Triggerman's Blues

Last Thursday, when a federal judge in Mexico City sentenced Raul Salinas de Gortari to 50 years in prison for orchestrating the 1994 murder of his former brother-in-law Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, all Mexico seemed to exhale. Salinas, the older brother of former President Carlos Salinas, has been a symbol of the nation's rot. The coldness of some of his acts--ordering the killing of his own brother-in-law!--was so great that the case somehow transcended its specifics and became a referendum on Mexico's hopes and fears.

Raul's conviction was supposed to be a sign that Mexico was reforming its authoritarian democracy. But last week there was at least one reminder of how far the nation has to go. While Raul confronted his verdict in a prison cell west of Mexico City, 50 miles away, in a prison called Southside, a tightly wound, closely shorn 34-year-old ex-cowboy named Daniel Aguilar Trevino described a Mexican political system that is still dark, unforgiving and sinister. Aguilar is serving a 50-year term for pumping the fatal bullet into Ruiz Massieu's neck from point-blank range. In recent weeks, for the first time, Aguilar described to TIME how, working through intermediaries, Raul Salinas arranged for the killing of Ruiz Massieu, a political leader his associates called a "data bank" on Raul's corruption. The story is colorful but, with many of the key figures in jail or out of reach, difficult to confirm.

When he was first arrested after killing Ruiz Massieu, Aguilar seemed an unlikely hit man. Authorities described him as a bumpkin desperate for the $15,000 fee he reportedly earned for the murder. But Aguilar insists--and underworld colleagues confirm--that he is in fact a member of a sophisticated kidnapping ring that abducts not for ransom but for hire--usually by politicians, businessmen or criminals who want to scare rivals into submission. Aguilar was highly trained for the ring's SWAT-style ops--to fly single-engine planes, for instance, and belay from a helicopter. "We weren't like the sloppy ransom kidnappers," he says. "We had an honor code...that dictated that you don't commit violence if you don't have to."

Which is why, says Aguilar, Raul Salinas approached the group's leaders to abduct Ruiz Massieu. Originally the plan was just for a kidnapping, to silence him--and perhaps to punish him for an acrimonious divorce from Salinas' sister. But in the late summer of 1994, Salinas' men changed the plan: "They said [Ruiz Massieu] was too much of a threat to the Salinases, and that we'd have to kill him. I've never been so shook up as when I heard that."

There was little Aguilar could do. If he had tried to back out, he insists, he would have been killed. He urged the conspirators to let him use a long-range rifle, but they were adamant that he use an automatic pistol up close and flee in a waiting car.

In the early morning just before the assassination, Aguilar says he felt like a man "manipulated on strings by Mexico's circle of power." He claims that the Salinas cronies who hired him provided him with a 9-mm machine gun-style pistol, which he hid under a folded newspaper, less than half an hour before Ruiz Massieu emerged from a meeting. After watching Ruiz Massieu climb into the driver's seat of his car, Aguilar stepped up and fired a round through the window. But then, he says, the gun either jammed or had no more rounds left. Either way, he says, he concluded that the gun had been rigged to leave him defenseless--and that whoever was in the getaway car was set to kill him too. He started to run and was quickly engulfed by police.

Aguilar says that when he was tortured by police, he gave up two names but remained silent about Salinas. And, he insists, he would have stayed silent even now, except for the fact that he says he too became one of Raul Salinas' victims. In August 1997, Aguilar says, he received news in his cell that his common-law wife and toddler son had been kidnapped as a way of forcing him to proclaim Raul's innocence. (Raul Salinas' lawyers did not return TIME's calls.) Aguilar did tell a Mexico City daily that Raul had no part in the conspiracy. "But it wasn't the truth," he says. And the kidnapping infuriated him. "That was the last time I intend to be betrayed by Raul."

Aguilar's new account is important because although Salinas was convicted last week, many Mexican legal scholars are worried that the verdict--which relies heavily on circumstantial evidence--may melt on appeal. Aguilar's story, if it holds up, could bolster the conviction. But even with both Aguilar and Raul in jail, Mexican officials say Salinas-style corruption remains a problem--and Aguilar's old gang is still practicing its dangerous trade.