Four leading members of Mexico's ruling elite have been assassinated over the past two years. 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 labor dispute, was found murdered in a downtown office building on the morning of June 20, 1995. This is part 3 of a three-part series covering the progress of these cases.
The third man
On April 8 the government of Mexico's Federal District (DF) suddenly shut down Mexico City's main bus line, Route 100. The line, which had been declared bankrupt the day before, provided service to 2.8 million passengers each day and employed the 13,000 members of the super-militant Route 100 Urban Passenger Auto Transport Workers Union (SUTAUR 100). Also on April 8, the DF attorney general's office arrested five SUTAUR 100 leaders, charging them with misuse of union funds, based on a complaint which 274 former employees filed in 1991 and which the authorities had ignored for four years. There were suggestions that the embezzled funds were used to supply the Zapatista rebels with weapons. Two days later, on the morning of April 10, the body of DF transport and highways secretary Luis Miguel Moreno Gomez was discovered in his office; he had been shot twice in the chest with a .38 mm hand-gun apparently belonging to one of the office's security guards. The capital's forensic department ruled Moreno's death a suicide. A few days earlier, on March 27, DF Judge Abraham Polo Uscanga had quit his post. He said later that he had been forced out by DF Chief Justice Saturnino Aguero Aguirre because of his refusal to authorise a warrant for the arrest of the SUTAUR 100 leaders in December and January. He charged that he had been pressured by Aguero twice before, once when he refused to support a case promoted by former federal finance secretary Pedro Aspe Armella and once when he released eight people charged in January 1994 with a Mexico City car bombing allegedly in support of the EZLN uprising. In early June, Polo Uscanga said that on April 27 he had been kidnapped, beaten and tortured by individuals who wanted to know if he was linked to leftist groups. He denied being opposed to the government and said he had been a member of the PRI for 35 years. On June 18 an unknown assailant shot and killed Mexico City assistant prosecutor Jesus Humberto Priego Chavez as he stood outside his home. Priego Chavez had been responsible for gathering evidence against the SUTAUR 100 leaders. Judge Polo Uscanga's body was found two days later. The judge was apparently shot on the evening of June 19. The killing occurred in an office he shared with his lawyer son, Abraham Polo Perez, in an ageing building at 300 Insurgentes Avenue South. The building's electricity had been turned off on June 16 for non-payment; Judge Polo Uscanga, who rarely came to the building, had to walk up nine floors in the dark in order to reach the office where he was killed. The revolver, a Taurus .38, was found wiped clean of fingerprints and tucked under the corpse. SUTAUR 100 had offices in the same building, although a building security guard said no-one from the union had been there since the Route 100 bankruptcy declaration. Before that, according to the guard, SUTAUR 100's legal adviser, Independent Proletarian Movement (MPI) leader Ricardo Barco, had been a frequent visitor. Before his death Polo Uscanga had charged Chief Justice Aguero with amassing an illegal fortune during his four terms in office; the judge implied that his former boss was plotting his death. Aguero resigned on July 12, despite being formally cleared of suspicion by the DF attorney general's office. Pedro Aspe and Mexico City regent (mayor) Oscar Espinosa Villarreal had been cleared of suspicion in the Polo Uscanga case on June 27. Some suspect that SUTAUR 100, which has marched to demand justice for Polo Uscanga's murder, itself killed the judge in order to create a martyr for the movement. But in that case, La Jornada columnist Miguel Covian Perez notes, it is hard to see why the leftists would have murdered Polo Uscanga a few feet from their own offices. It is equally hard to understand, according to the columnist, why Chief Justice Aguero would arrange for a murder in which he would certainly be the prime suspect. Covian Perez suggests that investigators should be looking instead for a "third man".The busy billionaire
Despite a lack of hard evidence, the four Mexican murders raise suspicions about an astonishing range of potential "bad guys", from a chief justice to a papal nuncio, from drug cartels to the intelligence and law-enforcement agencies of Mexico and the US. One man, however, stands out as the person who appears to have the greatest number of links to all four cases: Carlos Hank Gonzalez, a former rural schoolteacher who became a leader of the conservative PRI politicians Mexicans refer to as the "dinosaurs", and the 25th of the 28 billionaires Mexico had produced by the end of 1994. He once remarked that "a politician who's poor is a poor politician". Hank Gonzalez's younger son, Jorge Hank Rhon, runs a race track in Tijuana. US journalist Andrew Reding reports that two Aeromexico flight attendants say they saw Hank Rhon in the first class section of the flight that carried Cardinal Posadas' murderers away from Guadalajara to Tijuana. They say that Hank Rhon was sitting with Benjamin and Javier Arellano Felix, the alleged Tijuana Cartel bosses. Hank Gonzalez himself is thought to have links with the drug cartels. Reding writes that Jorge Hank Rhon had business links in Cancun with Marcela Bodenstedt's husband. Bodenstedt is the alleged femme fatale said to have used her romantic links with former presidency secretary Jose Cordoba Montoya to infiltrate Colosio's security force. Hank Gonzalez was agriculture secretary at the end of the Salinas administration, and from this position strongly influenced the agriculture and water resources committee of the federal Congress. The committee was chaired by Munoz Rocha, the now-missing coordinator of the Ruiz Massieu assassination. When Mario Ruiz Massieu resigned from the murder investigation in November 1994, Hank Gonzalez was one of the PRI conservatives who the prosecutor said may have helped block the probe. But the unexplained $8 million the former prosecutor had secretly deposited in the US turned up in the Texas Commerce Bank in Houston, a Chemical Bank subsidiary that is said to have connections with Hank Gonzalez's older son Carlos Hank Rhon. Hank Gonzalez also has interesting connections to Mexico City's bankrupt Route 100. He was one of the owners of the chaotic private bus system that Route 100 replaced in the early 1980s. Hank Gonzalez has an interest in the privatised minibus system that seems to be the planned replacement for Route 100. US journalist John Ross writes that the politician "stands to increase his already ample fortune if [Mayor] Espinosa contracts with his Mercedes-Benz subsidiary for the manufacture of 3,000 new minibuses". On May 22 Mexican customs officials arrested Jorge Hank Rhon as he arrived in Mexico's City's international airport from Japan with 12 suitcases of carved ivory and rare animal pelts, whose total value he had declared as US$1000. Andrew Reding sees this as a hopeful sign that President Zedillo is trying to rein in the power of the Hank family and "place every cabinet minister, police commander, and army general on notice to respect the law". But other signs are less hopeful. On June 28 Zedillo dismissed his long-time personal friend Esteban Moctezuma Barragan from his powerful post as governance secretary. Moctezuma's replacement was Mexico state Governor Emilio Chuayffet Chemor. The Other Side of Mexico, the bimonthly publication of the Mexican non-governmental organisation Equipo Pueblo, describes Chuayffet as "a politician close to Carlos Hank Gonzalez". On August 26 Chuayffet was expected at a lavish 68th birthday party for Hank Gonzalez, himself a former Mexico state governor. The billionaire is said to have cancer, which may explain why he has kept a low profile recently. On September 2 Attorney General Antonio Lozano Gracia said that there were no new leads in Cardinal Posadas' murder and that the case was closed.[This report was produced by the Weekly News Update on the Americas and New York Transfer News Collective.]