Thirty years after presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was assassinated, Juan Carlos Rodriguez is still getting questions about that day. He was attending a political rally in Tijuana’s Lomas Taurinas neighborhood when two shots rang out, striking the man expected to be Mexico’s next president.
It was March 23, 1994, a date that remains seared in the memories of many Mexicans. As Mexico once again prepares for a presidential election this year, the incident continues making headlines.
After a decade of not setting foot in Lomas Taurinas, I returned several times last week for the assassination’s 30th anniversary, revisiting this neighborhood whose name is known across Mexico, yet has largely remained a backwater.
I was struck by a thought: Although decades have passed, Lomas Taurinas still lives in the shadow of Colosio’s homicide, known as el magnicidio.
“Somos tristemente celebres, we are sadly famous,” Rodriguez told me, pointing to the spot where he had been standing. Rodriguez, a teacher at the time – now the school’s assistant principal — was there with his students to present a petition for more teachers. But the crowd was so thick, they were forced to remain on the periphery.
Tucked in a canyon below Tijuana’s A.L Rodriguez International Airport, Lomas Taurinas feels a world apart from the bustle of Otay Mesa, with its maquiladora factories, rumbling container trucks, university campuses, shopping malls, and the well-to-do neighborhood of Altabrisa perched just uphill. Lomas Taurinas’ modest houses cling to its steep hillsides where laundry hangs in outdoor patios. Bright flowers grow in weed-filled lots, where the names of past political candidates fade from outdoor walls.
The neighborhood has seen some progress in 30 years. The main street is now paved, and cement houses have replaced the wood shacks. The elementary school where Rodriguez taught now sits inside a walled compound with classrooms, colorful murals, functioning bathrooms and a playground. Some of his students’ parents work across the border in San Diego, he told me, but the majority are employed in Tijuana’s maquiladora factories, and are struggling to make ends meet.
In Lomas Taurinas you can hear dogs bark, roosters crow, and birds chirp. But the tranquility is deceiving: Residents will tell you that Lomas Taurinas suffers from violence and drug addiction, like scores of other low-income neighborhoods across Tijuana.
Last month, “there was a shootout on the street, when children were still in school in the afternoon,” said Rodriguez, who now works as deputy principal in the morning session and was not there at the time. “They had to evacuate them, the National Guard came, and the police as well.”
The incident drew little attention outside Lomas Taurinas.
Still in the News
Mexico’s national media remains focused on the Colosio assassination. The confessed assassin, Mario Aburto, is serving a 45-year federal sentence. Despite numerous allegations that Aburto, at the time a 23-year-old maquiladora worker, worked with accomplices, a series of government investigations have been unable to confirm outside participation.
Last October, the Mexican Attorney General’s Office reopened the investigation, saying evidence pointed to a second gunman, a former employee of Mexico’s defunct intelligence agency, CISEN. But the judge overseeing the case has dismissed the allegations and recommended against going to trial.
For his part, Aburto has petitioned for release, saying that he should not have been sentenced under federal law, but rather under Baja California law, which at the time limited sentences to 30 years. He has received support from an unexpected quarter – Luis Donaldo Colosio Riojas, the candidate’s son. He was 8 years old when his father was killed and is now running for Mexico’s Senate as a member of Movimiento Ciudadano, a small opposition party.
“We want to turn the page,” the son said in January. “We want justice, not revenge.”
Mexico’s president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador denied the request, calling the assassination a “matter of state” that needs continued investigation; the opponents say he’s playing a political game.
Changing Times
Agustin Perez Rivero, was one of Lomas Taurinas’ first residents, founding the colonia five decades ago. “It was so clean, there was nothing here, not even a tree, just hillsides,” he told me. As leader of a grassroots PRI organization, he said he invited Colosio to Lomas Taurinas, and was feet away when the candidate was shot.
“He was coming down here,” said Perez Rivero, now 93 years old, pointing to a spot on the vacant lot where there are now stairs. “They lifted him and dragged him away.”
Perez Rivero watched from the sidelines on Saturday, as fewer than four dozen people – political contenders, party officials and others – gathered briefly in his memory, posing for photos as they stood at the foot of a large bronze statue of the slain candidate.
They remembered Colosio’s famous words, “I see a Mexico that hungers and thirsts for justice,” and said much remains to be done.
Efren Torres, 27, who works at a call center, wasn’t yet born when Colosio was killed, but he grew up in Lomas Taurinas hearing about the incident. For the most part it’s just a regular neighborhood, he told me as we shared a bench on the small plaza. “People take their children to the park, they go to the market, but there is also this dark, violent side,” he told me.
Torres is not sure who he’ll vote for on June 2, when Mexicans elect a new president. But much of the colonia is staunchly supporting President Lopez Obrador’s MORENA Party and its candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum.
In Other News
- Border wall art: The Museum of Us in Balboa Park has acquired pieces of the bollard-style U.S. border fence torn down to make way for a taller barrier. The dismantled sections contain murals painted on the Mexican side, and the plan is to work with the coalition Friends of Friendship Park to prepare them for public display. Meanwhile, artists are already at work in Tijuana painting pieces on the Mexican side of the new wall.
- Police extortions: Business owners and residents of Rosarito Beach marched on City Hall last week demanding an end to police corruption, including extortions that they say are driving away tourists.
- Adoption by same-sex couple: The first gay couple to marry in Baja California has now set another precedent as the first same-sex couple to legally complete the adoption process. Last week, the city of Mexicali issued them an adoption certificate for their son. It’s the first issued to a same-sex couple.
- Mexican immigration agents accused of corruption: Two Mexican federal employees assigned to the Tijuana office of Mexico’s National Migration Institute were detained in February after federal investigators searched their home in the city’s Santa Fe section. Investigators discovered items suggestive of human trafficking: ammunition, large sums of cash, and documents showing ostensible payments from migrants, the website Punto Norte reported. But a federal judge ordered their release after finding irregularities were committed during the arrest. After the news broke, Mexico’s National Migration Institute announced last week that it had “separated from their duties” two members of the agency in Tijuana under investigation for illicit acts, but did not name them.
- Open-air migrant camps: Two migrant civil-rights groups filed a lawsuit earlier this month in San Francisco federal court against U.S. Customs and Border Protection, demanding that the agency release its guidelines on outdoor migrant camps at the California border. The legal action follows separate lawsuits filed last year by Al Otro Lado and the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies demanding the information. The new lawsuit alleges the agency failed to make the records available.
- IBWC meeting: A presentation on the origins of pollution on the Mexico side of the Tijuana River and an update San Diego-Tijuana wastewater treatment projects are on the agenda of the International Boundary and Water Committee meeting scheduled for Thursday 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Coronado Community Center. The meeting will also be held virtually.