Luis Donaldo Colosio

MEXICO CITY - A young presidential candidate pushes through a crowd of supporters in a barrio in Tijuana, apparently unaware as the barrel of a gun is placed at his right temple. Before anyone can react, the gunman pulls the trigger, exploding the skull. As the candidate falls, a second bullet rips into his body. That much we know. But the March 23, 1994, assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio, a few months before he was expected to be elected, has never been solved to the satisfaction of many Mexicans, despite a six-year government investigation that concluded it was the work of a lone gunman.

MEXICO CITY - A young presidential candidate pushes through a crowd of supporters in a barrio in Tijuana, apparently unaware as the barrel of a gun is placed at his right temple. Before anyone can react, the gunman pulls the trigger, exploding the skull. As the candidate falls, a second bullet rips into his body. That much we know. But the March 23, 1994, assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio, a few months before he was expected to be elected, has never been solved to the satisfaction of many Mexicans, despite a six-year government investigation that concluded it was the work of a lone gunman.

The investigation into the assassination of ruling party presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio has hooked the government's credibility to one of Mexico's most mistrusted institutions: the country's criminal justice system. The strain was already becoming evident the weekend after the shooting. On Saturday, the attorney general's office was forced to deny rumors that the suspect being held in a prison outside Mexico City is not the same person arrested in Tijuana, where Colosio was killed.

After one of the most exhaustive investigations in Mexican history, authorities Friday closed the books on the 1994 assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, saying a convicted gunman was the lone culprit. "There has been no impunity in the investigation into the homicide of Luis Donaldo Colosio," declared special prosecutor Luis Raul Gonzalez.

Mexicans began the traditional Easter week vacation Saturday under a cloud of uncertainty caused by the murder of Luis Donaldo Colosio and apprehension about its effects on Aug. 21 federal elections. Concerns about whether the elections will be free of fraud and how voters will react if they are not have been fueled by Wednesday's assassination of Colosio, presidential candidate of the ruling party.

Two considerations led President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to choose Luis Donaldo Colosio as his successor: history and loyalty. By anointing the minister of social development as the government party's presidential candidate, Salinas guarantees the continuity of the modernization process he set in motion five years ago and assures his place in Mexico's history. Colosio owes his political existence to Salinas.

The political party that has ruled Mexico for more than six decades on Sunday named Luis Donaldo Colosio, the social development secretary who oversees the popular anti-poverty program Solidarity, as its candidate for president. The nomination by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known by the Spanish initials PRI, virtually assures that Colosio, 43, will be the nation's new president after elections next Aug. 24.

Two gunmen stepped from a crowd Wednesday and shot and seriously wounded Luis Donaldo Colosio, the presidential candidate of Mexico's ruling party who was campaigning in a poor area of this border city, authorities said. Details of the condition of Colosio--who is 44 and was widely expected to be elected president of Mexico during national elections scheduled for Aug. 21--were not immediately available.

Mexico's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, known by the initials PRI, is expected at a convention on Wednesday to formally nominate Luis Donaldo Colosio as its candidate in presidential elections scheduled for next August. Because the PRI has not lost a presidential election since its founding 64 years ago, the nomination will make Colosio, who was social development minister until last month, the automatic presidential front-runner.

President Ernesto Zedillo testified in the 1994 slaying of a ruling party presidential candidate, marking the first time a sitting president has given evidence in a Mexican criminal investigation, party officials said Thursday. Mario Aburto is serving a prison sentence for the slaying. A source at the attorney general's office said Zedillo gave written evidence April 14 in the 1994 assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio. Colosio was shot twice after a campaign rally near Tijuana.

Former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari is back in Mexico, and he's pulling no punches in criticizing the current president, Ernesto Zedillo. Salinas has written a book, almost 1,500 pages long, that details the accomplishments of his administration. Included are documents that he hopes will prove that Zedillo, not he, is responsible for the 1995 economic crisis, when the peso's value collapsed and interest rates soared.

President Ernesto Zedillo testified in the 1994 slaying of a ruling party presidential candidate, marking the first time a sitting president has given evidence in a Mexican criminal investigation, party officials said Thursday. Mario Aburto is serving a prison sentence for the slaying. A source at the attorney general's office said Zedillo gave written evidence April 14 in the 1994 assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio. Colosio was shot twice after a campaign rally near Tijuana.

For the first time since he left Mexico in disgrace 20 months ago, former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari was interrogated Wednesday by Mexican federal investigators probing the 1994 assassination of his handpicked successor. Mexico's attorney general and foreign secretary confirmed that prosecutors questioned Salinas for 12 hours at the Mexican Embassy in Dublin, the Irish capital, where the former president has been living in self-exile for several months.

A top official said Tuesday that the recent assassination of a Tijuana prosecutor appeared to be linked to disgruntled police who were fired in an anti-corruption purge--not to a possible conspiracy that claimed the life of a presidential candidate. Prosecutor Jesus Romero Magana was fatally shot outside his home in Tijuana on Aug. 17. No one has been charged.

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.

A federal judge on Wednesday acquitted and ordered free a Tijuana driver charged with being the second gunman who allegedly fired a shot into the abdomen of Luis Donaldo Colosio, the presidential candidate whose 1994 assassination radically altered Mexican politics. The verdict was a huge blow to the credibility of Mexican Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano Gracia and his prosecutors.

In a move to quell growing suspicions, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari named an independent commission Wednesday to investigate last month's assassination of ruling party presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio. "The country wants to know the truth. At the same time, it is necessary to avoid a climate of suspicions from some against others," he said in a brief announcement at the presidential residence, Los Pinos.

The attorney general's office Thursday played down allegations by a former justice official that the assassination of a presidential candidate in March may have been entangled in a web of drugs and politics. In a statement responding to testimony given by Eduardo Valle Espinosa to Mexican authorities last month at a closed-door hearing in Washington, the office of Atty. Gen. Humberto Benitez Trevino said Valle had provided no proof of his key allegations.

A father and son who were acquitted last year in the assassination of a Mexican presidential candidate have requested political asylum in the United States, fearing that they are once again suspects, officials said Wednesday.

The unsolved assassination of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio has become a labyrinth of intrigue and suspicion in which solid evidence remains painfully scarce. Therefore, recent revelations--a letter written by Mexico's president and comments by the governor of Baja--have set off a furor among journalists and politicians, the social forces driving the case in the absence of progress by investigators.