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....
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