Prosecutors Question Mexico’s Ex-President in Ireland About Colosio Assassination

For the first time since he left Mexico in disgrace 20 months ago, former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari was interrogated Wednesday by Mexican federal investigators probing the 1994 assassination of his handpicked successor.

Mexico’s attorney general and foreign secretary confirmed that prosecutors questioned Salinas for 12 hours at the Mexican Embassy in Dublin, the Irish capital, where the former president has been living in self-exile for several months.

Salinas “answered an extensive interrogation and delivered a document that will be added to the investigation” into the March 1994 slaying of Luis Donaldo Colosio, a government communique stated. The ruling party presidential candidate was gunned down at a campaign rally in Tijuana. Official sources said Salinas was asked 300 questions during the session.

Officials have stressed in recent weeks that Salinas would be questioned as a potential witness--rather than a target--in the assassination probe, although opposition leaders have asserted publicly that they suspect Salinas was involved in the slaying.

The Harvard-educated former president has denied any role in the slaying, which most Mexicans view as a conspiracy within the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Salinas also has said several times in the past that he would welcome an opportunity to testify in the case, although it was unclear until Wednesday whether he would return to Mexico to do so.

Salinas quietly left the country in March 1995, soon after his elder brother Raul was arrested here on charges of masterminding another high-profile political slaying. Raul Salinas is still jailed and on trial for the Sept. 28, 1994, killing of the PRI’s secretary-general, Francisco Ruiz Massieu.

In the days before his departure, the former president staged an on-again, off-again hunger strike, demanding that the government of President Ernesto Zedillo, who succeeded Colosio as the PRI’s candidate, publicly exonerate him in the Colosio case.

The government’s communique Wednesday gave no hint of the substance of Salinas’ testimony, which official sources said will remain sealed for some time. It stated that the questioning of the former president was led by Luis Gonzalez Perez, who is the fourth special prosecutor to investigate the Colosio assassination.

Salinas, a champion of free-market economics who was widely heralded as a reformer during his six-year term, left office Dec. 1, 1994, with the highest popularity ratings of any president in modern Mexican history. Within weeks, his successor was forced to devalue the nation’s currency, triggering a deep economic crisis that most Mexicans blame on Salinas.