The Two Faces of an Accused Assassin : Violence: Mexican officials call Mario Aburto Martinez a killer. But his father, who works in San Pedro, says: ‘My son is innocent.’

To Mexican authorities, Mario Aburto Martinez is a coldblooded killer: an apparent fanatic, possibly deranged, who may have schemed about shooting Luis Donaldo Colosio, the front-runner for the Mexican presidency, before assassinating the candidate in a Tijuana neighborhood last week.

But to friends and relatives in San Pedro, the tough harbor neighborhood where Aburto lived intermittently in recent years, the suspect is someone else: a hard-working, serious and intelligent young man who seems an unlikely candidate to be Mexico’s most notorious assassin since the post-revolutionary period more than 50 years ago.

Although offering no proof, relatives and others who know Aburto said in interviews Monday that Mexican authorities are using the 23-year-old suspect as a fall guy--an allegation that has been heatedly denied by officials in Mexico, where such conspiracy theories are also gaining currency. Relatives speculate that conspirators may have manipulated Aburto to go to the scene and become an unwilling participant in a broader plot--perhaps after threatening to harm family members in Tijuana.

“My son is innocent,” said a distraught Ruben Aburto, 47, father of the accused assassin, during an interview Monday at a San Pedro automobile repair shop owned by a relative. “I feel that there are others involved in this who are really responsible.”

On Monday, Mexican authorities said that a security guard may have aided the gunman, giving added credence to theories that Colosio’s death may have resulted from a conspiracy.

The suspect’s father and a brother, Rafael Aburto, agreed to be interviewed Monday in what they characterized as an effort to counter a smear campaign. No relatives have been able to speak with the suspect since his arrest, they said.

“I want to unmask what the government is doing to my son,” said the father, a furniture factory employee who says he has been unable to work or think straight since his son’s arrest.

Contrary to news reports and official allegations in Mexico, relatives said the suspect had no interest in politics, knew nothing about guns, and was a member of no grass-roots organizations, religious groups or Los Angeles-based gangs.

“My brother would settle something with words, not with arms,” said Rafael Aburto, 24, the eldest of the six Aburto siblings.

Nor was Aburto insane, relatives say. “He has always been very smart and very responsible,” Ruben Aburto said of his son, who, he said, saved his earnings and helped support his family in Tijuana.

According to Mexican officials, Mario Aburto Martinez has confessed to shooting Colosio--the presidential candidate of Mexico’s long-governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as PRI--during a campaign stop in Tijuana last Wednesday. Aburto told interrogators that he intended to wound the candidate in a twisted effort to draw attention to his pacifist views.

In Mexico, polls have shown that most people doubt that Aburto acted alone.

In recent days, Mexican law enforcement authorities have painted an increasingly bizarre portrait of Aburto, depicting him as a misguided zealot who may have considered assassinating President Carlos Salinas de Gortari during his 1988 electoral campaign. Reportedly, Aburto’s possessions include a notebook containing a drawing showing Aburto’s spirit entering the body of Colosio, who was headed to almost certain victory in the Aug. 21 presidential elections.

In San Pedro, those who knew Aburto dispute the emerging portrait of a disturbed young man who purchased a revolver in recent weeks and went to a firing range to practice.

“My son is a peaceful boy and a good worker,” said the accused killer’s father.

He expressed remorse to Colosio’s family and said he last saw his son two weeks ago in Tijuana, where Mario had built a home with earnings gained during a yearlong stint as a furniture worker in Torrance during 1989-90 and subsequent employment in Tijuana factories. He seemed normal then, the father said.

As for politics, Aburto’s kin said it is absurd to cast him as some kind of activist or pacifist. They professed no knowledge of the suspect’s supposed writings on pacifism. However, Aburto did reportedly attempt to publish some of his tracts in Spanish-language publications in Southern California.

In general, relatives described Aburto as a young man who worked hard, enjoyed female companionship, liked to dance and occasionally had a few beers.

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Aburto was a native of La Riconada, a village that is part of the municipality of Zamora in Mexico’s central Michoacan state. He is one of six offspring of Ruben Aburto and Maria Luisa Martinez. The family moved to Tijuana when Aburto was about 15, relatives said, a northward exodus common among Mexican families. The father has worked intermittently in the United States since the early 1970s, initially finding employment in the tuna canneries of San Pedro.

Mario Aburto returned to Tijuana from San Pedro in 1990, relatives said. He visited San Pedro on occasion since then.

For the accused assassin’s father, who shares a cramped one-bedroom flat in a run-down housing complex with another Mexican family, word of his son’s arrest came as he was preparing dinner Wednesday. The father said he watched the news of Colosio’s assassination on television, and then gasped in horror as he recognized his son being pummeled by security guards and others who grabbed him at the scene.

“That was such a shock for me, I wanted to die,” the father said Monday evening. “I almost fainted. I recognized my son, but I couldn’t hardly believe that it was him.”

Since then, the family has been in crisis. Mexican police detained his wife and three youngest children in Tijuana. He contends that they were tortured and otherwise mistreated--allegations denied by Mexican authorities.

Nonetheless, he, Rafael, and another son, Ruben Jr. 21--all of whom live in San Pedro--say they are afraid to go back to Mexico or speak to Mexican consular authorities in this country.

Mexican officials have hinted that the father is wanted on a murder charge from more than 20 years ago in Michoacan--a charge the father contends has been dismissed.