28 years after the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio: the murder that struck Mexico

The assassination of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta, which occurred on a day like today 28 years ago, still shakes up the country's politics, raising questions that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador intends to reopen, while the son of the murdered politician assumes his popular legacy.

Colosio Murrieta, of the then hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was shot twice on March 23, 1994 while greeting the crowd at a rally in the popular neighborhood of Lomas Taurinas, on the Tijuana border.

“The assassination involved an important moment, a crisis in the Mexican political system that was already present in other ways before the assassination of Colosio 28 years ago,” researcher Flavio Meléndez, author of the book “Mexico River Revuelto, told Efe. From State crime to the State of crime”.

Although he was not yet president, the PRI candidates won the elections organically until the transition in 2000, so his assassination is considered the most serious assassination in Mexico since 1928, when they killed President-elect Alvaro Obregon, who had already presided over the country between 1920 and 1924.

“Of course it was a state assassination because the entire Mexican political system collapsed because economic, institutional, ideological and social structures collapsed,” Ulises Corona, professor of politics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), explained to Efe Ulises Corona.

Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta, born in the state of Sonora in 1950, “was a candidate that symbolized the rupture of the old PRI regime towards a new, more democratic, mostly plural, more participatory and socially based model,” according to Corona.

His figure transcends, added the academic, because he is a “charismatic, honest, simple and good-natured” leader who knew how to handle the concept of national unity and integrate family life into politics.

“Colosio's ideals remain valid because they were not the PRI's ideals, they were ideals of social rather than economic liberalism, ideological rather than political liberalism, non-partisan intellectual liberalism,” stressed the UNAM professor.

It is precisely because of that rupture figure that Colosio represented that conspiracy theories have emerged, explains Meléndez.

The most common of these is that then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) had him killed and another is that Mario Aburto, his confessed murderer, is actually innocent and the real perpetrators used him as a “scapegoat,” Meléndez explained.

“For months before, there was a rumor that Colosio was going to get sick, something was going to happen to him and that it was not going to arrive on election day,” he says.

The controversy has been revived because the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) last October requested that the Office of the Attorney General of the Republic (FGR) investigate the arrest and sentence of Aburto, claiming that he was a victim of torture.

However, in her investigation of more than 10 years, Meléndez documented at least three expert reports involving Scotland Yard, the FBI and the Spanish Police.

In addition, the researcher is a member of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis, so he has studied the profile of Aburto, who intended to “end the empire”, in reference to the PRI, and confessed to the crime since the day of the attack.

“He wanted to save the country from that PRI dictatorship that had already been in power for 65 years, he believes that he was invested as an eagle knight to save the country,” he details.

In the midst of the controversy, the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has offered to reopen the case and protect Aburto.

“If he can express, prove, that he was tortured, that he is threatened and that is why he has remained silent, if there is another version, the Mexican State would protect him,” López Obrador said last October.

In this context, Professor Corona warned that politicians still take advantage of Colosio's death “to bring water to his mill”.

“Reopening the case seems to me, more than anything, propaganda and mercantilist, a mere exit to the media, that is, to look for another unresolved scandal to cover the many mistakes that are happening at the moment,” he said.

Colosio's political lineage is kept alive in his son Luis Donaldo Colosio Riojas, current mayor of the city of Monterrey, capital of the second largest city in the country and the industrial state of Nuevo León.

Colosio Riojas, whose team rejected a request for an interview from Efe, appears in recent polls as his party's favorite, Movimiento Ciudadano (MC), to be a presidential candidate in 2024.

Professor Corona considered that Colosio Riojas has a future, but “not in the short term”.

“The responsibility of the surname is very large, I think it weighs a lot, but I think it still doesn't have the capacity to measure what he inherited,” he said.

Another legacy of the assassination is the violence that has remained in place, because the Mexican political system was not the same again, Meléndez added.

“The constitutional pact that had come since the Mexican Revolution is broken. What emerges is a multiplicity of powers inside and outside the State that dispute the president of the republic and the State himself for the monopoly of legitimate violence”, he concluded.

With information from EFE

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