The assassin stood unnoticed in the crowd. He listened as the man he was stalking pledged to help poor people, like the 3,000 gathered in a ramshackle neighborhood near Tijuana's airport. After a chorus of vivas, the candidate stepped down from the platform and, in his populist campaign style, waded into the crush to shake hands. The assassin edged up behind him, thrust a .38-cal. pistol at his head and fired. The bullet smashed through the candidate's skull, shattering his brain. Then the gunman leaned over and fired another bullet into the fallen man's stomach.
The first shot not only killed Luis Donaldo Colosio, the ruling party's handpicked successor to Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, but it also crippled the confidence of a country striving to enter the select company of First World nations. The murder was the latest blow in a year that has . brought violent rebellion, economic uncertainty and political disruption to a land whose citizens believed they had achieved peace and stability. Mexicans grieved not just for Colosio but for themselves and a future they now viewed with trepidation. In the weeks ahead, they will discover whether their institutions and maturity are sufficient to handle the shock.
In the turmoil after the shooting, the crowd pounced on the assassin, screaming "Kill him!" and beat the man fiercely before plainclothes police hauled him away. The following morning investigators announced that the killer was Mario Aburto Martinez, 23, a poor factory mechanic who lived alone and had no obvious political links. They said he had confessed to the shooting but refused to reveal his motive.
Rumors blamed everyone: Colosio's party rivals had planned the killing, or Tijuana's notorious drug gangs did it. No one seemed to know whether there was a conspiracy or if the assassin was another of the solitary, deranged killers who disfigure history. Mexicans reacted not only with horror and outrage but also with something close to fear. No matter what the motive, the public murder of a leading politician inflicted a national trauma, a sense of disorientation that came with the recognition that things were not what they so comfortingly seemed to be.
The country had been priding itself on its stability and relative prosperity, especially since President Salinas pushed through his six-year program of free-market economic reforms and Mexico joined the U.S. and Canada in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Last week he announced that Mexico had become the first Latin American nation to join the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the association of the world's leading industrial democracies.
Now an assassin's bullets reminded Mexicans again of their country's most chronic problems. For the first time in more than 20 years, guerrillas reappeared as a political force last January when an indigenous peasant movement rose up and seized several towns in the southern state of Chiapas, leaving at least 145 dead. On Friday those rebels, who call themselves the Zapatista National Liberation Army, suspended their deliberations on a peace accord with the government, citing the country's uncertainties. Taking impetus from the revolt, discontented groups rose across the country, staging sit-ins and land grabs. Then two weeks ago, Alfredo Harp Helu, president of Mexico's largest bank, was kidnapped in Mexico City.