Mexico Releases 3 Suspects Arrested in Latest Slaying

The gangland-style slaying of Leobardo Larios Guzman, former chief prosecutor of Jalisco state, joined a growing file of unsolved Mexican assassinations Thursday as federal authorities released three suspects and state prosecutors conceded that they have no solid leads.

“Until now, they’ve discovered nothing,” Larios’ successor told reporters in Guadalajara, reporting on the progress of hundreds of state and federal investigators who sealed off roads, bus stations and the airport of Mexico’s second-largest city moments after Larios was shot to death Wednesday morning outside his home there.

“Honestly, we have no witnesses to the crime,” he said.

Jorge Lopez Vergara, who replaced Larios as attorney general when the Jalisco state government changed hands March 1, said the only leads police have are rough sketches of two men that neighbors saw near Larios’ home before he was shot at least seven times, apparently by hit men from one of Mexico’s powerful drug cartels.

Vergara said he suspects that the slaying of Larios, 50, who led several investigations into the drug mafias during his term, was the work of one of Mexico’s rival drug gangs. A known hit man for one of the cartels who appears to match one of the sketches remains a suspect.

The prosecutor said police also are pursuing what he called probable links between Larios’ assassination and his leading role in investigating the murder of Guadalajara’s Roman Catholic cardinal at the city’s airport on May 24, 1993.

“It has to do with revenge for (Larios’) having acted with honesty and firmness in those investigations,” Vergara said.

“Frankly, we still are not certain that there is a direct relationship,” he added later. “But because of the way the crime was committed, the manner in which the job was done, it makes one presume that, in some way, we are looking at a problem of organized crime and, basically, drug traffickers.”

In Mexico City, federal Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano added that his investigators also suspect Larios was killed by at least one of the two drug cartels already charged in the slaying of Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo. Officially, the government concluded that Posadas was caught in the cross-fire between two rival drug gangs and mistaken for a trafficker; the cardinal, an outspoken critic of the cartels, was wearing black clerical garb when he was shot 14 times.

Lozano also confirmed Thursday afternoon that his investigators freed three men they had arrested Wednesday evening at Tijuana airport in connection with Larios’ slaying. Lozano called it a case of mistaken identity.

State prosecutor Vergara, in a simultaneous apology, told reporters in Guadalajara that “there was a terrible error” in the arrest of the three men, who were en route to Los Angeles. “They had nothing to do with the crime.”

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The clear frustration of state and federal prosecutors Thursday underscored the increasing impunity of Mexico’s “narco-politics” and the difficulty prosecutors face in curbing its ensuing violence.

The advent of new smuggling routes for an estimated 700 tons of Colombian cocaine that enter the United States annually through Mexico has given drug cartels vast power. U.S. and Mexican authorities have said the cartels use huge payoffs to ensure the cooperation of corrupt Mexican officials--and murder to eliminate the honest ones.

As Vergara announced that security has been increased for senior state officials in Guadalajara, Jalisco’s recently elected governor, Alberto Cardenas, said he has scheduled a meeting for today to organize increased police patrols and develop a strategy to curb drug trafficking and other crime.

Meanwhile, as part of extradition proceedings in New Jersey against Mexico’s former assistant attorney general in another major assassination case, Mexican authorities asserted that Raul Salinas de Gortari, brother of a former Mexican president, funneled more than $300,000 to a legislator as part of a murder conspiracy.

The money, prosecutors say, went to a fugitive legislator who is believed to be a conspirator in the killing of Francisco Ruiz Massieu, the No. 2 official in the PRI.