2nd Suspect in Colosio Killing a Party Insider

Othon Cortes Vazquez was, by all accounts, a low-ranking ruling party insider--a chauffeur for local party bosses, a street-level party operative, security guard and fixture among police officers and journalists in the border town of Tijuana.

Eleven months ago, Cortes was videotaped and photographed inches away from the presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party just seconds before two bullets ripped into Luis Donaldo Colosio’s head and abdomen at a Tijuana campaign rally.

That same night, Cortes even drove in the caravan that carried Colosio’s body from Tijuana General Hospital to the city’s international airport.

On Saturday, as his family and friends reacted with shock and denial, Cortes was in a maximum-security prison in Mexico City, charged with being the second gunman in the assassination of Colosio, a killing that changed the face of Mexican politics and that authorities now assert was, in fact, a conspiracy. Cortes, 28, was arrested early Friday in Tijuana while taking his two children to school.

Also Saturday, federal authorities confirmed that they had taken the investigation a step further, arresting Fernando de la Sota, a former high-ranking federal police commander who had been chosen by the party to head one of Colosio’s campaign security teams when he was shot.

It was the latest twist in a murder case that has rivaled the John F. Kennedy assassination in its multitude of conspiracy theories and widespread public doubt.

In suddenly announcing Cortes’ arrest and officially endorsing a persistent second-gunman theory for the first time late Friday night, Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano stunned and partially satisfied a nation that has never accepted the findings of two earlier investigative commissions. Those probes concluded that Colosio was killed by a single, fanatic factory worker named Mario Aburto Martinez, who is now serving a 45-year prison term for the crime.

After nearly a year of inconclusive and often contradictory findings from a steady series of investigators, not everyone is convinced that Lozano’s latest bombshell will lead to the masterminds of the assassination.

But as Cortes’ background began to emerge Saturday, it was clear that Lozano had formally opened a line of investigation that political leaders and sources close to the case indicated could lead high up in the ruling party, known as the PRI, and even inside Lozano’s own federal prosecutor’s office.

One opposition congressman said he will demand a parallel investigation into a cover-up that could reach to the highest levels of the government of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who appointed the commissions that investigated the murder of his handpicked successor.

“When we presume it was a state crime, we are thinking in terms of the highest authorities,” legislator Ramon Sosamontes said. “It is not easy to prove it, but we have to make the effort.”

“The investigations should be taken to their ultimate consequences, because the existence of two gunmen is not the work of coincidence,” said Jaime Martinez Veloz, a ruling party legislator from the state of Baja California.

With Saturday’s arrest of De la Sota, 44, the nation’s top prosecutor reinforced his assertion that Cortes was part of a conspiracy. Lozano flatly declared that crucial evidence--one of the bullets that allegedly hit Colosio--had been planted at the crime scene rather than fired from a pistol.

Lozano, the first opposition party member to serve in a ruling party Cabinet, had already told reporters that the investigation led by his trusted top deputy, special prosecutor Pablo Chapa Bezanilla, is nowhere near complete.

“This is just the end of the preliminary stage,” he said in an eight-page statement Friday night. “We will continue with the investigation until all the facts are clarified.”

Through interviews with Cortes’ family, leaks apparently from the prosecutor’s office published Saturday and documents amassed during the earlier probes of the assassination, it seems clear that Cortes did, in fact, have strong ties to the ruling party, to the Colosio campaign and to key security chiefs whose names have surfaced in connection with the assassination in the past.

So strong were those links, in fact, that Cortes’ family and friends Saturday firmly rejected the allegation that he had participated in any way in the Colosio assassination. They cast him as a scapegoat being offered up to an increasingly skeptical and angry public.

“I know my brother, and I know he never could have done something like this,” said Josue Cortes Vazquez, the 34-year-old brother of the accused, who comes from a lower-middle-class family originally from Oaxaca. “I want to ask those who are accusing him to reflect on the fact that he has a wife and two children, and that they think about what they are doing to him 11 months after this incident occurred.”

The family, in fact, said Cortes was a great admirer of Colosio and had been traumatized by witnessing his brutal killing.

“He would have given his life for Colosio,” said Alejandro Cortes, the suspect’s uncle. “When they killed Mr. Colosio, it made him sick.”

During the earlier investigations, Cortes himself had testified in a deposition--which he volunteered in June based on his proximity to the killing--that he was about a yard away from the candidate when he heard two shots, “like firecrackers.” But he said he never saw Colosio’s killer because he was helping carry the mortally wounded candidate to a nearby vehicle. And he stressed that he knew none of the suspects in the case.

According to his brother and documents obtained Saturday, Cortes had worked for years as a chauffeur for high-ranking PRI members in Baja California. He also had worked in security and media activities for the party before and during Colosio’s campaign.

Cortes’ brother conceded that Othon had worked alongside Mexico’s equivalent of the Secret Service in previous political campaigns. And he confirmed that on the day of the assassination, his brother chauffeured top security officials in the caravan that took Colosio’s body to the airport.

The brother’s claims of Cortes’ ruling party ties were backed up by hard evidence--photographs and documents that placed him beside the presidential plane, near Colosio at political events in previous years, beside the campaign bus of Ernesto Zedillo after he replaced Colosio as the ruling party candidate and generally accompanying the party’s inner circle of power.

A photograph that surfaced separately Saturday was even more powerful. It shows Cortes behind the wheel of an official campaign car on the day Colosio was killed. Seated beside him: army Gen. Domiro Garcia Reyes, who was Colosio’s chief bodyguard and overall head of security.

The general, in turn, had hired De la Sota--a former senior officer in Mexico’s now-defunct intelligence agency, the Directorate of Public Security--to head a second-level security group called Team Omega, which accompanied Colosio during the campaign.

Amid published but unconfirmed reports that Cortes once worked in the directorate under De la Sota, federal authorities confirmed Saturday that they had detained and were questioning the former federal officer, principally to determine whether he falsified earlier statements to investigators.

The files from the two previous probes in the Colosio case indicate that De la Sota delivered the controversial bullet to federal investigators after Colosio’s body was rushed to the hospital. The bullet, according to the official record, was recovered at the scene by local police officer Rigoberto Flores Gonzalez, a longtime member of the ruling party’s Tijuana rank and file who reportedly is also among the targets of the conspiracy probe.

Local PRI officials in Tijuana also confirmed that Cortes is well known in their circles of power. For example, Antonio Cano Jiminez, the municipal president of the ruling party chapter in Tijuana, also recalled that Cortes accompanied Colosio’s hearse to the airport.

The government’s official news agency, Notimex, asserted that Cortes had even worked in the information department of the local branch of the federal district attorney’s office--the same office that did the preliminary investigation into the Colosio murder. The attorney general in Mexico City flatly denied the report Saturday afternoon. But numerous journalists in Tijuana recalled that Cortes was well known as a street operative who routinely gathered information for police officers.

But it was his role as political gadfly among the local PRI and police agencies in Tijuana that all who know him best recalled Saturday about Cortes. Reporters described him as a classic street-level operative known in Mexico as an oreja , or ear.

Fineman reported from Mexico City and Rotella from Tijuana.