A federal magistrate ruled on Thursday that former Mexican president Luis Echeverria cannot be tried nor punished in any way for whatever role he might have played in the massacre of student protesters in 1968.
The ruling overturned a judge's decision that enough evidence existed to try Echeverria on genocide charges. Saying the attorney general had not proved Echeverria's involvement, the magistrate granted the former president total protection from prosecution and imprisonment, a broad legal ruling known in Mexico as an amparo.
"The crime of genocide was committed, but there is not a single proof that Luis Echeverria Alvarez was the one who prepared, conceived and executed the crime of genocide," Magistrate Jesus Guadalupe Luna Altamirano said at an unusual news conference explaining his decision. "The accusation is pure conjecture."
Prosecutors have 10 days to appeal the decision to a panel of three magistrates, but the complete rejection of their case by a high-ranking magistrate is a severe setback. Prosecutors said they were studying the decision to see if there was a possibility of an appeal.
Echeverria, who is 85 and in poor health, has been under house arrest for a year, pending the outcome of his trial, and he will remain under arrest until the 10 day period for an appeal has elapsed.
His lawyer, Juan Velasquez, said Luna's ruling put to rest the charge that Echeverria orchestrated the massacre. He emphasized that the judge had not found a shred of evidence of Echeverria's guilt in 55,725 pages of testimony and documents.
Velasquez said Echeverria was elated about the ruling.
For eight years, Echeverria has successfully beaten back several attempts by prosecutors to charge him with genocide and other crimes for his role in the deaths and disappearances of hundreds of students and dissidents in the late 1960s and early 1970s, known as "the dirty war."
If the three-member appellate panel upholds Luna's ruling, it would mean that even if a lower court judge were to eventually determine he were guilty, he could never be sentenced to prison.
The ruling dashed the hopes of many democracy advocates and leftist lawmakers who believed the tradition of impunity for public officials had come to an end in Mexico.
"Nothing has changed for the better," said Senator Rosario Ibarra, a liberal whose son disappeared during the dirty war. "They are doing the same things. There is a criminal complicity here in this coddling, let us say, of Echeverria."
The decision comes just three days after an architect came forward and revealed there were bodies that may belong to student protesters killed in October 1968 underneath a hospital near the plaza where soldiers and federal agents opened fire on a prodemocracy rally.
Echeverria was the interior minister at the time. Dozens died that day although a final death toll has never been determined.
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