Mexico & Nafta - December 2008 (ISSN 1741-444X)
Almost certainly an accident
The death in a plane crash of the interior minister, Juan Camilo Mouriño, on 4 November looks increasingly like an accident and not an assassination. The latest theory for the cause of the crash is that the Learjet on which Mouriño was travelling caught in turbulence caused by a bigger Boeing 767 jet just in front of it.
The key question then is how far ahead was the 767: some reports claim that the Learjet was less than three miles behind, though Mexico City's air traffic controllers are adamant that there were four miles between the two aircraft. On 12 November 2001 an Airbus crashed in New York after its pilots apparently overreacted to turbulence caused by a Boeing 747 which was only 90 seconds in front of it.
Accident investigators have found both the black box and the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR), which the communications and transport minister, Luis Téllez, had not been sure that the plane had been carrying. Both the CVR and the blackbox (which records flight data) have been sent to the US for analysis.
On 12 November, the US ambassador to Mexico, Tony Garza, said that he had been in contact several times with the US team of analysts and so far they had discovered no evidence of sabotage. Now the team will run simulations to try and work out what happened. Téllez, who is responsible for the investigation, has said that it could take 11 months to establish the cause of the crash.
Téllez is determined to publish as much information as he can about the crash. This is a marked change from previous administrations. Téllez's initiative is clearly designed to demonstrate that the government is hiding nothing (even if this means admitting mistakes) and that the rumours that the plane crash was a terrorist attack are wrong.
Téllez can take a lot of credit for puncturing the wild rumours that Mouriño was assassinated. Initially the muddle of information produced by the disaster gave the appearance that the government may have be trying to cover something up. For example, originally the authorities stated that there were eight people on the interior ministry's Learjet which crashed into an upmarket area of Mexico City, Las Lomas de Chapultepec, at about 6.45pm (local time) on 4 November. President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa also mentioned that number in his encomium of Mouriño. A day later, the authorities, in the form of the Procuraduría General de Justicia del Distrito Federal (PGJDF), Miguel Angel Mancera, said, correctly that there were nine people on board.
The government also now said that the earlier reports of an on-board emergency were wrong. The communications minister, Luis Téllez, accused the source of this report, Angel Iturbe, an air traffic controller, of lying. Téllez then produced the transcripts of the communications between the plane and its controllers, to demonstrate that everything was normal until the plane started its final approach to Mexico City's international airport and was in normal radio contact with air controllers right up until moments before the crash, when the aircraft disappeared from radar screens and radio communication was broken. The aircraft appears to have been between 300 and 500 metres above the ground when it disappeared from the radar screens.
President Felipe Calderón himself was agnostic about the cause of the crash during the ceremony of homage to those killed, on the Campo Marte, in Mexico City, on 6 November. He said that he was determined that the truth about the crash and its cause should be established.