Four members of Mexico's ruling elite have been assassinated over the past two years, and not one of the cases has been solved to anyone's satisfaction. Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo of Guadalajara, Jalisco, and six other people died in a gun battle at Guadalajara's Miguel Hidalgo international airport on May 24, 1993; Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta, presidential candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was gunned down as a campaign rally was ending in Tijuana on March 23, 1994; PRI general secretary Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu was shot dead in broad daylight on a downtown Mexico City street on September 28, 1994; and Mexico City Judge Abraham Polo Uscanga, who had just been forced into retirement over his handling of a labour dispute, was found murdered in a downtown office building on the morning of June 20, 1995. A number of lesser government officials connected to these cases have also died mysteriously. Several people are in jail on charges relating to the Posadas, Colosio and Ruiz Massieu murders, but most Mexicans feel that these people are bit players in much bigger operations. Many agree with Sub-Commander Marcos of the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) that the killings are a "settling of internal accounts" by leading figures within the ruling PRI. In late June, President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon felt compelled to give his own explanation for the high-profile bloodshed. He blamed everything on "a very small group of bad guys" who "would like things to be the way they were before". As with everything else about the cases, the president's remarks satisfied no-one. The iconoclastic cartoonists who produce the humour magazine Ahuizote responded with a superhero issue: "Bat-Zedillo and the Bad Guys". This is part one of a three-part series covering the progress of these complex and confusing cases.
The waiting plane
The Mexican government's first explanation of the May 1993 murder of Cardinal Posadas was that the cardinal had been caught in the cross-fire during a shoot-out between two rival drug gangs. But as Pacific News Service associate editor Andrew Reding notes: "The gunmen first opened the car door, then riddled the cardinal — who was wearing a prominent pectoral cross — with automatic weapons fire from a distance of less than a yard ... Flashing police credentials, the assassins boarded Aeromexico flight 110 to Tijuana, whose departure had been delayed more than 20 minutes for their arrival." There was no police interference when the plane landed in Tijuana. Benjamin and Javier Arellano Felix, brothers from a family that allegedly runs the Tijuana drug cartel, reportedly led the hit squad. Posadas had previously been Tijuana's bishop. On January 6 of this year two suspects in the case were extradited from the US: Carlos Enrique Garcia ("Tarzan") and Jesus Zamora ("Cougar"). On June 23 Mexican federal agents arrested Luis Hector Palma Salazar ("El Guero", or "the Blond" or "Fair-skinned") in Guadalajara after his private plane crashed; authorities announced that Palma, allegedly the head of the Sinaloa drug cartel, was connected to the Posadas killing. Mexico also accuses former Sinaloa cartel head Joaquin Guzman Loera ("El Chapo"), who apparently fled from the Guadalajara airport to Guatemala, where a coup attempt was about to start. He was arrested there. But no action seems to have been taken against the Arellano Felix brothers, even though a warrant was issued for their arrest some two years ago. Around New Year 1994 the brothers, supposedly seeking spiritual advice, held a secret meeting with papal nuncio Girolamo Prigione at his home in Mexico City. Prigione, a conservative who is said to have had strained relations with Posadas, was arriving in Guadalajara the night the cardinal was murdered; Posadas was in fact at the airport to meet the nuncio. Prigione has been the Vatican ambassador for 17 years and has distinguished himself by his repeated attacks on proponents of liberation theology — most notably Samuel Ruiz Garcia, bishop of San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. Leobardo Larios Guzman, a former Jalisco attorney general who had been involved in the Posadas murder investigation, was shot dead on the morning of May 10, 1995, as he was leaving his home in Guadalajara. As of August 29, the Mexican government still insisted that Posadas' death was a case of mistaken identity. One intriguing aspect of the case is the number of dramatic events that took place in Mexico and Central America the week Posadas was killed. On May 21 and 22, the Mexican army had its first encounter with the rebel EZLN in Chiapas; on May 23 an arms cache belonging to the Salvadoran People's Liberation Forces (FPL), part of the ex-guerrilla Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN), exploded in Managua; Posadas was murdered on May 24; and on May 25 Guatemalan president Jorge Serrano Elias tried to carry out a "self-coup". There is no evidence of a connection, but the coincidence is striking.Flip-flops
For the first few days after the 1994 assassination of front-running presidential candidate Colosio, Mexican officials tried to pin the blame on a deranged "lone assassin". Mario Aburto Martinez, a factory worker with no clear political affiliations, was reportedly the man shown in videotapes standing to Colosio's right and shooting the candidate point blank in the head. Mario Aburto was apprehended at the scene and has since been convicted of murder; in December 1994 he was sentenced to 45 years in prison. But special prosecutor Miguel Montes Garcia quickly dropped the lone gunman theory, and by April 6, less than two weeks after the killing, he had named five more suspects, all connected with a private security force hired to guard Colosio in Tijuana: former Baja California state judicial police officer Tranquilino Sanchez Venegas; another ex-judicial, Vicente Mayoral Valenzuela; his son, Rodolfo Mayoral Esquer; local PRI official Jose Rodolfo Rivapalacio Tinajero; and former police agent Hector Javier Hernandez Thomassiny. Videotapes from the campaign rally allegedly showed the men either obstructing the government's official security group or else clearing a path through the crowd so that Aburto could reach his victim. A sixth suspect, federal agent Jorge Antonio Sanchez Ortega, was also charged. He was caught near the rally in a bloodstained shirt; paraffin tests indicated that he had fired a gun recently. Sanchez Ortega is said to look remarkably like Mario Aburto. The British Guardian reported, "It was apparently Mr. Sanchez whom Mario Aburto's mother mistook for her son when she visited the Tijuana police station after the shooting". Local Tijuana police chief Jose Federico Benitez Lopez, a member of the conservative opposition National Action Party (PAN), was responsible for Sanchez Ortega's arrest; Benitez also amassed evidence that Colosio had been shot by two different assassins firing from opposite sides. But police chief Benitez was ambushed and murdered by two gunmen on the night of April 28. And in a report released on June 3, special prosecutor Montes made a second abrupt about-face, announcing that Aburto had acted alone after all. The Mexican government changed its position yet again after the Zedillo administration took office on December 1, 1994, bringing in a new attorney general, Antonio Lozano Gracia, and a new special prosecutor, Pablo Chapa Bezanilla. Like Benitez, Lozano is a member of the PAN, and on February 24 of this year he suddenly announced that Benitez's hypothesis was correct: there had been a second assassin. Lozano charged Othon Cortes Vazquez, a man who worked as a driver and gopher for various PRI functionaries, with shooting Colosio in the abdomen from the left side. He also charged the head of Colosio's private security group, former federal police officer Fernando de la Sota Rodalleguez, with manipulating the evidence at the scene of the crime. Cortes Vazquez was working for the federal government's official security group at the time of the assassination; he was the driver for the group's director, General Domiro Roberto Garcia Reyes. As of May, special prosecutor Chapa's team was reportedly investigating the sources of the $5 million General Garcia Reyes is said to be keeping deposited in US banks. Since February, however, the Mexican government has again retreated from the theory of a wider conspiracy. In April Judge Alejandro Sosa Ortiz dismissed charges against Tranquilino Sanchez for lack of evidence, and on July 8 he did the same for Vicente Mayoral and his son Rodolfo. The three had remained in prison since April 1994, through all the twists and turns of the investigation. Rivapalacio, Hernandez Thomassiny and federal agent Sanchez Ortega had been released earlier.[This report was produced by the Weekly News Update on the Americas and New York Transfer News Collective.]