1994 Colosio assassination mystery deepens as Mexico arrests suspect

MEXICO CITY — A breakthrough in the decades-long investigation into a political assassination that shook the country?

Or is it a political stunt aimed at distracting from more pressing issues?

These were the questions that arose after the arrest last weekend of the alleged “second shooter” in the 1994 assassination of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, who was shot dead at a rally in the border city of Tijuana.

His murder is widely considered one of the most significant and controversial events in recent Mexican history.

Suspicions and conspiracy theories surrounding Colosio’s murder have long circulated, with blame long attributed to the “lone gunman” caught at the scene. Many people have compared the ongoing uncertainty surrounding Colosio’s death to the endless debate in the United States over the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy; This assassination was again an assassination in which a lone gunman with ill-defined motives was accused.

Many in Mexico have disputed this popular theory: Mario Aburto, a seemingly non-political factory worker, shot the candidate twice at point-blank range as Colosio mingled with citizens at a campaign event.

“I looked up and saw the gun right in front of me,” Maria Vidal, who walked with Colosio at the scene, told the Times in 1994. “Then I saw him fall to the ground. He was bleeding from his head.”

Colosio was shot once in the head and once in the abdomen, fueling speculation that a second gunman was involved.

Aburto, who said he was tortured to make him confess, continues to serve his 45-year prison sentence.

The Colosio case has spawned tens of thousands of pages of testimony from hundreds of witnesses, as well as books, documentaries, and a TV miniseries on Netflix, all of which examine the question: What really happened in Tijuana on March 23, 1994?

Speculation points to everyone from political figures to drug traffickers behind Colosio’s assassination, which contributed to a sense of uprising in Mexico. The year 1994 began with a Zapatista rebellion in the south, soon followed by Colosio’s stunning murder, and culminated in the collapse of the peso in December, triggering an economic crisis.

More than a quarter-century after the murder, Mexican writer Cuauhtémoc Ruiz captured the ubiquitous sense of uncertainty in his 2020 book “Colosio: Sospechosos y Encubridores” (roughly “Colosio: Suspects and Cover-ups”).

The Colosio case even spawned its own version of the Zapruder film, the storied home movie sequence of JFK’s assassination in Dallas. Video clips from that fateful 1994 rally show Colosio, his curly black hair smeared with confetti, shaking hands and signing autographs as he moves through a joyful political crowd.

Suddenly, the image of a hand holding a gun appears from the chaos. The gun fires directly into the right side of the candidate’s head. Chaos ensues.

On Saturday, federal prosecutors in Tijuana arrested Jorge Antonio Sánchez Ortega, a former intelligence agent wanted since last year in connection with Colosio’s murder, according to reports here.

Officials said Sánchez Ortega was part of the federal protection team assigned to Colosio’s rally in the Lomas Taurinas neighborhood near Tijuana’s city airport. The agent was arrested shortly after the murder, but prosecutors say he was released and quickly taken away as part of a cover-up. Authorities say the agent’s clothing was stained with the victim’s blood and ballistic evidence showed he fired the gun.

His new arrest stems from a bombshell last year when Mexico’s attorney general’s office abruptly retracted its claim of a lone gunman. Prosecutors instead supported the hypothesis of a second shooter, naming the suspect as “Jorge Antonio S.”, now identified as Sánchez Ortega. gave his name.

But the former agent’s arrest left more questions than answers. Prosecutors have not offered a comprehensive theory as to why Colosio was targeted or who was behind the killing.

Neither the former agent nor his lawyer have commented since his arrest.

Jesús González Schmal, a lawyer for convicted assassin Aburto, hailed the arrest as a step toward clarifying what really happened to Colosio.

“This will open a horizon of knowledge about what happened 31 years ago,” the lawyer said in a television interview.

But some described the arrest as an elaborately disguised attempt to distract people from more pressing current issues such as crime and corruption.

Alejandro Moreno Cárdenas, head of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), said in X that President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government was using Colosio’s memory “to cover up its incompetence.” The president, he said, “has no shame and no idea how to govern.”

At the time of his death, Colosio was the presidential candidate of the PRI, which had authoritarianly ruled Mexico for much of the 20th century. A few months later he was on track to be elected as Mexico’s next president.

Colosio, 44, was widely seen as a charismatic and progressive voice within the PRI’s rigid hierarchy. He promised to introduce reforms and purge deep-rooted corruption and nepotism. Some have suggested that hardliners within the ruling party were behind his killing, a theory long rejected by the PRI leadership.

Following Colosio’s murder, the PRI selected Ernesto Zedillo, Colosio’s campaign manager, as its candidate. Zedillo, a party loyalist and a lackluster technocrat, won overwhelmingly and served for six years.

But these days the PRI is a weakened minority player against the Sheinbaum government, elected under the banner of the now dominant Morena party.

The arrest of the alleged accomplice in Colosio’s murder came just days after another high-profile political assassination, this time of Mayor Carlos Manzo of the western city of Uruapan. He was shot dead during the Day of the Dead festival this month in what some have called Mexico’s most sensational political assassination since Colosio’s killing.

The killing of Manzo, who attacked Sheinbaum’s government for not doing more to fight the cartels, sparked massive protests in his hometown of Michoacan, a battleground for the cartels. Many people criticized the Sheinbaum government for what they called its lax attitude towards organized crime; this claim was denied by the president.

A generation after the assassination, Colosio’s killing remains a seminal event that continues to cast a shadow over Mexican politics.

Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City contributed to this report.