Another Mexican Official Is Slain

Mexicans grappled with a baffling new set of questions Monday about their nation’s political volatility after this weekend’s gangland slaying of yet another federal prosecutor who had played a role in investigating the assassination of the nation’s onetime presidential heir apparent.

Jesus Romero Magana--the 48-year-old federal prosecutor who was one of the first officials to question the gunman convicted of the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio--was fatally shot outside his home late Saturday night, officials said.

Police, saying the case had been turned over to federal investigators, offered no motive for Romero’s killing. But local authorities noted that Romero seemed to know the assassins, who shot him 14 times with bullets from 9-millimeter and .38-caliber weapons.

Alerted by an anonymous telephone call, police found Romero, barefoot, dressed in casual slacks and a knit top, with the television still on inside his home, said police Cmdr. Antonio Torres Miranda, who added of the prosecutor’s killers, “For him to have come out of the house at that hour, they must have been known to him.”

Romero was the fourth official tied to the federal attorney general’s office in Baja California to be slain this year--raising concerns about whether the killings were somehow linked to the Colosio assassination or to the twin plagues of drugs and corruption that have afflicted all of Mexico and especially the Tijuana area.

This year’s killings started on Feb. 23, when gunmen in Mexico City killed Sergio Armando Silva Moreno, former operations chief for the federal judicial police in Baja California.

Five days later, prosecutor Rebeca Acuna Sosa was shot to death in Tijuana.

In mid-May, the bodies of Sergio Moreno Perez--a former federal prosecutor who handled drug cases in Baja California--and his son were found in a western suburb of Mexico City. They had been shot and showed signs of torture.

In another case that raised suspicions, Tijuana Police Chief Federico Benitez, who had also been involved in the investigation of the Colosio assassination, was shot dead on April 28, 1994, while investigating a bomb hoax at the city’s airport.

Eduardo Valle, a former federal investigator who fled Mexico after publicly linking the Colosio slaying to the Tijuana narcotics fiefdom run by the Arellano Felix brothers, said he believes the government is trying to silence those involved with the Colosio investigation.

“I think this is linked to the Colosio case,” he said of Romero’s killing.

Victor Clark Alfaro, who heads an independent human rights group in Tijuana, observed: “With the presence of narcotics traffic and other crimes that generate violence, it would be speculation to assume that the victims who have been working on the Colosio case were killed because of that. But I think that the forces behind the Colosio assassination did not stop with his killing.”

Torres dismissed the link, saying, “The Colosio assassination occurred two years ago. Many other motives for this killing could have arisen since then.”

Colosio was assassinated at a Tijuana campaign rally in March 1994. Mario Aburto Martinez has been convicted and imprisoned for fatally shooting Colosio, who, as the candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, was effectively the presidential heir apparent.

But the investigation has yet to resolve what many Mexicans have said was the plot behind the slaying, which altered Mexico’s national politics.

President Ernesto Zedillo has vowed to bring those responsible for Colosio’s assassination to justice. Antonio Lozano Gracia, his attorney general and the only Cabinet minister from the opposition National Action Party, has staked his reputation on the theory that multiple gunmen were involved.

But Lozano and his third special prosecutor in the Colosio case, Pablo Chapa Benzanillo, suffered a major setback in the case when the Tijuana man they accused of being the second gunman was acquitted.

Chapa on Aug. 12 was ousted from his post, said Hector Villareal, spokesman for the attorney general’s office in Mexico City.