Luis Donaldo Colosio - Assassination

Assassination

At 7:12 PM, on March 23, 1994, at a campaign rally in Lomas Taurinas, a poor neighborhood of Tijuana, Baja California, Colosio was shot in the head with a .38 Special a distance of a few centimeters in front of a person recording video nearby. There was no foreign press coverage of this campaign event in spite of it happening only a few miles south of San Diego, California. Colosio collapsed, and was subsequently rushed to the city's main hospital, after plans to fly him to an American hospital across the border were canceled. His death was announced a few hours later; amid contradicting eyewitness reports that remain to this day.

The shooter, Mario Aburto Martinez, was arrested at the site and never wavered from his story that he had acted alone. Nonetheless, many theories still surround Colosio's assassination. The authorities were criticized for their poor handling of Aburto, having shaved, bathed and given him a prison haircut before showing him to the media, which started rumors about whether that man, who looked so different from the one arrested, was really the murderer. Colosio received three bullet wounds, and it was never clear if they could have been done by a single person or not. The case has been officially closed after many different prosecutors investigated it, but after the many mishandlings of the investigation and contradictory versions, the controversy continues. Aburto remains imprisoned at the high-security La Palma facility in Almoloya de Juárez.