Former Prosecutor’s Death Latest In Wave Of Murders Hints Of Drug Gang Influence Haunt Mexican Government

The curbside shooting of a former state attorney general has added another mysterious murder to a series of spectacular but still murky crimes that have rocked Mexico.

Suspicions of corruption or influence by drug traffickers at high levels of the government have haunted several of those slayings, including those of top politicians, prosecutors, Roman Catholic Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo and, the latest, of Leobardo Larios Guzman.

State and federal officials on Thursday freed three suspects arrested a day earlier in the killing of Larios Guzman, who stepped down in February as attorney general for the state of Jalisco.

But the state’s new attorney general, Jorge Lopez Vergara, told a news conference that the killing “could be a vengeance for (Larios Guzman’s) role in clarifying the Posadas case.”

“We do not have full certainty that this has a direct relation,” he added, “but by the form in which the crime was carried out, it appears we face a problem of organized crime and fundamentally of drug crimes.”

Larios Guzman, 50, was shot nine times at close range Wednesday morning as he left his Guadalajara home.

He headed the attorney general’s office in Jalisco through a turbulent period, which included allegations of corruption in his agency and a focus on Guadalajara as a center of activity for drug gangs.

A sewer explosion that most blamed on government incompetence killed 200 people in 1992. The cardinal was assassinated in May 1993. And in 1994, alleged drug traffickers bombed the city’s most luxurious hotel, apparently in an attempt to kill rivals.

Larios Guzman was among the first to claim that Posadas was killed by accident in a shootout between drug gangs at the Guadalajara airport. But his office also helped develop evidence that led federal investigators to probe the possibility that the cardinal was killed on purpose.

The Mexican press has speculated the cardinal might have come across damning information about links between drug traffickers and officials or caused anger with a public crusade against the criminals.

Church officials have noted that security at the airport was unusually heavy before the cardinal was shot and that officials delayed an airliner’s departure so that some of the suspected gunmen could board.

The Posadas killing was followed by the March 1994 assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio, presidential candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, and the September slaying of Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, No. 2 man in the ruling party.

Gunmen have been convicted in both cases, but the motives remain obscure. The attorney general’s office recently said evidence in the Colosio case had been tampered with.

Rumors of corruption in the Ruiz Massieu case grew with the arrest of the brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and of the victim’s own brother, Mario Ruiz Massieu, who had been in charge of investigating the case as a deputy attorney general.

On Thursday, Mexican prosecutors charged that Raul Salinas funneled the equivalent of more than $300,000 to a Mexican congressman to arrange the assassination.

The charge was made in a court in New Jersey, where Mario Ruiz Massieu has been jailed after officials found close to $43,500 in undeclared U.S. and Mexican currency on him as he attempted to fly to Europe via the United States.

Mexico is seeking to extradite him on charges of obstructing justice and of embezzlement. The U.S. government in March seized $9 million from a Houston bank account that belonged to Mario Ruiz Massieu.

U.S. and Mexican officials have said they believe he got bribes from a drug gang.

There have also been a series of lesser-known killings.

In April 1993, former Sinaloa state Attorney General Francisco Rodolfo Alvarez was shot, apparently by drug traffickers. A month later, the deputy attorney general of Yucatan state, Palomeque Rio, was killed in what officials said was an attempt to steal documents from him.

A month after Colosio died in Tijuana, the city’s police chief, Jose Federico Benitez Lopez, was murdered. Officials say they believe the case was vengeance by drug gangs angry at his investigations. There was initial suspicion he had been killed by people trying to cover up the Colosio slaying.