Zedillo Fires Attorney General, Picks Successor

After failing to resolve two of the highest-profile murder cases in Mexico’s history, Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano Gracia was fired Monday by President Ernesto Zedillo, who then named the chairman of the National Human Rights Commission to the country’s top law enforcement job.

Zedillo gave no reason for the firing, but senior government officials blamed it on Lozano’s performance: most important, his inability to advance investigations into two political assassinations that have shaken the country. They also cited his failure to extradite from the United States and Europe several prominent Mexicans accused in those and other crimes and to convict suspects in many lesser-known cases.

Lozano, 43, a member of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, became the first opposition figure to serve in a ruling-party Cabinet when he was named to the post two years ago this week. He had no immediate public comment on Zedillo’s decision.

Zedillo, in asking for Lozano’s resignation, thanked and praised the young lawyer for his honesty. But a presidential communique announcing the firing said Zedillo stressed to Lozano’s successor, Jorge Madrazo Cuellar, that he “will be obliged to reject all pressure and pretension from whatever political group or party.”

Leaders of Zedillo’s long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, have frequently accused Lozano of playing politics. Lozano has denied the charge, and PAN leaders are likely to countercharge that politics were behind Monday’s firing.

Madrazo, 43, whose appointment is expected to be confirmed by the Mexican Senate today, is a career human rights activist and lawyer who has never belonged to any party. Independent analysts praised him as “an impeccable lawyer,” “an excellent investigator” and “truly independent.”

“I assume the responsibility . . . completely conscious of the enormous challenge,” Madrazo told a news conference late Monday. “I believe in procuring a justice that is of a technical--and not a political--nature.”

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Zedillo also ordered Madrazo to keep the special prosecutor now assigned to a murder case that still rivets the nation: the March 1994 assassination of PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio.

Prosecutor Luis Raul Gonzalez Perez stunned the country last week when his investigators interrogated former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in connection with that murder at the Mexican Embassy in Dublin, Ireland, where Salinas is living in self-imposed exile.

Officials said Zedillo’s insistence that Gonzalez Perez, the fourth special prosecutor in the Colosio probe, remain on the case was a clear signal that the president approved of investigators questioning Salinas--the first time a former Mexican president has been asked to testify.

An unemployed factory worker has been convicted and is serving a 45-year prison term for killing Colosio, but Lozano’s inability to prove a widely suspected conspiracy in the case was among the shortcomings cited by officials Monday.

After a yearlong trial, a federal judge in August dismissed charges against Othon Cortes, a low-level PRI worker, that Cortes fired the second bullet into Colosio at a Tijuana campaign rally.

The case against Cortes, one of dozens that officials said have gone against the government during Lozano’s two-year term, severely damaged the prosecutors’ case that Colosio was killed in a broader conspiracy within the ruling party. Soon after Cortes’ release, Zedillo ordered Lozano to remove the special prosecutor who had tried to build the second-gunman case in court. Gonzalez Perez replaced him as prosecutor.

“It wasn’t just the high-profile cases--it was many, many things. We lost hundreds of cases in the courts during the past two years,” one senior government official said Monday.

Lozano, initially seen as a crusading reformer both in Mexico and in Washington, had won high praise from U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and other top Clinton administration officials who had viewed the young criminal lawyer as a point man in their joint war on Mexican narcotics traffickers, who supply up to three-fourths of the cocaine sold in the United States. Reno declined comment on his firing.

Senior Mexican officials said Lozano’s handpicked drug czar, Francisco Molina, also would be replaced--an indication Zedillo also was dissatisfied with Lozano’s progress in the war on the nation’s powerful drug cartels, which the president has called Mexico’s No. 1 national security issue. Officials said a Mexican army general will be named to replace him. Top Clinton administration officials were scheduled to meet next week with Lozano and Molina to discuss the drug war, but it was unclear whether the meeting will take place.

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In September, Lozano fired more than 700 federal police officers, many for drug-related corruption, but independent analysts say that corruption is still endemic in Mexican federal law enforcement.

Just three months after taking his post, Lozano took the unheard-of step of ordering the arrest of the elder brother of former President Salinas. Lozano’s investigators charged Raul Salinas with masterminding the Sept. 28, 1994, death of the PRI’s secretary-general, Francisco Ruiz Massieu--an assassination that, coming just six months after the Colosio killing, further destabilized the nation.

Although Raul Salinas remains in jail and his trial continues, Lozano’s prosecution in the case had recently taken a series of bizarre twists.

Using psychics and anonymous informants, Lozano’s investigators unearthed a body on the grounds of Raul Salinas’ ranch on Mexico City’s outskirts in October; they initially announced strong suspicions that the dismembered corpse was that of a Mexican legislator who disappeared soon after the Ruiz Massieu assassination and was indicted as a co-conspirator in the case.

Raul Salinas and his lawyers charged that Lozano’s office had planted the corpse and fabricated evidence against him.

In the weeks after the ranch discovery, Lozano had promised to announce the results of DNA tests performed on the body here and at U.S. laboratories. Although he had appeared to be backing off early speculation the body was that of former lawmaker Manuel Munoz Rocha, Mexican press reports before Monday’s announcement indicated that the test results show it was not Munoz Rocha.

Government officials insisted that the timing of Lozano’s firing was coincidental.

But they confirmed that the latest developments in the Raul Salinas case have tarnished Mexico’s image abroad, and Zedillo has just returned from a tour of Asia that included meetings with more than a dozen world leaders in Manila.

Among Lozano’s other defeats in the Ruiz Massieu case has been his failure to extradite the victim’s brother, Mario Ruiz Massieu, who initially investigated the murder as deputy attorney general under then-President Salinas but was later charged with obstructing justice for allegedly hiding Raul Salinas’ role in the case.

Mario Ruiz Massieu, who also is charged in Mexico with illegal enrichment, is under house arrest in New Jersey while a U.S. federal court decision rejecting his extradition is appealed.

Noting that other extradition requests have gone against Lozano in Spain, a senior official said: “It’s simply a question of performance. There’s nothing partisan or political about this. It’s just that the prosecutor was not performing as the Mexican public expect.”

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Profiles

Antonio Lozano Garcia

Age: 43

Personal: Married

Education: Law degree, National Autonomous University of Mexico

Party affiliation: National Action Party (PAN)

Career: Professor of civil law and economic theory, National Autonomous University, 1982-present; member, Chamber of Deputies, 1988-91; secretary-general of the national executive committee, PAN; attorney general of Mexico, 1994-Dec. 2, 1996.

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Jorge Madrazo Cuellar

Age: 43

Personal: Married

Education: Law degree, National Autonomous University of Mexico

Party affiliation: None

Career: Director, Institute for Legal Investigations, 1984-1990; president, National Human Rights Commission, 1993-1996; president, Ibero-American Federation, in the Defense of the People, 1995-present; named attorney general of Mexico, Dec. 2, 1996.

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Sources: Times staff reports; Who’s Who in the World, 1996