States for its use (and perceived misappropriation) of water from the Colorado River, which drains much of the U.S. southwest before crossing into Mexico. The established treaty between the U.S. and Mexico called for the U.S. to allow a specified volume of water 1.5 million acre-feet (1.9 km³) to pass the U.S.-Mexican border, but it did not establish any quality levels. Throughout the 20th century, the United States, through its water policy managed through the United States Bureau of Reclamation, had developed wide-ranging irrigation along the river which had led to progressively higher levels of salinity in the water as it moved downstream. By the late 1960s, the high salinity of the water crossing into Mexico had resulted in the ruin of large tracts of the irrigated land along the lower Colorado. The sudden increase in oil prices in 1973 coupled with the possibility of new Mexican oil deposits in the Bay of Campeche, gave Echeverr?a a strong bargaining position against the Nixon Administration in the United States. Echeverr?a threatened to bring the issue to the World Court, prompting the Nixon Administration to renegotiate the treaty to include a salinity-conrol agreement. The implementation of salinity control at the border (specified to be at U.S. expense) has been on-going and slow, however, and the lower Colorado remains largely a desolate shadow of what it once was.

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17 January: REDIRECT January 17...

1922: 1922 was a common year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar)....

President: President is a title held by many leaders of organizations, companies, universities, and countries. Etymologically, a "president" is one who presides, who sits in leadership (from Latin prae- "before" + sedere "to sit"). Originally, the term usually referred to the presiding officer of a ceremony or...

Luis Echeverría related Images and Photos (experimental)

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