NEWS ANALYSIS : For Mexico, an Ominous Year of Murder and Revolt : Latin America: Spate of violence unnerves nation. It began with cardinal’s slaying in Guadalajara last May.

The hail of bullets that ripped through the Guadalajara airport a year ago today, killing a Roman Catholic cardinal, was the first obvious sign that Mexico’s vaunted stability was teetering.

In the 12 months since then, Indian peasants have staged an armed rebellion in the south; the leading presidential candidate and a police chief have been assassinated in the north, and prominent businessmen have been kidnaped in broad daylight in the capital. Mexico has run through three attorneys general, and public safety has become a major issue in the presidential campaign.

And in that year, police still have not captured the drug lords believed to be responsible for the killings of Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo and six other people--and the gunmen’s escape to Tijuana on a commercial flight that was held 20 minutes for them.

When he was still attorney general last month, Diego Valades denied that the outbursts of violence were related.

“They are separate acts, isolated from each other,” he asserted during a news conference following his report to an annual meeting of Mexican bishops.

But the incidents are strongly linked in the public mind. When Mexicans talk about the spate of violence that has shaken their nation, they date it to May 24, 1993, the day drug dealers killed the cardinal.

The slaying has become a lightning rod for the growing criticism of the government’s seeming inability to maintain order, in part because the drug dealers believed to have been behind it are still free. Now, with each fresh display of weapons--whether in urban gun battles, jungle rebel camps or an assassination--the first question that police and citizens alike ask is, Did narcotics money pay for the arms?

The rebels who invaded and quickly left several towns near the Guatemalan border Jan. 1 took great pains to clarify that they were not linked to drug gangs. But in other cases, rumors of links to narcotics persist.

The failure to solve the cardinal’s murder has also strained church-state relations, which had been recovering from decades of official anti-clericalism. Until last week, the Roman Catholic Church had publicly accepted the government’s version of the killing: A rival gang aiming to kill drug lord Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman shot the cardinal 14 times by mistake.

But in his first news conference since replacing Posadas Ocampo as archbishop of Guadalajara--although not as a cardinal--Juan Sandoval Iniguez said Thursday, “That is not believable.”

He called for a stepped-up investigation to provide credible answers for why the cardinal was slain and how the suspected killers were able to escape.

According to authorities, the case has advanced little since December, when police arrested Francisco Rafael Arrellano, the older brother of the three men suspected of plotting the killing.

In Valades’ report to the bishops last month, he said 10 arrest warrants were outstanding in the case and that 37 people were in jail and awaiting trial--about the number who were arrested last June.

“This has not been forgotten,” Valades assured the bishops.

Indeed, in this election year, politicians are not letting it be forgotten.

“Do we want six more years of assassinations of cardinals that are never cleared up?” Cristobal Arias, a Senate candidate for the opposition Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), asked a crowd at a campaign rally in his home state of Michoacan. “No!’ they thundered back.

Arias went on to link the cardinal’s death to the more than 200 murders of PRD activists and the March 23 assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio, the presidential candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Ernesto Zedillo, Colosio’s replacement, has made public safety one of his top campaign issues.

But beyond the campaign rhetoric are signs that police are finding it harder to keep order.

One of the attorney general’s top advisers, Eduardo Valle Espinoza, quit last month, asking, in his letter of resignation, “When are we going to have the courage and political maturity to tell the Mexican people that we suffer from a sort of narco-democracy?”

His boss, Valades, resigned a few days later, clearing the way for this administration’s fifth attorney general and the third since the Posadas Ocampo murder.

“The history of honest officials such as Diego Valades . . . as attorney general is worrisome,” the independent newspaper La Jornada editorialized. “Little by little, they are worn down by an overburdened justice system and a climate of corruption that pervades all levels of the attorney general’s office.”

But for many Mexicans, the causes of these seemingly unrelated acts of violence go far deeper than the traditional police corruption or the influence of drug traffickers.

“Mexican society has undergone a profound economic change in recent years,” said Hector Aguilar Camin, a writer known for his political novels. “That is going to have social and political effects.”

The old order has been destroyed, and the violence is a sign of the need for a new order, Aguilar Camin said.