Ex-President’s Brother Tied To Killing Arrest Startling Development In Unsolved Assassination
The brother of a former Mexican president was arrested Tuesday in connection with the assassination of a high-ranking, reformist leader of the ruling party.
The arrest of Raul Salinas de Gortari was a startling development in one of three unsolved assassinations of top Mexican leaders over the past year. The attorney general’s office scheduled an evening news conference on the case, but it wasn’t immediately clear what Raul Salinas’ connection was to the killing.
A spokeswoman for the federal attorney general’s office confirmed local news reports that Salinas, 48, was arrested Tuesday afternoon.
Radio Red said federal police had arrested him in connection with the September 1994 slaying of Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, No. 2 man in the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI.
Investigators had been puzzled by the assassination, and in the past were unable to come up with a motive. Raul Salinas is the brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who left office in December. Both were brothers-in-law of the victim.
The news of Raul Salinas’ arrest comes on the heels of the government’s announcement Friday that last year’s murder of Luis Donaldo Colosio, presidential candidate of the ruling party, was the result of a conspiracy and that a second gunman had been arrested.
Many Mexicans have long suspected a conspiracy in those two killings, as well as the 1993 assassination of a Roman Catholic cardinal in the western city of Guadalajara.
The PRI, which has ruled Mexico since it was formed in 1929, currently is racked by infighting between reformers and members of the old guard.
Carlos Salinas has bristled at suggestions that his administration either bungled or covered up the assassination investigations and that he left his successor, President Ernesto Zedillo, with a seriously troubled economy.
In an television interview earlier Tuesday afternoon with the Televisa network’s “24 Horas” news program, Carlos Salinas insisted that he had “done everything possible for the good of Mexico” during his six-year term.