Probe Divides Mexico President, Ruling Party

The first direct conflict between President Ernesto Zedillo’s government and his ruling party took center stage in politics here Tuesday, as Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano confirmed that a senior deputy of the Institutional Revolutionary Party will be questioned in last year’s assassination of the No. 2 PRI official.

Lozano quickly incurred the wrath of the party’s leadership by opening an investigation of federal legislator Ignacio Ovalle Fernandez, who also heads the PRI’s internal reform committee.

The party instantly closed ranks around Ovalle and blasted his summons for questioning as “a slanderous situation.”

But Lozano, the first-ever opposition member to serve in a ruling-party Cabinet, told reporters late Monday that Ovalle was named by a convicted co-conspirator as a mastermind of the Sept. 28 assassination of then PRI Secretary General Francisco Ruiz Massieu.

Prosecutors earlier had said that Raul Salinas de Gortari, the elder brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, also helped to mastermind that crime.

“There is a statement” implicating Ovalle, who is now under investigation by special prosecutors, Lozano said.

Ovalle, who insisted Tuesday that he would voluntarily testify before prosecutors in the capital today or Thursday, denied statements by one of the co-conspirators convicted in the murder last month.

That individual has told prosecutors that, as a close associate of Raul Salinas, Ovalle helped Ruiz Massieu’s killers plan and prepare for the assassination.

“It’s absolutely false,” Ovalle declared in an impassioned news conference Tuesday. “I categorically deny it. . . . But, independently of clearing my personal prestige, I feel that it should not be a motive to stain an institution that is far above me, which is the party I belong to.”

The PRI issued a communique defending Ovalle. It also bought large advertisements in Tuesday’s newspapers to back the integrity of a senior party member who has headed the effort to refurbish the authoritarian image of the PRI, which has governed Mexico for 66 years.

Lozano’s actions underscored how the probe of the spectacular assassination--which includes criminal charges against ex-President Salinas’ brother and Ruiz Massieu’s brother--continues to threaten the party at top levels.

Quoting from a sealed, 121-page document that it said it obtained from judicial authorities in the Ruiz Massieu case, El Financiero, Mexico City’s financial daily, took a step further Tuesday: It declared in an investigative account of the murder that “all roads lead to Los Pinos”--the official presidential residence.

The newspaper asserted that 1 million pesos, then worth about $300,000, used to finance the murder, originated in the office of then-President Salinas.

The former president has not been officially implicated in the murder. His emphatic denials of any involvement after his brother’s arrest Feb. 28 led to a public statement by Lozano that exonerated the former president in the Ruiz Massieu case.