The brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari was behind bars Wednesday, accused of masterminding the assassination of a reformist leader in the ruling PRI party.
The arrest of Raul Salinas de Gortari in connection with the Sept. 28 murder of Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu outside a Mexico City hotel was viewed as a courageous act in a country where family and political ties have long been considered sacred and the powerful immune from prosecution."No one is above the law," special prosecutor Pablo Chapa Bezanilla said in announcing the arrest Tuesday.
The arrest may well boost the credibility of Mexico's new president, Ernesto Zedillo, who has been battered by an economic crisis, rebel problems in the south and charges of weak leadership almost since he took office three months ago.
Suspicions about lagging investigations in the Ruiz Massieu case and in the March 23 murder of PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in Tijuana have eroded the government's credibility with the public as well as among some investors.
By arresting his predecessor's brother, Zedillo has "shaken a political tradition that was doing much damage to the country," said Sen. Gabriel Jimenez Remus of the opposition National Action Party.
The arrest of the former president's brother serves too as a major show of political independence by Zedillo.
No motive was ever given for the murder of Ruiz Massieu, the No. 2 man in the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. More than a dozen people, including a lone gunman who confessed to slaying the PRI's secretary-general, were arrested.
But the man federal police accuse of organizing the murder - PRI congressman Manuel Munoz Rocha - is a fugitive, and some suspect he too may have been killed.
The special prosecutor said Tuesday that the last place Munoz Rocha visited before vanishing was Raul Salinas' house. After going into hiding, one of two known phone calls he made was to Raul Salinas.
The arrest of Raul Salinas, 48, comes just four days after the attorney general's office announced it had arrested a second gunman in the murder of Colosio. Until his death at a campaign rally in Tijuana, Colosio had been the favorite to succeed Carlos Salinas.
With the political vacuum caused by the death, Carlos Salinas then turned to Zedillo as his handpicked PRI candidate. Zedillo, an economist, went on to easily win the presidential contest.
Carlos Salinas, president until Dec. 1, had insisted all along that his government was doing everything it could to investigate both assassinations.