Many Mexicans still doubt the official version that Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio died from a single bullet fired by a deranged gunman on a muggy March day 20 years ago at a campaign stop in Tijuana.
Many people prefer to believe that conservative elements in the party conspired to eliminate Colosio, who three weeks earlier had made a speech that shocked the PRI’s old guard. Targeting the excessive concentration of power in the hands of a few, the candidate vowed to end authoritarianism and separate his dominant party from the government. It was a bold move that marked a split from incumbent president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who had hand-picked Colosio to be his successor, believing that the dashing 44-year-old technocrat would be the ideal man to carry on his policies of economic liberalization, while maintaining the PRI’s corporatist structure and hold over the nation’s most influential institutions.
This Sunday, two decades on from an incident that effectively changed the character of Mexico’s ruling party for ever, PRI dignitaries will pay tribute to Colosio, the man who never got the chance to put the democratic reforms he promised into practice.
Historians may argue that had he reached presidential office Colosio may not have been the savior the country required, rather another cautious pragmatist trapped in a political system largely controlled by vested interests. Nonetheless, like many famous people who die at a young age, Colosio’s legacy can be shaped in any way the observer chooses.Born in 1950 to a wealthy ranching/political family in the state of Sonora, Colosio was a bright student who graduated in economics from the Tec de Monterrey and went on to obtain a master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania. He had once shaken hands with President Adolfo Mateos (1958-1964) on a school trip to Mexico City, an experience biographers like to say was the “spark” that drew him into politics.
His rise to the highest echelons of power was rapid. He served in the Sonora state legislature and as a federal congressman and senator, before taking over as head of the PRI. After managing the presidential campaign of Salinas in 1987, he was asked to serve as the director of the new president’s social welfare program, Solidaridad.
His choice as Salinas’ successor caused some commotion within the party. Everyone believed Foreign Minister Manuel Camacho Solis was a shoo-in for the nomination. Furious at the slight, Camacho never forgave the president or the PRI. He even considered running against Colosio as an independent but was eventually persuaded to take on the job as the government’s chief negotiator with the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas. A year later Camacho would quit the PRI and join the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
To insiders the choice of Colosio was not so surprising. Camacho’s temperament – as his public displays of anger would later demonstrate – was always in doubt and the handsome, mustached Sonoran was regarded by the media as a “cool dude.” A “ladies’ man” who loved riding motorbikes, Colosio had been carefully nurtured by Salinas and was close to a political son as there could be.
Colosio began his presidential campaign with the country in turmoil. The indigenous Zapatista uprising in the impoverished southernmost state of Chiapas had broken out on January 1, 1994, the same day the North American Fee Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had come into effect. Although fighting only lasted 12 days before a cease fire was agreed, the rebellion had brought international attention to Mexico’s huge disparities of wealth and the appalling, centuries-old treatment of its native population. The rebels also challenged everything Salinas stood for: his government’s subservience to the United States, his neoliberal policies and, particularly, his hated agrarian reforms.
Salinas had enjoyed high popularity ratings throughout 1993 and had expected the following year to be a swan song that would cement his place in Mexico’s history books. But the Zapatista uprising changed the narrative, unleashing further grievances all across the nation and threatening his Gorbachev-like legacy.
Perhaps sensing the changing social climate, and keen to move out of the shadow of his “godfather,” Colosio began to distance himself from the president, promising to broaden democracy and empower the population as he bounded across the country from rally to rally.
While being escorted to his car amongst a throng of people on March 23, 1994, at the end of an open-air campaign stop in Tijuana, a man emerged stealthily from the crowd brandishing a handgun. Within seconds he fired a single bullet at close range into Colosio’s right temple. Bystanders pounced on the gunman while the candidate was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he died within an hour.
The blurry video images that captured the moment of the assassination were later broadcast into the nation’s homes. Like the film clips of President John F. Kennedy’s fateful final ride in Dallas they were to become the departure point for endless conspiracy theories. Why was the perpetrator, Mario Aburto, a 23-year-old drifter, allowed to get so close to the candidate? Did others ease him into position? Did he actually fire the fatal shot?
Aburto confessed to the crime and insisted he was a lone assassin. When he was subsequently paraded before the media in prison garb, his clean-shaven look made some doubters wonder if this was the same man who was photographed being led away to a police van on March 23.
The killing generated a frenzy of speculation and investigators found themselves obliged to dig deeper. Seven others were arrested, including three of Colosio’s security guards. All were soon released for lack of evidence. Once the police case file was finally closed, Aburto was sentenced to 42 years in jail for his crime.
Initially, Colosio’s family was not convinced by the lone assassin theory and demanded more clarity. It was only when the PRI offered his father a seat in the Senate did the family openly accept the official line that neither the party or the president played any role in the slaying.
One of the conspiracy theories that has gained traction over the years is that Colosio’s death was ordered by drug traffickers. Salinas had openly targeted the Pacific cartels while protecting the Gulf Cartel. Was the assassination a message? A 1993 U.S. intelligence report noted that Colosio had briefly befriended drug traffickers in Sonora when he started his political career. Was there a connection here?
These theories have been largely discounted, not just due to inconclusive evidence but because drug cartel bosses would be unlikely to employ someone as mentally deranged as Aburto to carry out such an important hit.
Colosio’s death marked the beginning of a major period of transition for the PRI. His replacement, the dour bureaucrat Ernesto Zedillo, was a safe choice. Untainted by corruption but loyal to the party, he presided over economic disaster in December 1994 when financial bungling led to a 50-percent slide in the value of the peso. Shrewdly, Zedillo was able to deflect much of the personal blame for the mismanagement of the economy and Mexico’s misfortunes on to the shoulders of Salinas, who had become public enemy number one. After his brother was arrested for the murder of a political opponent, the former president fled to Ireland in fear of his safety and further “political persecution.” His reputation has never recovered.
Colosio and Zedillo were the last PRI presidential candidates to be hand-picked by the sitting chief executive. The 1999 candidate, Francisco Labastida Ochoa, was chosen in the party’s first nationwide primary – a sign, or so party leaders claimed, that the PRI was becoming more democratic and politically legitimate. But the toll taken on the PRI over the past six years proved to be too heavy. Mechanisms had been introduced to make elections more honest and Labastida – a gray technocrat – was a poor candidate. The nation was ready to end the PRI’s 71-year stranglehold on power. Labastida won just 36 percent of the vote, losing the election to Vicente Fox of the right-of-center National Action Party (PAN).
Eulogies to Colosio on Sunday, March 23 are most likely to embrace the view that Mexico lost a fine public servant of impeccable character who was denied the opportunity to implement his vision for the nation. The task of evaluating how much the PRI (and the nation) has changed as the result of his demise will be left to the commentators.