Suspect Freed in Colosio Slaying Faces Anger

MEXICO CITY — As he stepped through the gate of the maximum-security prison for the first time in 18 months, a jubilant Othon Cortes Vazquez thanked President Ernesto Zedillo and declared: “We live in a nation of laws, a nation where justice exists.”

But on the morning after Cortes’ acquittal on charges that he fired the second bullet that killed presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio two years ago at a Tijuana campaign rally, Colosio’s friends, relatives and ruling-party colleagues disagreed.

From the halls of Mexico’s Congress to Colosio’s ancestral home Thursday, they demanded justice in a case that continues to shape Mexico’s search for a new rule of law.

In a land where the government cannot solve Mexico’s highest-profile political assassination in half a century, many asked, how can anyone be safe?

Cortes, for one, felt insecure. Within three hours of his release just before midnight Wednesday, the 29-year-old ruling-party street operative and his family were forced to take refuge--first at a Mexico City television station and later at the capital’s National Human Rights Commission.

Cortes, who is now in an undisclosed location for his own safety, said he feared for his life after his car was chased from the prison by unidentified men Thursday morning.

Predictably, much of the blame for the verdict landed on the nation’s top law enforcement officials, especially Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano Gracia.

The conspiracy case that Lozano’s special prosecutor spent 18 months building against Cortes and other low-level members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, appeared to collapse under a single court ruling Wednesday.

“It is inconceivable that precisely the institution in charge of delivering justice has demonstrated such utter incompetence,” said Sen. Jose Luis Soberanes, a onetime Colosio confidante.

Soberanes, a member of the PRI, serves on a legislative commission monitoring the probe.

Luis Colosio Fernandez, the slain candidate’s father, said: “I want to appeal to the conscience of all Mexicans to keep this country from drowning in impunity.”

Agustin Basave, president of a PRI foundation created in Colosio’s name, added: “I don’t know in which garbage can one will find the attorney general’s lost prestige.”

One Tijuana man, Mario Aburto Martinez, has already been found guilty of killing Colosio and is serving a 45-year sentence.

In an emotional meeting Thursday, the PRI-led congressional Colosio commission voted to give Lozano 15 days to produce the entire case file--a demand it first made in February 1995--or they will appeal directly to Zedillo.

Lozano is a member of the opposition National Action Party, or PAN. And, on a day of finger-pointing, several PRI members used the verdict to call for his resignation.

But one PAN senator said the attorney general is the victim of a “lynching mentality.”

Another accused Lozano’s PRI predecessor of “sweeping away all the proof” immediately after Colosio’s assassination on March 23, 1994.