Assassination Again Brands Tijuana as a Lawless City

In the shantytown where Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio fell mortally wounded in the dirt, the children gathered discarded campaign signs and blood-stained pebbles as mementos Thursday.

And the adults talked about fear.

Like the rest of Tijuana, the people of Lomas Taurinas were coming to grips with the Wednesday assassination of Colosio, who was widely expected to become Mexico’s next president and who had campaigned here moments before his death, promising to help this hillside neighborhood of hovels and rutted dirt roads.

His murder was a grievous blow to a city that has been battered by escalating street violence intertwined with allegations of political corruption.

Colosio’s assassination came three weeks after a deadly gun battle on a busy boulevard pitting federal police against state police officers who were allegedly protecting a drug lord.

“I’m very afraid,” said Juvenita Manzano, 56, who lives in the squatters’ development that is a stronghold of Colosio’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI as it is known. “The last couple of weeks with the drug shootings, and now this tragedy, I don’t understand it. The question the people are asking: Why did he have to die, when he was going to help the people?”

Across town, in the Plaza Rio shopping mall with a Denny’s restaurant and trendy department stores that embody the new face of Mexico, marketing manager Ceasar Leal, 63, observed: “There is so much violence in Baja and in Mexico. What happened here yesterday, what happened in Chiapas, what happened with the drug shooting--it’s like going back 40, 50 years.

“Tijuana,” he continued, “is coming apart, like Chicago during Prohibition. Politically speaking, people are so passionate--and that is dangerous. The problem is that the government tells us nothing about what is going on.”

Leal echoed the doubts, uncertainty and conspiracy theories that were swirling around an increasingly turbulent Mexico on Thursday.

His words had particular resonance for Tijuana and Baja California, an opposition-controlled state with a history of tension with the PRI government.

Tijuana has tried hard to emphasize its little-known side, portraying itself as a modern metropolis with a population approaching almost 2 million, a youthfully energetic municipal administration and a burgeoning arts scene.

But, unjustly or not, the assassination has once again branded Tijuana as a lawless, sinister border town.

And in conversations on the street Thursday, it seemed as if the assassination was the explosion at the end of a long-simmering fuse.

“We have been insistent about the high levels of criminality in this state,” said a somber Jose Luis Perez Canchola, the state’s human rights ombudsman, during an appearance on a radio talk show. “There has been apathy and disinterest on the part of the police in attacking this escalation of crime. . . . This is a call of alarm that should concern us greatly.”

Until Wednesday, lawlessness in Tijuana had been synonymous with drugs. The city is the home base of the powerful Arellano drug cartel, which is suspected in a three-year wave of murders and brazen shootouts--including the notorious slaying last year of the archbishop of Guadalajara. Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo and six others were killed when they were caught in a drug-related shootout in the parking lot of Guadalajara’s international airport, authorities say.

Although the government has said the cleric was shot by mistake, doubts and politically tinged conspiracy theories linger here because the Arellanos remain at large. They continue to run the Tijuana cartel and allegedly were behind a shootout on March 3 that left five people dead--including the commander of an elite federal unit that was hunting the Arellanos and a state police officer who was alleged to have been guarding a top cartel lieutenant.

That shootout left Gov. Ernesto Ruffo Appel stuck with a major corruption scandal.

Ruffo was the target of openly partisan criticism Thursday among some Colosio supporters, who blamed the state and city for failing to provide sufficient security for the slain politician.

Ruffo responded that security was the campaign’s responsibility and that local authorities had provided all the officers that were needed.

Regardless of the political concerns that swirled here Thursday, the emotions expressed over Colosio’s killing also were heartfelt.

In Lomas Taurinas, still strewn with confetti and bloodstains from the previous day’s events, the crowd grew at a memorial service Thursday afternoon. As night fell, there was talk of renaming the neighborhood for Colosio. And there was talk of the fear that grips the neighborhood and the nation.

“Something is terribly wrong in Mexico,” said Jose Antonio Rique, 43. “ The government does not tell us the truth. . . . Who is behind all of these terrible things that are happening?”

Working-Class Roots

Background on Luis Donaldo Colosio, who was gunned down Wednesday at age 44:

* Education: Degrees in economics from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania.

* Background: The oldest of six children, he spent his childhood helping his father, a rancher, in the small town of Magdalena de Kino in the northern state of Sonora. He relied on scholarships and other help to get him through college.

* Political inspiration: Like President Clinton, who was inspired by shaking President John F. Kennedy’s hand, Colosio said he decided to go into politics when he shook the hand of President Adolfo Lopez Mateos on a trip to Mexico City awarded him for having the best grades throughout high school.

* Political style: Usually shy and tense until he mounted a platform and started to speak to supporters--usually poor people. Then the words would start to flow easily, he would relax, and he related to his listeners.

* Career: Managed President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s 1988 campaign, guiding him to a narrow victory over Cuauhtemoc Cardenas in an election that foes decried as tainted. Before being named a candidate, directed the government’s $3-billion-plus Solidarity program, which built roads and brought electricity and running water to remote communities but which critics said was designed to perpetuate the party’s grip on power.

* Personal: Married to Diana Laura Riojas, an economist. Two children, newly born Mariana and Luis Donaldo, 7.

Sources: Times staff and wire reports