Suicide Was All That Was Left to Him

“The demons are on the loose and they have prevailed.”--Mario Ruiz Massieu.

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Mario Ruiz Massieu first pronounced these words on Nov. 23, 1994, when he announced his resignation as Mexico’s deputy attorney general. The words could also serve as his epitaph, as he committed suicide on Wednesday in New Jersey.

Mario was an intense man from a tragic Acapulco family. Two of his brothers were murdered in the 1960s. A third brother, Jose Francisco, became a successful politician; he was governor of the state of Guerrero and later secretary-general of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). He was assassinated as he came out of a political meeting in a downtown Mexico City hotel on Sept. 28, 1994.

Carlos Salinas de Gortari, then in his final months as president of Mexico, asked Mario to take charge of the investigation of his own brother’s murder. It was, after all, a family affair--Jose Francisco had been married to Adriana, the president’s sister, and had two daughters with her.

Mario’s investigation took place at a dazzling pace. He arrested more than a dozen people in a few days. He moved with ruthless efficiency.

Some conspirators were allegedly tortured. The wife of one would claim her young children had been kidnapped by federal agents to put pressure on her. She herself was raped while in jail. Her husband, Jorge Rodriguez Gonzalez, eventually would confess that he paid the gunman who killed Jose Francisco. He has not recanted.

The investigation soon pointed to Manuel Munoz Rocha, a ruling party representative in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress. Rodriguez Gonzalez said the representative had given him the money and the instructions to hire the gunman. But Munoz Rocha disappeared.

Mario claimed that top officials of the PRI and his own boss--the attorney general--prevented him from getting to the representative and from finding out whether there were other politicians involved in the assassination. When he felt defeated, he resigned as deputy attorney general and from the PRI. He did this in grand fashion--at a chaotic press conference in which he claimed the demons were on the loose.

But this was not the end of his saga. The new administration of President Ernesto Zedillo accused Mario of omitting statements from the testimony of Rodriguez Gonzalez, who had allegedly claimed that Munoz Rocha told him that the person behind the murder scheme was Raul Salinas de Gortari, brother of the former president. Mario fled Mexico while saying that he had never tampered with the testimony. He was arrested in March 1995 at Newark International Airport on his way to Europe because he carried more than $10,000 that he failed to declare. He remained detained in New Jersey, most of the time under house arrest.

Repeated attempts to extradite or deport Mario to Mexico failed.

During this time, it was proved that Rodriguez Gonzalez was paid $500,000 by the Mexican attorney general to change his testimony to implicate Raul Salinas. The investigation of Jose Francisco’s death was not Mario’s only worry. U.S. authorities confiscated $9 million he had in a bank account in Houston. They also started a new trial against him, this time for alleged cooperation with drug traffickers. The case was based, again, on the testimony of paid witnesses.

Mario was out of funds. A few days before his suicide, he borrowed $1,000 from his lawyer to make ends meet. He was also depressed. After four years of costly victories, he had lost the will to fight.

Mario Ruiz Massieu is certainly no hero. At least a portion of the $9 million he had in Houston were the proceeds of corruption. There is little doubt that he tortured witnesses to break the case of his brother’s murder.

But it is also evident that Mario ended up as the victim of a legal system that he represented at one point. It was not enough for him to beat every rap. It was not enough to show that witnesses were paid to give evidence against him. Authorities came back every time with new charges, with new paid witnesses. It was clear that he would never be free again.

His suicide seems understandable. Only death would make him free. If the demons had prevailed, he had to become a demon himself to get a chance to have his voice heard.