Javier Garcia Paniagua, 61, Hardline Mexican Official

          By SAM DILLON

                MEXICO CITY -- Javier Garcia Paniagua, a former senior
                Mexican official whose hardline views exemplified those of a
          group within the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party known as the
          "dinosaurs," died of a heart attack on Tuesday in Guadalajara. He was
          61.

          The son of a defense minister, Garcia held many of Mexico's most
          important posts during the 1976-82 government of Jose Lopez Portillo,
          an era marked by anti-guerrilla campaigns, ultranationalist foreign policies
          and state-dominated protectionist economics.

          Under the traditional Mexican system in which presidents pick their
          successors, Garcia was one of Lopez Portillo's two final choices to
          become the governing party's presidential candidate in 1982. The
          president's eventual selection of Miguel de la Madrid, an economist
          educated at Harvard, marked a watershed in Mexican politics, dividing
          the PRI into two camps and ushering in an era in which foreign-trained
          technocrats have dominated the Mexican presidency.

          De la Madrid was succeeded in 1988 by Carlos Salinas de Gortari, a
          Harvard-trained economist, who was in turn succeeded by Ernesto
          Zedillo, a Yale-trained economist, in 1994. All of them have been leaders
          of the technocrat wing of the PRI, which has faced constant opposition
          from the party's traditional politicians, who are schooled in populist
          politics and pork-barrel methods of government and who are called
          dinosaurs because they have resisted party reforms.

          Garcia was born on Feb. 13, 1937, the son of Marcelino Garcia
          Barragan, an army general who became Mexico's defense minister during
          the 1960s. Perhaps because of his long-standing ties to the armed forces,
          Zedillo sent Gen. Enrique Cervantes Aguirre, the current defense minister,
          to carry his condolences to Garcia's family in Guadalajara.

          Garcia's first public post, during the late 1960s, was as manager of a
          state-run agricultural bank. His family ties to power allowed him to rise
          quickly, and the PRI installed him in the Senate in 1970 when he was only
          33 years old, ignoring a constitutional requirement that senators be at least
          35.

          In 1977, the president named Garcia to head the Federal Security
          Directorate, the powerful plainclothes police agency. In that post, he
          directed a violent counterinsurgency campaign that virtually wiped out
          several leftist guerrilla groups. During the last three years of Lopez
          Portillo's presidency, he rose to serve as a deputy interior minister,
          agrarian reform secretary and president of the PRI.

          A year before Lopez Portillo finally selected his candidate, many
          newspapers were already suggesting that Garcia would be the choice, and
          he made clear in public statements that he expected to be named. But
          plunging world oil prices in 1982 sank Mexico into a lengthy debt crisis,
          and Lopez Portillo picked de la Madrid because he wanted a candidate
          with good relations in the international banking community.

          When he learned that he had been passed over, Garcia barely contained
          his fury, and after a three-month stint as labor minister, retired from public
          life. In 1990, he returned to serve as Mexico City's police chief and then
          to head the national lottery, but only briefly.

          He lived his last years in retirement in Mexico City, in Guadalajara and at
          his ranch in Jalisco state.

          Garcia is survived by his wife, Olivia Morales de Garcia, and six children:
          Javier, Enoch, Dolores, Olivia, Claudia and Marcelo.