An article in the Post reports that a special prosecutor in Mexico, Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, has asked a judge to issue an arrest warrant for former Mexican President Luis Echeverria. The charges involve an attack in 1971 in which security forces killed at least thirty student protestors in Mexico City.
As the article notes, “bringing charges against Echeverria also marks a milestone in Mexico’s efforts to investigate the government’s so-called dirty war against pro-democracy activists from the 1960s to the 1980s.”
What strikes me though is that the crime he would be charged with is “genocide.”
I know the definition of ‘genocide’ is a highly contested matter — in philosophical, political and legal contexts — particularly in emerging international law. The term can be highly mutable. And, of course, withholding the term ‘genocide’ in no way mitigates or excuses state-terror or political murders used as a tool of repression. But its use in cases such as these seems to blur it almost beyond recognition.
Merriam-Webster defines the term as “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.”
