BREAKING: Ex-Mexico leader cleared of genocide charges

[IDemo]

Echeverria has been under house arrest for alleged role in 1968 massacre

BREAKING NEWS
Updated: 6:59 p.m. ET July 8, 2006

MEXICO CITY - A judge cleared former Mexican President Luis Echeverria Saturday of genocide charges for his role in a 1968 massacre, in a blow to efforts to prosecute the country’s former leaders for rights abuses.

Echeverria, 84, was charged with genocide a week ago and was placed under house arrest but the judge ruled he could not be put on trial under Mexico’s statute of limitations, the former president’s lawyer Juan Velasquez said.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13772086/

[acmavm]

1. Statute of limitation against genocide????????

[IDemo]

2. I was going to add your words in italics to my post

[ugarte]

3. That was easy. Mexican justice in action...nt

[Judi Lynn]

4. Is it possible charges can be brought again under a new President?

They've been trying to get Luis Echeverría Álvarez for ages, and he keeps slipping away. He needs to answer for his Nixon-supported genocidal actions. Example:

Declassified Documents Point to the Top in Mexico

Proceso (Mexico), Jan 25, 2002

"Echeverría ordered the dirty war": that is the blockbuster headline to the cover story in the January 20 issue of Proceso, the Mexican weekly news magazine. The magazine published three US State Department documents that were declassified last year. All are from the period of Mexico's dirty war against domestic guerillas during the presidency of Luis Echeverría (1970-1976).

Two of the documents poke gaping holes in the Mexican government's long-standing denials of responsibility for the disappearances of hundreds of guerrillas and dissidents.

The first document is a confidential telegram from the US embassy in Mexico City to the State Department in Washington. It says that Mexico's foreign minister visited the US ambassador with a message from President Echeverría to President Richard Nixon. The message was to reassure Nixon, who was worried about the possibility of communism on the US' southern flank, that Mexico would never tolerate communism within its borders. The subject of the assurances, however, is the expulsion of Soviet diplomats, not the dirty war, which is never mentioned in any way in the document.

The second document is a lot more damning. It is a secret Airgram from the US consulate in Guadalajara to the State Department, dated January 1974. It relates information obtained from an informant, who described what happened to an urban guerrilla who was captured after being wounded in a firefight with police. The guerrilla, Pedro Orozco Guzmán, was at first given medical care under which his condition improved. He was then "interrogated," at that point a euphemism for torture, to the point where he implicated others who were in turn seized. Having given the authorities the information they wanted, the source said that Orozco became "expendable (trash)."
(snip/...)

http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=205

[madrchsod]

5. npr discussed this the other day

the use and charge of genocide is really thin and is not recognized nor welcome by the organizations that are bringing genocide charges in different parts of the world. the charge of genocide is being used in mexico because the statue of limitations has run out so the charge of genocide is used to charge these men..it`s not a legally or historically valid use of the charge of genocide

[Judi Lynn]

6. I can see the confusion trying to compare the disappearance and

torture and murder of several hundred with the same barbarism against thousands, or even hundreds of thousands.

It IS large enough, however, to demand a formal rebuke, one would think, if nothing else.