President Carlos Salinas de Gortari appealed for calm and unity Thursday after an assassin lurking at a campaign rally murdered his party's presidential candidate.
The assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio on Wednesday in Tijuana threatened to plunge the country into a new political crisis just five months before elections and less than three months after a peasant uprising.Colosio was shot in the head and stomach while in a crowd of supporters and died three hours later. Authorities first said two men were arrested as suspects, but the attorney general's office said Thursday that only a 23-year-old mechanic was considered a suspect and the other man was held as a witness.
Colosio, the first major politician to be slain since President-elect Alvaro Obregon in 1928, had only a handful of security guards. Gov. Ernesto Ruffo said Colosio asked for a discrete security presence so he could have greater contact with the crowd - a populist style he adopted for his campaign.
Colosio's death was a stunning blow for the embattled leadership of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which is still reeling from the New Year's Day uprising by Indian peasants in southernmost Chiapas state.
The rebels were seeking improved living conditions and reforms to clean up Mexico's fraud-ridden electoral system through which the ruling party has won every presidential election for 65 years.
President Clinton said Thursday in Washington that he was "profoundly saddened" by the assassination and pledged the United States will assist Mexico in the coming days "in any way we can."
Salinas, who handpicked Colosio in November as the PRI candidate for the Aug. 21 election, called the slaying a "cowardly attack."
A grim-faced Salinas went to the Mexico City airport Thursday morning to meet a Mexican air force plane carrying Colosio's body.
The body was taken in a motorcade to party headquarters downtown, where Salinas stood at attention beside a coffin draped with a white cloth bearing the red, white and green party symbol. Party activists applauded and chanted "Colosio, Colosio!"
The president declared Thursday a national day of mourning, with the stock market and all banks, government offices and schools closed.
"I call on all my compatriots to share their indignation in serenity and calm," Salinas, who by law is limited to a single term, said in a statement. "I call on them to reaffirm our shared conviction that within the framework of institutions and of the law we can overcome this offense."
With only five months before the election, PRI will now have to go through the process of selecting another candidate, but how it would do that was not clear because there is no established selection process.
There was no immediate front-runner to replace Colosio, but possibilities included Manuel Camacho Solis, the government's negotiator with the rebels in Chiapas.
The assassination was sure to add to the nation's sense of crisis. Salinas, who had successfully negotiated the NAFTA free-trade pact with the United States and Canada while turning Mexico around from the economic debacle of the 1980s, is facing his gravest tests at the end of his six-year term.
Opponents had attacked Colosio by saying his free-market economic policies were too close to those of the Salinas administration, which so far have brought little improvement to Mexico's poor. In response, Colosio, 44, had stressed the social programs and environmental protection he would implement.
James Jones, U.S. ambassador to Mexico, dismissed suggestions the assassination would have significant economic repercussions.
But the killing caused a major drop in the price of Mexico bonds on international markets.
The attorney general's office identified the suspected killer as Mario Aburto Martinez, a mechanic in Tijuana. Officials said he used a .38-caliber pistol.
Martinez reportedly told federal agents he was a pacifist and had written books about pacifism.