Body Found on Ranch Belonging to Raul Salinas

While excavating a ranch owned by the elder brother of a former Mexican president, federal investigators on Wednesday unearthed what they suspect may be the skull and bones of a onetime Mexican legislator.

The lawmaker, Manuel Munoz Rocha, was accused of plotting with Raul Salinas de Gortari--the older brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari--the 1994 slaying of a top ruling-party official.

Mexico’s Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano Gracia declined to speculate at a news conference Wednesday about the identity of the corpse that federal officials said they found buried near a tennis court on Raul Salinas’ hacienda on Mexico City’s outskirts.

Lozano said it could take three to four weeks for forensic experts to identify the remains through genetic fingerprinting.

“The only fact that we have is that it’s a male,” Lozano said.

Investigators found the body after 15 hours of tearing at the Salinas property with bulldozers, other heavy equipment and trained dogs.

The excavation began under armed guard on Tuesday after prosecutors obtained a search warrant for Raul Salinas’ property in the Mexico City suburb of Cuajimalpa. The search was based on an anonymous tip and information from a psychic, Lozano said.

Investigators said they were hunting for the body of Munoz Rocha, a ruling-party legislator from Tamaulipas state who disappeared without a trace just days after the Sept. 28, 1994, assassination of the second-ranking official of Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

Munoz Rocha was later charged in absentia with plotting the killing of Francisco Ruiz Massieu. Massieu was the PRI secretary-general when gunned down outside a Mexico City hotel.

The elder Salinas, who is in a maximum-security federal prison near the capital, was arrested and charged Feb. 28, 1995, with masterminding that murder.

After Wednesday’s discovery, one of Salinas’ defense attorneys who attended the excavation told reporters that he doubted the body was that of Munoz Rocha. The hair on the recovered skull was black, he said, while the former legislator’s hair was white.

“We’ll have a more exact position on the hair when we get genetic proof,” Lozano told the news conference.

The intensive search at Salinas’ posh ranch--one of many luxury properties federal agents say are owned by the former president’s brother--is the latest attempt by federal prosecutors to trace Munoz Rocha.

Within days of Salinas’ arrest, Mexican officials said police were combing the countryside in Munoz Rocha’s home state, where they said his body might be buried.

Officials said they believed that Munoz Rocha was killed by his co-conspirators in the case and that locating his body would provide vital clues. More than a dozen people have been charged or convicted for Ruiz Massieu’s murder; Salinas has been on trial for his alleged role in it for more than a year.

Ruiz Massieu was killed just six months after PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was assassinated in Tijuana. The brutal incident further shocked the nation and convinced many Mexicans that the murders were part of an internal power struggle in the party that has ruled Mexico for 67 years.