A case that refuses to go to the dead file
It seems that Mexican justice loves comebacks, like those artists who try to relaunch their career with a TikTok. 31 years after the assassination that broke the heart of the country, the Colosio case has returned to court with all the force of a streaming drama that no one asked for, but we are all going to have to see. The protagonist of this season of True Crime: Mexico is Jorge Antonio Sánchez Ortega, a former CISEN agent who was recaptured and to whom the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) has assigned the role of second shooter. One weekend, a federal judge decided that spending three decades in anonymity was enough and ordered him to formally be imprisoned for his probable participation in the aggravated homicide of the former PRI presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta. We already know the script: March 23, 1994, Lomas Taurinas, Tijuana, and a country that ran out of air.
The reopening of this historical file has more layers than a Shrek meme. On the one hand, there is the political drama and, on the other, the uncomfortable feeling that we are watching a low-quality reboot. Constitutional lawyer Pablo Andrei Zamudio Díaz sees it clearly: this move allows the federal government to sustain the narrative that justice does arrive, even if it does so with the punctuality of a bureaucratic procedure and the facts are as blurred as a photo from the nineties. In an interview that is not to be missed, the expert dropped the bomb: “The real problem is that current justice still does not operate”. And he is right. It is as if, in the era of the metaverse and artificial intelligence, our judicial system was still trying to connect to the Internet with a dial-up modem.
The second shooter theory: a ghost that keeps appearing
The FGR, under the command of prosecutor Alejandro Gertz Manero, has dusted off the theory of the second shooter, an argument that has had more resurrections than a soap opera character. Since 1994, this approach has been discarded, recovered and discarded again, generating more controversy than a series finale on Netflix. The most worrying thing about this judicial déjà vu is that, according to experts, there is no new technical evidence, nor recent expert reports that justify unearthing a file that has been weakened for decades by irregularities, omissions and those official silences that speak louder than any statement.
Zamudio Díaz issues a warning that should make our hair stand on end: this decision reflects a worrying institutional trend. While historical justice advances at a snail’s pace (but it does advance), present-day justice seems stuck in the traffic of bureaucracy and inefficiency. The constitutionalist even allowed himself an irony worthy of the best threads on Basically, he is telling us to prepare the popcorn, because they could reopen any historical case, from the Conquest on up.
This revival of the most emblematic political crime in the recent history of Mexico leaves us with a bittersweet taste. On the one hand, there is a latent hope that justice will finally be done for the murder that changed the course of the country. On the other, the suspicion that all this is a smokescreen to hide the inability to solve today’s crimes. It’s the legal equivalent of your parents continuing to talk about that time you misbehaved in kindergarten, while ignoring the problems you have today in college. The impunity of the past and the present are two sides of the same coin, a coin that, it seems, still does not fall.
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