Latinnews Archive
Caribbean & Central America - 25 April 1996
Still more smoke than facts; After two years and three investigations
The investigation into the murder, on 23 March 1994, of Luis Donaldo Colosio, the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional's nominee for the presidency, has taken quite a bureaucratic toll. Three procuradotes generales and three fiscales, all appointed by the President have had a crack at the case. The only tangible result has been that Mario Aburto Martfnez, the assassin, was sentenced to 42 years in gaol on 31 October 1994.
The latest twist to the story was a frontpage story in Reforma, a daily newspaper, that Jose Cordoba Montoya, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari's eminence grise, had masterminded a plot to shoot (but not kill) Colosio. This was supposed to be a warning to Colosio not to expand upon his speech on 6 March 1994 (just over two weeks before he was shot) in which he attacked Salinismo. Cordoba has also written to the Procuraduria saying that he wants to give evidence. The Procuraduria says that he will have to wait his turn.
Who did what. The first procurador was Diego Valades, who took over from Jorge Carpizo. Valades is generally reckoned to be close to Manuel Camacho Solis, the former mayor of Mexico City and a disappointed candidate for the PRI nomination in 1994. Valades was only in charge of the investigation for a few days before being replaced by Humberto Benitez Trevino.
Benitez is a close associate of Carlos Hank Gonzalez, one of the country's key political powerbrokers. Benitez was replaced by Antonio Lozano Gracia, a member of the clericalist, Partido Accion Nacional.
Under the constitution, the President has the right to appoint special investigators (fiscales) to handle particularly complicated investigations. The first fiscal to handle the Colosio investigation was Miguel Montes, who was then president of the Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nacion. He was appointed by the then President, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, after an appeal by Colosio's (now deceased) widow, Laura Riojas.
Montes was adept at playing the Mexican political system, trimming the court's judgments to suit the taste of the current President. He lasted four months and took evidence from 312 witness, made 48 technical investigations, watched 113 videos and looked at more than 2,000 photographs.
Montes's initial hypothesis was that there was a plot to kill Colosio, but his conclusion was that Colosio had been the victim of a lone assassin, Mario Aburto Martinez. Despite this, Montes took the following into preventive custody: Tranquilino Sanchez Venegas, Vicente Mayoral Valenzuela, Rodlofo Mayoral Esquer and Rodolfo Rivapalacia Tinajero. These people were released in April 1995.
Montes also pursued Hector Javier Hernandez Tomassini and Mario Alberto Carrillo Cuevas, but did not arrest them. All of the people Montes either arrested or thought about arresting were in Colosio's immediate vicinity when he was shot.
The real conspiracy theorists believe that Montes was somehow gotat before he could prosecute these people. They cannot believe that there was simply no evidence.
Number two. The second fiscal was Olga Islas Magallanes de Gonzalez Mariscal. She was sub-procurador in charge of preliminary investigations in Mexico City. She was also appointed by Salinas.
She immediately complained about the way her predecessor had handled the investigation. She said that he had taken evidence away with him; that the police investigation had been defective and incomplete; that there had not been a single chain of command for the investigation; that Mario Aburto saw the video of the assassination before he confessed and that key pieces of evidence had been destroyed.
Salinas backed her up, saying that her brief was get to the bottom of case and to find out whether anyone or any group set Mario Aburto up to commit the crime.
Olga Islas spent five months on the investigation and although she left plenty of loose threads, she breathed life into the idea that there had been a plot. In particular she posited that there was a link between Colosio's murder and the assassination of the Secretario General del Comite Ejecutivo de PRI, Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, on 28 September 1994.
Blinkered. The odd thing about the first two (Salinas) appointed fiscals and procuradors was that they believed that Colosio died at the hands of a single assassin.
This was despite the autopsy evidence which, right from the start, showed that he had been hit by two bullets, each of a different calibre.
Third time around. The third fiscal to investigate the Colosio assassination, Pablo Chapa Bezanilla, virtually ignored the work done by Olga Islas. This took the form of 146 statements, 49 expert opinions, 14 technical investigations and 83 general investigations carried out by the Policia Judicial Federal.
Chapa Bezanilla was appointed by the Panista, Lozano Gracia, on 16 December 1994. He was in charge of preliminary investigations under Humberto Benitez Trevino and he said that his investigation would start again from scratch. One legacy of Olga Islas's investigation was that Chapa Bezanilla was also appointed fiscal for the murders of the cardinal of Guadalajara, Juan Ocampo Posadas (who was killed in May 1993) and for the murder of Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu.
The emphasis of the investigation shifted under the new administration: a lot of energy has been expended in trying to torpedo the Salinas inspired theory that Aburto acted alone and that there was no plot. This article of faith required some heroic assumptions: notably that Colosio's body had turned right around between the first and second shot. This was the only way that the fact of two shots could be tallied with a single assassin. One bullet hit Colosio in his right temple; the other hit him in his abdomen on the left side.
Chapa Bezanilla refused to believe that Colosio turned right round between the first and second shots. He concluded that there were two shots from different guns and on 24 February 1995, he arrested and gaoled the second 'assassin' Othon Cortes Vazquez. Chapa Bezanilla also arrested Fernando de la Sota, the policeman who nabbed Aburto, for having falsified evidence when he made his statement, though de la Sota was eventually released on bail.
This is how the case now stands: Aburto has been convicted and Cortbs Vazquez awaits judgment after the decision by the judge, to the evident dismay of Lozano Gracia, to close the case. In Mexican law, a case closes and comes to judgment when the two sides (the fiscal and the defence) have presented all the evidence they can muster. This system is open to abuse since the defence can keep the defendant out of gaol simply by producing a stream of witnesses. Criminal judges are often offered bribes or political favours either to close a case prematurely or to keep it open indefinitely.
Lozano Gracia's worry is that the judge's decision to close the case, because he does not believe that the evidence produced by the Procuraduria General de la Republica, indicates that he will let Cortbs Vazquez go free.
The plot. Chapa Bezanilla is convinced that there is a plot but he cannot prove it. Instead rumours have been circulating that the trail leads to Los Pinos, the President's residence, and President Salinas and his chief henchman, Jose Cordoba Montoya, his chef du cabinet.
There is evidence, apparently, that both Cortes and Aburto telephoned Los Pinos, particularly to Justo Ceja, one of Salinas's private secretaries, but also to people in the Estado Mayor Presidencial, which was charged with guarding Colosio during his campaign. There are, a lot of strange links between Cortes and General Domirio Garcia Reyes, who was in charge of guarding Colosio.
Chapa Bezanilla's strategy seems to be to leak bits of his evidence to force the other side to respond. This makes for lively dinner parties and newspapers and presents the illusion that Chapa Bezanilla is making progress. His supporters say that the leaks are part of smokescreen to hide the true investigation; cynics fear that the wild allegations are more evidence that the investigation is going nowhere and that Colosio's murder will eventually join the murders of President John F. Kennedy and of the Swedish prime minister, Olaf Palme, in the heap of notorious, but unsolved crimes.
De la Sota is one of the pivots in Chapa Bezanilla's investigation. De la Sota's role in the whole affair and indeed his exact position in Las Lomas Taurinas when the shots were fired, has never been satisfactorily explained. The links between the people surrounding Colosio, the assassins and Salinas and Cordoba are certainly curious but to jump to the conclusion that Salinas and Cordoba were behind the killing looks wild. Why would they kill the man President Salinas had nominated as his successor? If Salinas wanted to go on in power it would have been much more sensible to kill Colosio (or whoever won the election) after the election.
Victims. Indeed the Salinistas have been the big losers from the assassination. The President's brother, Rail, is in prison; the President himself is in exile; Manuel Camacho's career appears to be over; Cordoba is in Washington; Pedro Aspe, the 'finance' minister is, after a year of waiting, finally in the private sector while Jaime Serra Puche, who botched the devaluation under President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon, is reduced to teaching at Princeton.
Beneficiary. The obvious beneficiary of Colosio's killing is the current President, Ernesto Ponce de Leon. Jumping from this to claiming that he was the brains behind the killing almost beggars belief.
Zedillo, who was Colosio's campaign manager and a potential candidate for the nomination himself, has never stopped lamenting the fact that he was selected as the PRI's candidate by President Salinas after Colosio's murder. Zedillo also seems too indecisive (and too honourable) to have cold-bloodedly killed his rival.
Dinosaurs. The most likely people to have organised the killing are the 'dinosaurs' or old guard Priistas who feared that Colosio would threaten their positions. There is some evidence to suggest that the Hankistas (the followers of Carlos Hank Gonzalez, a former governor of the Estado de Mexico and a power behind several administrations) have benefited.
The big test of whether the dinosaurs are back in control will be the selection of candidates for the Congressional elections for 1997. If the followers of Hank, President Luis Echeverria, Fernando Gutierrez Barrios (a former governor Chiapas and interior minister under Salinas) and Manuel Bartlett, the current and controversial governor of Puebla, are prominent, the dinosaurs are be back in the saddle.
President Salinas apparently believes that the dinosaurs are the real threat: 'My enemies are your enemies' he wrote in an open letter to Zedillo before Christmas. In this letter he accused those politicians who had been against his neo-liberal economic policies of being behind the assassination. Supporting evidence for this theory is the gaoling of the President's brother Rail and the careful leaking of evidence pointing to his corruption.
* Rabl Salinas: He has now been in gaol for more than a year: under Mexican law no-body should spend more than a year in gaol without being convicted. The Procuraduria has used a legal device to avoid closing the case and getting judgment. It has added further charges to the initial ones which has enabled it to keep the case open. When it seemed likely that the judge would throw out the initial charge that Salinas was the brains behind the murder of Ruiz Massieu, the Procuraduria added the charge of corruption.
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