Colosio Security Chief Reportedly a Prime Suspect

The army general who was responsible for protecting ruling party presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio is now a prime suspect in his assassination, sources close to the investigation say.

Brig. Gen. Domiro Garcia Reyes headed Colosio’s security team for the elite Estado Mayor Presidencial, an outfit that holds a role similar to that of the U.S. Secret Service. He is now being “thoroughly investigated as part of a line of inquiry that leads to Los Pinos,” the Mexican White House, said one source.

The attorney general’s office has denied that former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari is a suspect in the assassination, which occurred a year ago after a campaign rally in a working-class Tijuana neighborhood.

In an unusual news release two weeks ago, Special Prosecutor Pablo Chapa Bezanilla stated that he had never told anyone that he suspected Garcia Reyes of involvement in the assassination. The attorney general’s office otherwise has refused to comment on the status of the ongoing investigation.

But sources confirmed reports that Chapa has told legislators that the general is under investigation as a suspect. “They are really trying to hang this on him,” another source said. “My sense is that he will be arrested in a matter of days.”

Authorities said Tuesday that Garcia Reyes is in Mexico, though they would not provide specifics. He could not be reached for comment. He has thus far declined to publicly discuss the Colosio case, despite the intense speculation about his role in it.

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Rumors about Garcia Reyes’ possible involvement have circulated for weeks, provoking Chapa to warn reporters at a news conference last Wednesday against wrongly accusing innocent people. Sources close to the investigation said that law enforcement officials are afraid that the publicity will cause Garcia Reyes to flee.

Formally accusing Garcia Reyes of participating in Colosio’s killing would also be a test of President Ernesto Zedillo’s pledge that no one in Mexico is above the law.

Mexican reporters say, only half-jokingly, that the press here is free to criticize everything except the president, the army and the Virgin of Guadalupe, this country’s patron saint. The arrest of a general assigned to the Estado Mayor Presidencial could be seen as an affront to two of those sacred institutions.

Still, the investigation into Colosio’s murder always comes back to the question of how Mario Aburto Martinez--the young factory worker convicted of pulling the trigger--was able to get close enough to the candidate to put a pistol to his head. “It is hard to believe that someone in the Estado Mayor was not involved,” one source said.

According to investigative documents in the case, “In a custom that has become practice, the security of presidential candidates is the responsibility of a former high-ranking officer of the Estado Mayor Presidencial. Colosio’s case was no exception.”

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The presidential candidate’s head of security is usually chosen by the outgoing president’s military chief of staff. If he does a good job, the head of security routinely becomes military chief of staff in the next administration. That likelihood provides an argument against suspecting Garcia Reyes of involvement in any plot to kill Colosio, because the candidate’s assassination would block him from getting a plum job.

But the selection process also makes the candidate’s head of security indebted to the president’s military chief of staff.

Garcia Reyes told investigators that he became separated from Colosio when a man--later identified as Tranquilino Sanchez Venegas, who is now imprisoned and formally charged with conspiring to kill Colosio--violently blocked his path. Seconds later, Aburto shot the candidate. Photographs and videotapes confirm that statement.

Investigators appeared to have accepted Garcia Reyes’ statement until the arrest a month ago of a second alleged gunman, Othon Cortez. In his formal statement, Garcia Reyes had said he did not know Cortez, sources said. But Cortez’s family has said publicly that the two men were friends, and the attorney general has photographs that show them talking, sources said.