MEXICO CITY — A breakthrough in the decades-long investigation into a political assassination that shook the nation?
Or a political stunt intended to distract from more pressing issues?
These are the questions that have emerged in Mexico following the arrest last weekend of a suspected “second shooter” in the 1994 assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, who was gunned down during a rally in the border city of Tijuana.
His assassination is widely considered one of the most important – and controversial – events in recent Mexican history.
Doubts and conspiracy theories have long swirled over Colosio’s murder, long blamed on a “lone gunman” captured at the scene. Many have compared the lingering uncertainty surrounding Colosio’s disappearance to the endless debate in the United States surrounding the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an assassination also blamed on a lone gunman with unclear motives.
Many in Mexico have disputed the widespread theory that a seemingly apolitical factory worker, Mario Aburto, shot the candidate twice at point-blank range as Colosio mingled with citizens during the campaign.
“I looked up and saw the gun right in front of me,” Maria Vidal, who was walking with Colosio at the scene, told the Times in 1994. “Then I saw him fall to the ground. Blood was coming out of his head.”
Colosio was shot once in the head and once in the abdomen, fueling speculation that a second shooter was involved.
People lay flowers March 23, 2004 in tribute to Luis Donaldo Colosio during a ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of his assassination in Tijuana.
(David Maung/Associated Press)
Aburto, who claims he was tortured into confessing, continues to serve a 45-year prison sentence.
The Colosio case has generated tens of thousands of pages of testimony from hundreds of witnesses, as well as books, documentaries and a Netflix television miniseries, all examining the question: What really happened in Tijuana on March 23, 1994?
Speculation has shown that everyone from political insiders to drug traffickers was behind Colosio’s assassination, contributing to a sense of upheaval in Mexico. 1994 opened with a Zapatista rebellion in the south, soon followed by the stunning assassination of Colosio, and culminated with a collapse of the peso in December, triggering an economic crisis.
More than a quarter century after the murder, Mexican writer Cuauhtémoc Ruiz captured the pervasive sense of ambiguity in his 2020 book, “Colosio: Sospechosos y Encubridores” — basically, “Colosio: Suspects and Cover-ups.”
The Colosio affair even spawned its own version of the Zapruder film, the famous home movie sequence of the JFK assassination in Dallas. Video clips from the fateful 1994 rally show Colosio, his curly black hair speckled with confetti, shaking hands and signing autographs as he weaves his way through a cheerful political crowd.
Suddenly, the image of a hand holding a gun emerges from the melee. The gun shoots directly into the right side of the candidate’s head. Chaos ensues.
On Saturday, according to our information, federal prosecutors in Tijuana arrested a former intelligence agent, Jorge Antonio Sánchez Ortega, wanted since last year in connection with the assassination of Colosio.
Sánchez Ortega, authorities said, was part of the federal protection team assigned to the Colosio rally in the Lomas Taurinas neighborhood of Tijuana, near the city’s airport. The agent was arrested shortly after the killing, but prosecutors now say he was released and taken away as part of a cover-up. The officer’s clothing was stained with the victim’s blood and ballistic evidence indicated he had fired a weapon, authorities said.
His new arrest follows an explosive about-face last year by Mexico’s attorney general’s office, which abruptly backed away from the lone gunman allegation. Instead, prosecutors endorsed the theory of a second shooter and named “Jorge Antonio S.”, now identified as Sánchez Ortega, as the suspect.
But the former agent’s arrest left more questions than answers. Prosecutors have offered no overarching theory about why Colosio was targeted and who was behind his killing.
Neither the ex-agent nor his lawyer have made any comment since his arrest.
Jesús González Schmal, lawyer for Aburto, the convicted killer, welcomed 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 have called the arrest a thinly disguised attempt to distract from more pressing current problems of crime and corruption.
President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government is using Colosio’s memory “to cover up its incompetence,” Alejandro Moreno Cárdenas, president of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, said on X. The president, he said, “has no shame and no idea how to govern.”
At the time of his assassination, Colosio was the presidential candidate of the PRI, which ruled Mexico authoritarianly for most of the 20th century. He was in line to be elected Mexico’s next president a few months later.
Colosio, 44, was widely seen as a charismatic and progressive voice within the PRI’s rigid hierarchy. He pledged to introduce reforms and eliminate deep-rooted corruption and cronyism. Some have speculated that hardliners within the ruling party were behind his assassination – a theory long rejected by the PRI leadership.
After Colosio’s assassination, the PRI nominated Ernesto Zedillo, who had served as Colosio’s campaign manager, as its candidate. Zedillo, a party loyalist and lackluster technocrat, won a landslide victory and served a six-year term.
But the PRI is today a weakened minority player in the opposition to the Sheinbaum government, elected under the banner of the Morena party, now dominant.
The arrest of an alleged accomplice in Colosio’s assassination comes days after another high-profile political assassination, this time that of Mayor Carlos Manzo of the western city of Uruapan. He was gunned down this month during a Day of the Dead festival, in what some call the most sensational political assassination in Mexico since Colosio’s assassination.
The killing of Manzo – who accused Sheinbaum’s government of not doing more to fight the cartels – sparked massive protests in his home state of Michoacán, a battleground for the cartels. Many criticized Sheinbaum’s government for what they called its lax attitude toward organized crime, an allegation the president denied.
A generation after his assassination, Colosio’s assassination remains a historic event that continues to cast a shadow over Mexican politics.
Special Envoy Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City contributed to this report.
