MEXICO CITY — A breakthrough within the decades-long investigation of a political assassination that convulsed the nation?
Or a political stunt meant to distract from extra urgent points?
These are the questions that emerged in Mexico after the arrest final weekend of an alleged “second shooter” within the 1994 assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, who was gunned down at a rally within the border metropolis of Tijuana.
His slaying is extensively thought to be one of the vital consequential — and contentious— occasions of current Mexican historical past.
Doubts and conspiracy theories have lengthy swirled over Colosio’s killing, lengthy blamed on a “lone gunman” who was captured on the scene. Many have in contrast the lingering uncertainty about Colosio’s demise to the endless debate in the US surrounding the 1963 killing of President John F. Kennedy, an assassination additionally blamed on a lone gunman with ill-defined motives.
Many in Mexico have disputed the prevalent idea: that an apparently nonpolitical manufacturing facility employee, Mario Aburto, shot the candidate twice at point-blank vary as Colosio mingled with residents through the marketing campaign occasion.
“I seemed up and noticed the gun proper in entrance of me,” Maria Vidal, who was strolling with Colosio on the scene, informed The Occasions in 1994. “Then I noticed him fall to the bottom. Blood was popping out of his head.”
Colosio was shot as soon as within the head and as soon as within the stomach, feeding hypothesis {that a} second gunman was concerned.
Folks place flowers on March 23, 2004, in tribute to Luis Donaldo Colosio throughout a ceremony marking the tenth anniversary of his assasination in Tijuana.
(David Maung / Related Press)
Aburto, who says he was tortured into confessing, continues to serve a 45-year jail sentence.
The Colosio case generated tens of 1000’s of pages of testimony from tons of of witnesses, together with books, documentaries and a TV miniseries on Netflix, all inspecting the query: What truly occurred in Tijuana on March 23, 1994?
Hypothesis has pointed to everybody from political insiders to drug traffickers as those behind Colosio’s assassination, which contributed to a way of upheaval in Mexico. The yr 1994 opened with a Zapatista riot within the south, quickly adopted by Colosio’s gorgeous homicide, and culminated with a December collapse of the peso, triggering an financial disaster.
Greater than a quarter-century after the killing, Mexican author Cuauhtémoc Ruiz captured the ever present sense of ambiguity in his 2020 ebook, “Colosio: Sospechosos y Encubridores” — roughly, “Colosio: Suspects and Cowl-ups.”
The Colosio case even spawned its personal model of the Zapruder movie, the storied home-movie sequence of JFK’s assassination in Dallas. Video clips from the fateful 1994 rally present Colosio, his curly black hair flecked with confetti, shaking arms and signing autographs as he winds his means by way of a gleeful political crowd.
All of the sudden, the picture of a hand greedy a pistol emerges from the scrum. The gun fires immediately into the precise facet of the candidate’s head. Chaos ensues.
On Saturday ,in line with stories right here, federal prosecutors in Tijuana arrested a former intelligence agent, Jorge Antonio Sánchez Ortega, who had been needed since final yr in reference to Colosio’s killing.
Sánchez Ortega, authorities say, was a part of federal safety staff assigned to Colosio’s rally in Tijuana’s Lomas Taurinas neighborhood, close to town airport. The agent was arrested shortly after the killing, however prosecutors now say he was freed and whisked away as a part of a cover-up. The agent’s clothes was stained with the sufferer’s blood, and ballistic proof indicated he had fired a weapon, authorities say.
His new arrest stems from a bombshell about-face final yr by the workplace of Mexico’s legal professional normal, which abruptly retreated from the lone-gunman allegation. As a substitute, prosecutors endorsed the speculation of a second shooter and named as a suspect “Jorge Antonio S.,” now recognized as Sánchez Ortega.
However the former agent’s arrest has left extra questions than solutions. Prosecutors have offered no overarching idea on why Colosio was focused, and who was behind his slaying.
Neither the ex-agent or his lawyer have commented since his arrest.
Jesús González Schmal, legal professional for Aburto, the convicted murderer, hailed the arrest as a step towards clarifying what actually occurred to Colosio.
“It will open a horizon of information about what occurred 31 years in the past,” the lawyer stated in a tv interview.
However some labeled the arrest a thinly disguised try and distract folks from extra urgent present problems with crime and corruption.
The federal government of President Claudia Sheinbaum is utilizing the reminiscence of Colosio “to cowl up its ineptitude,” Alejandro Moreno Cárdenas, president of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Social gathering, or PRI, declared on X. The president, he stated, “has no disgrace and no thought of the way to govern.”
On the time of his slaying, Colosio was the presidential candidate of the PRI, which ruled Mexico in authoritarian style for many of the twentieth century. He was on monitor to be elected Mexico’s subsequent president a number of months later.
Colosio, 44, was seen extensively seen as a charismatic and progressive voice contained in the inflexible hierarchy of the PRI. He vowed to institute reforms and clear up deeply entrenched corruption and cronyism. Some have speculated that hard-liners inside the ruling celebration have been behind his killing — a idea lengthy rejected by the PRI management.
After Colosio’s slaying, the PRI named Ernesto Zedillo, who had been Colosio’s marketing campaign supervisor, as its candidate. Zedillo, a celebration loyalist and lackluster technocrat, gained in a landslide and served a six-year time period.
However, lately, the PRI is a weakened minority participant in opposition to the federal government of Sheinbaum, elected beneath the banner of the now-dominant Morena celebration.
The arrest of an alleged confederate within the Colosio killing comes days after one other high-profile political assassination, this time of Mayor Carlos Manzo of the western metropolis of Uruapan. He was gunned down at a Day of the Lifeless competition this month in what some name Mexico’s most sensational political assassination since Colosio’s slaying.
The killing of Manzo — who assailed Sheinbaum’s authorities for not doing extra to fight cartels — sparked huge protests in his house state of Michoacán, a cartel battleground. Many criticized Sheinbaum’s authorities for what they known as its lax perspective towards organized crime, an allegation denied by the president.
A era after his assassination, Colosio’s slaying stays an epochal occasion that continues to forged a shadow over Mexican politics.
Particular correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico Metropolis contributed to this report.
