MEXICO CITY, NOV. 10, 2005 (Zenit.org).- The Mexican attorney general’s office has reopened investigations into the 1993 assassination of Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo.
The crime, which occurred on May 24, 1993, in the garage of Guadalajara’s international airport, shook the country and created tensions between the Catholic Church and the state.
Since then, there have been «doubts and many obscure points» in the investigation, said Auxiliary Bishop Abelardo Alvarado Alcántara of Mexico, who is in charge of the episcopal conference’s relations with the Mexican state.
There are also lingering questions, he said, about the allegedly political motives that led the hired assassins of a band of drug traffickers to murder Cardinal Posadas and his driver. Six other people also died in the hail of bullets unleashed in the airport’s parking lot.
Mexican bishops, including Cardinal Posadas’ successor, Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, have asked the attorney general’s office to call former President Carlos Salinas to make a statement about what he knows about the assassination.
On Tuesday, the attorney general’s office opened, for the first time, the possibility of calling Salinas to make a statement. Bishop Alvarado Alcántara said, on behalf of the episcopal conference, that if this summons contributes to shed light on the case, the country’s prelates see it as something very positive.
Meanwhile, Interior Minister Carlos Abascal Carranza met with the bishops in the episcopal conference’s premises in Lake Guadalupe.
He said that the openness to summon former President Salinas shows that «in this country we continue to make progress in the building of a state of law and that we are all equal before the law.»
