Baja California Columnist’s Killer Gets 27 Years

A Baja California state judge has imposed a near-maximum 27-year prison sentence on a former race-track security guard and one-time state police agent after convicting him of being the triggerman in the slaying of a prominent Tijuana journalist.

Judge Braulio Gomez Veronica found on Wednesday that Victoriano Medina Moreno, 38, is guilty in the slaying of Hector Felix Miranda, a columnist who was widely known for more than a decade in Baja California under the nom de plume of El Gato--the Cat.

However, the long-expected ruling failed to curb the controversy and doubts surrounding a case that precipitated large protests against the state government and still inflames passions in Baja California. Many have maintained that a massive cover-up is under way and Medina, while an accomplice in the slaying, is a fall guy for higher, politically connected interests. Two suspects remain at large.

Medina has given conflicting versions of his involvement in the crime, first signing a confession and subsequently maintaining that he was innocent and that police had tortured him into confessing.

Felix, whose gossipy, often-strident and frequently outrageous column--Un Poco de Algo (A Little of Something)--lampooned the movers and shakers of the border state and Mexico, was gunned down as he drove to work April 20, 1988. A gunman pumped two shotgun rounds through the driver’s window of the late-model sedan as it was stopped or rolled slowly on a rain-slicked street. Felix was killed instantly.

Although there is widespread agreement that Medina was probably an accomplice in the slaying, many Mexican journalists, led by Felix’s colleagues at the muckraking weekly Zeta, have maintained that Medina was probably no more than a driver at the scene. Indeed, Gomez noted in his sentencing document that the case will remain open until the apprehension of Antonio Vera Palestina, former security chief at the Caliente Racetrack in Tijuana, who was Medina’s ex-boss. Many believe that Vera was the actual triggerman.

Vera, a former police official in Mexico City, is a fugitive. An arrest warrant has also been issued for a third former security official at the race track, Emigdio Nevarez, who also remains at large.

J. Jesus Blancornelas, Felix’s longtime partner and co-founder with him of Zeta, said he is convinced that the “intellectual author” of the crime has never been formally charged. Blancornelas has repeatedly pointed the finger, in print, at Jorge Hank Rhon, the president of Caliente, who is one of the richest men in Baja. His father, Carlos Hank Gonzalez, is a former mayor of Mexico City and is counted among the Mexican power elite. The race track president, a frequent target of Felix’s barbed pen, employed all three named suspects.

Both the race track official and the elder Hank, who now is the national minister of tourism, a cabinet-level post, have denied any involvement in the slaying or in any cover-up.