Mexico arrests a new suspect in 1994 assassination of a presidential candidate

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Federal prosecutors in Mexico arrested another alleged accomplice in the 1994 assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, a crime that shocked the country and remains unsolved, even though the confessed killer has been imprisoned for more than 30 years.

A federal official who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, confirmed Monday to The Associated Press that Jorge Antonio Sánchez Ortega was arrested in Tijuana in connection with Colosio’s assassination. The official did not specify the charges against Sánchez Ortega, who is being held in a maximum-security prison in central Mexico, awaiting trial.

According to the National Registry of Detentions, the arrest took place on Saturday.

Colosio, the 1994 presidential candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was shot twice during a rally in the northern Mexican city of Tijuana. Since 2024, federal prosecutors have been seeking to prosecute an intelligence agent assigned as his bodyguard, identified only as Jorge Antonio “S,” as the alleged perpetrator of the second shooting.

As of Monday, the prosecutor’s office had not officially commented on the arrest of Sánchez Ortega.

Mario Aburto has been serving a 45-year prison sentence since 1994 after declaring himself the sole perpetrator of the assassination, a confession he later retracted, claiming he was tortured.

As a result of Aburto’s complaints, during the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2019-2024) the National Human Rights Commission recommended that the federal prosecutor’s office reopen the investigation.

Colosio’s murder triggered a major political crisis in Mexico and was always surrounded by controversy fueled by the possibility that it was encouraged by certain spheres of power, amid internal struggles within the ruling PRI to choose a successor of then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

In a January 2024 statement, the Attorney General’s Office said there was evidence that the agent assigned to Colosio’s security was at the scene and had clothing stained with the victim’s blood. It also stated that ballistic evidence indicated that he fired a weapon — with only a difference of seconds between the two shots — and witnesses saw him flee immediately after the shooting.

In the same statement, the agency considered it confirmed that the National Security and Investigation Center, which in 1994 was under the Ministry of the Interior, sent the agent to the scene of the assassination only to later “cover for him and take him out of Tijuana urgently and surreptitiously.” The statement concluded that the agent’s immediate release was “an evident criminal cover-up.” ____

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