28 years after the murder of Luis Donaldo Colosio, the assassination that still shakes Mexico

Twenty-eight years ago, Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta, a presidential candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the 1994 elections, came to Tijuana to lead proselytizing events. On March 23, he went to an event in the neighborhood of Lomas Taurinas from which he never returned. In the middle of the meeting, a man, later identified as Mario Aburto, shot him twice, sealing his death.

This is a murder that still shakes up the country's politics, a case that still raises questions and which the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, intends to reopen at a time when the son of the murdered politician assumes his popular legacy.

“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,” said researcher Flavio Meléndez, author of the book “Mexico River Revuelto. 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,” explains Efe Ulises Corona, professor of politics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

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

His figure transcends, adds 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,” says the 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 the then-president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994), ordered him killed and another is that Mario Aburto, his confessed murderer, is actually innocent and the real perpetrators used him as a “scapegoat”, says Meléndez.

“For months before, there was a rumor” that “something was going to happen to Colosio and that it was not going to come 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.

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 dictatorship of the PRI 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, President 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 warns 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 says.

Colosio's political lineage is kept alive in his son Luis Donaldo Colosio Riojas, current mayor of the northern 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 the favorite of his party, the opposition Movimiento Ciudadano (MC), to be a presidential candidate in 2024. Professor Corona believes that he 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 says.

Another legacy of the assassination is the violence that has remained in force, because the Mexican political system was not the same again, Meléndez adds.” The constitutional pact that had existed 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 concludes. CHIEF

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