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 labour dispute, was found murdered in a downtown office building on the morning of June 20, 1995. This is part two of a three-part series.
The World Bank and the CIA
Most Mexicans remain convinced that the Colosio assassination could not have been carried out without a wider conspiracy, and that a conspiracy of such scope would be impossible without the participation of Los Pinos, the presidential residence. Even former PRI president Maria de Los Angeles Morena Uriegas implied, while talking to reporters last May 13, that the investigators should take testimony from Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the president at the time of the killing, and his presidency secretary (chief of staff), Jose Cordoba Montoya. As a naturalised Mexican, Cordoba was unable to hold high public office, but he had managed to build up considerable power behind the scenes in Los Pinos. One week after the Colosio assassination, on March 31, President Salinas suddenly dismissed Cordoba and sent him to a newly created post as Mexico's representative to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington. Suspicions about Cordoba increased in September 1994, when former federal drug investigator Eduardo Valle Espinosa charged that ex-model and ex-police officer Marcela Bodenstedt, said to be an agent for Juan Garcia Abrego's drug operation (the "Gulf Cartel"), had used a romantic connection with Cordoba to infiltrate Colosio's security. On June 30, 1995, current President Ernesto Zedillo dropped Cordoba from the IDB post. Cordoba will not be out of work, however. He is to remain in Washington as a consultant for World Bank vice president Shahid Jadid Burki, freelancing for 90 to 100 days a year at US$1000 a day. "The growing opposition [to Cordoba] in Mexico contrasts with the image of him that financiers and diplomats in Washington express when they speak of him", writes Mexican columnist Jose Urena, who says that Cordoba was a major mover in the deal that got Mexico a $53 billion bail-out in February from the US and international lending institutions. On August 8 the New York Times revealed that Fernando de la Sota, the head of Colosio's private security team, was a paid informant for the US CIA from 1990 to 1992. De la Sota wasn't the only suspect with a background in intelligence. Mexican federal agent Jorge Antonio Sanchez Ortega — the reputed Mario Aburto look-a-like — was working for the Centre of Investigations and National Security (CISEN) when he was arrested. Andrew Reding calls the CISEN "Mexico's counterpart to the CIA". Cordoba was its coordinator at the time of the Colosio assassination.Men who knew too much?
No-one ever denied that there was a conspiracy behind the September 1994 murder of PRI general secretary Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, a former governor of the western state of Guerrero, the ex-husband of then president Salinas' sister Adriana Salinas de Gortari, and a rising political star expected to lead the PRI's congressional majority. The assassin, Daniel Aguilar Trevino, was apprehended at the scene of the crime. He confessed and implicated Carlos Cantu Narvaez, the alleged getaway driver, and Fernando Rodriguez Gonzalez. Rodriguez Gonzalez in turn implicated his boss, Manuel Munoz Rocha, a PRI federal deputy from the north-eastern state of Tamaulipas. Munoz Rocha disappeared on September 29, the day after the murder. Columnist Urena reports that Munoz Rocha may have fled to a house he owned in Brownsville, Texas, where agents of the FBI allegedly stalled on an extradition request, letting him escape. Rodriguez Gonzalez has continued to implicate more and more people in the crime. Apparently his testimony was involved in the arrest on February 28 of Raul Salinas de Gortari, the brother of Carlos and Adriana, on charges of masterminding the murder. In an interview published by the conservative independent Mexico City daily Reforma on July 20, Rodriguez Gonzalez announced that Carlos Salinas himself had been the real mastermind, and that the wounded Ruiz Massieu died because a doctor sent by the former president had kept the victim from receiving proper medical attention in the hospital where he was taken after being shot. Journalist Alexander Cockburn added another bizarre element to the story of the Salinas brothers when he revealed in the Nation that as children they shot and killed their family's 12-year old maid. This happened when Carlos was four and Raul was five; the children were playing war games with their father's .22. But the strangest aspect of the case is the role of the victim's own brother, then-deputy federal attorney general Mario Ruiz Massieu. President Salinas made Mario, who was then in charge of federal drug investigations, the special prosecutor in the case. After investigating his brother's murder for two months, Mario resigned in a dramatic, well-publicised press conference on November 23, upstaging a meeting in Washington between US President Bill Clinton and incoming Mexican President Zedillo. Ruiz Massieu said he had three boxes of evidence implicating the PRI's right wing, and concluded: "Last September 28 one bullet killed two Ruiz Massieus. It took the life of one and from the other it took the hope and faith that a PRI government could ever approach justice. The demons are running loose, and have triumphed." Ruiz Massieu quit the PRI and joined the centre-left opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) as a legal adviser to its president, Porfirio Munoz Ledo. But Ruiz Massieu now admits that he accepted a $120,000 cash "bonus" from Carlos Salinas at about the same time that he made his dramatic resignation. And columnist Urena reports that the special prosecutor received a house worth $2 million from the government. After Raul Salinas' arrest on February 28, the Zedillo administration suggested that Mario Ruiz Massieu may have been paid off to steer the investigation away from Raul. On March 2 the former prosecutor suddenly fled Mexico with his wife and daughter. FBI agents followed him from the moment he entered the US through Houston. Ruiz Massieu was arrested at Newark International Airport as he was attempting to take his family to Madrid; he was charged with making a false customs declaration about the $46,000 in cash he was carrying. The US later revealed that he had $8 million deposited in a Texas bank. Mexico and the US are now working on their second attempt to get Ruiz Massieu back to Mexico. On June 22, federal Judge Ronald Hedges in Newark rejected Mexico's first extradition request, based on charges that Ruiz Massieu had covered up Raul Salinas' role in the assassination. Judge Hedges ruled that the testimony against Ruiz Massieu had been obtained through torture and was "incredible and unreliable". The judge seems likely to reject a second request, based on charges that the former prosecutor embezzled at least $400,000 while in office, helping to explain the $8 million in his Texas bank accounts. Mexico and the US seemed unable to present convincing evidence during court appearances on August 3, 4 and 10. Mexico's zeal in the case against Mario Ruiz Massieu contrasts strikingly with the glacial pace of the other murder investigations. Some circles in the US also seem to have a noticeable animosity against the former prosecutor. Tim Golden reported in the New York Times that before Zedillo took office on December 1, the US government handed his advisers a list of more than a dozen officials the US didn't want to see in the new government; Mario Ruiz Massieu was on the list. Noting that Ruiz Massieu's resignation in November reportedly precipitated a $1.5 billion flight of hard currency from Mexico and "started the peso's final slide toward devaluation a few weeks later", a Wall Street Journal editorial fulminated against Hedges' refusal to ship the former prosecutor back to Mexico: "In short, Mr. Ruiz Massieu, amid signs he was in bed with the drug cartels, played a crucial role in collapsing the peso and destabilizing Mexico". What makes the eagerness of some US forces to get Ruiz Massieu out of the picture most noteworthy is the evidence that as deputy attorney general he collaborated closely with the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). According to the Mexican daily La Jornada, Ruiz Massieu's official reports to the government praised the DEA's role in work against Juan Garcia Abrego's Gulf Cartel and noted that DEA agents had carried out surveillance and telephone interceptions — presumably in violation of Mexican law—of people thought to be connected to the cartel.[This report was produced by the Weekly News Update on the Americas and New York Transfer News Collective. Part 3 will be printed in the next issue of GLW.]