Suspect arrested in 1994 murder of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio

Federal prosecutors in Mexico have arrested another alleged accomplice in the 1994 murder of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, a crime that shocked the country and remains unsolved, even though the confessed killer has been in prison for more than 30 years.

A federal official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly confirmed to The News on Monday that Jorge Antonio Sánchez Ortega was arrested in Tijuana in connection with Colosio’s murder. The official did not specify the charges against Sánchez Ortega, who is being held in a maximum security prison in central Mexico, awaiting trial.

According to the National Arrest Registry, the arrest occurred on Saturday.

Colosio, presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 1994, was shot twice during a rally in the northern Mexican city of Tijuana. Starting in 2024, federal prosecutors have sought to prosecute an intelligence agent assigned as his bodyguard, identified only as Jorge Antonio “S,” as the alleged perpetrator of the second shooting.

As of Monday, the prosecutor’s office had not officially commented on Sánchez Ortega’s arrest and authorities have not confirmed whether new evidence has emerged.

According to reports, Sánchez Ortega was then working as an agent for the National Security and Investigation Center, then the Mexican equivalent of the United States Central Intelligence Agency.

Mario Aburto has been serving a 45-year prison sentence since 1994 after declaring himself the sole perpetrator of the murder, a confession he later retracted, alleging that he was tortured.

As a result of Aburto’s complaints, during the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2019-2024), the National Human Rights Commission recommended that the federal prosecutor’s office reopen the investigation.

Colosio’s murder triggered a major political crisis in Mexico and was always surrounded by controversy fueled by the possibility that it was encouraged by certain spheres of power, amid internal struggles within the ruling PRI to choose a successor to then-president Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

In a January 2024 statement, the Attorney General’s Office said there was evidence that the agent assigned to Colosio’s security was at the scene and had his clothing stained with the victim’s blood. He also claimed that ballistics tests indicated that he fired a gun – with only a seconds difference between the two shots – and witnesses saw him flee immediately after the shooting.

In the same statement, the agency considered confirmed that the Center for Investigation and National Security, which in 1994 depended on the Ministry of the Interior, sent the agent to the scene of the murder to then “cover it up and remove it from Tijuana in an urgent and surreptitious manner.” The statement concluded that the agent’s immediate release was “an obvious criminal cover-up.”

Since Colosio’s murder, other politicians have been targets of violence in Mexico. In 2010one of the main gubernatorial candidates, Rodolfo Torre, was murdered in northern Mexico. Plagued by drug-related violence for decades, the country has also witnessed numerous local politicians murdered recently, including a mayor who was decapitated in 2024.