The Attorney General's Office of the Republic (FGR) arrested in Tijuana, Baja California, a former national security agent implicated in the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta, which occurred on March 23, 1994, in the Lomas Taurinas neighborhood. Agents from the FGR's Tijuana delegation were responsible for arresting Jorge Antonio Sánchez Ortega, a former agent of the now-defunct Center for Research and National Security (Cisen), who is accused of being the presumed second shooter in Colosio Murrieta's murder. According to the National Registry of Detentions (RND) of the Ministry of Security and Citizen Protection (SSPC), Sánchez Ortega was arrested on Saturday at 4:37 p.m. local time in the Los Reyes neighborhood of Tijuana, although the reason for his apprehension was not specified. The document indicated that the authority that carried out the detention was the Federal Ministerial Police and the detainee is at the FGR's Tijuana delegation, at the disposal of a federal judge. At the end of January 2024, the FGR announced that there was a second shooter in Colosio's homicide and implicated Mexico's former secretary of security (2006-2012), Genaro García Luna, who is imprisoned in the United States for corruption and drug trafficking. The Prosecutor's Office stated at the time that there was evidence that “implicates Jorge Antonio ‘S’,” an agent of the then Center for Research and National Security (Cisen) assigned to protect the presidential candidate, and who was released at the time, in an evident criminal cover-up in which García Luna was directly involved, who was then the operational deputy director at Cisen and is presumed to have rescued him in Tijuana. The FGR specified that the evidence presented against the mentioned agent “demonstrates his presence at the scene of the homicide, at the exact moment of the crime, when there was a difference of seconds between the two shots.” In addition, it noted that it is “properly proven” that the Cisen, then part of the Ministry of the Interior (Gobernación) “sent the accused to be at the scene of the facts, to later cover for him and remove him from Tijuana urgently and surreptitiously.” It specified that the video that proves the first shot, to which the judge is trying to give value against all the evidence provided, “was located towards the first shooter and not directed at the second, who was in a completely different angle, for which reason it could not be observed.” The assassination of Colosio, of the hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), is considered the most serious political assassination in Mexico since 1928, when they assassinated the elected President Álvaro Obregón, who had already presided over the country in the period 1920-1924. Colosio received two gunshot wounds while greeting the crowd at a rally in the popular Lomas Taurinas neighborhood, in the border city of Tijuana. You may also be interested | “1994”, the Netflix documentary series about the year that changed Mexico. Although at that time the material and confessed presumed murderer, Mario Aburto, was arrested, who is currently serving a prison sentence and has requested a review of the case, the investigations lasted for years in search of a possible intellectual author or a conspiracy. The case was revived in October 2023, when a tribunal in the State of Mexico canceled the 45-year sentence imposed on Aburto because he was judged based on the Federal Penal Code and not with the legal framework of Baja California, the northwestern state of the country where the political assassination occurred. The Supreme Court accepted in December 2023 to review the FGR's appeal of this annulment.
