Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu

José Francisco Ruiz Massieu (Acapulco, Guerrero, July 22, 1946-Mexico City, September 28, 1994) was a Mexican lawyer and politician, member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, brother-in-law of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and father of former Secretary of Foreign Relations Claudia Ruiz Massieu Salinas.

Biography

Studies

He studied at the Faculty of Law of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a Bachelor's Degree in History at the Universidad Iberoamericana; as well as postgraduate studies at the University of Essex in England. He served as tenured professor by opposition at the Faculty of Law and as a researcher at the UNAM Legal Research Institute and directed the Department of Law at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. He obtained the National Prize for Public Administration in 1979, awarded by the National Institute of Public Administration, later he was a member of its Board of Directors. He had a notable performance as a public administrator and as a politician, in which the following stand out: head of the Department of Orientation and Legal Services, secretary of the Assembly and general director of INFONAVIT; Director General of Legal Affairs. Senior Officer and Undersecretary of Planning of the Ministry of Health; Secretary General of the Government of Guerrero in 1981.

Political career

He was governor of the state of Guerrero between 1987 and 1993. He later served as general director of INFONAVIT, general secretary of the National Executive Committee (CEN) of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 1994, and as a multi-member federal deputy, being the next coordinator of his bench in the Lower House.

Death

Lafragua Street at the height of Hotel Casa Blanca, site of the murder of José Francisco Ruiz Massieu.

The morning of September 28, 1994, at 9:32 a.m. m. she received a bullet impact. Prior to this, Ruiz Massieu had attended a meeting with 180 elected deputies of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) held at the Hotel Casa Blanca, located on Calle de Lafragua (next to the monument to the Revolution) of the mexican capital. After that encounter, Ruiz Massieu tried to get into his car and a 28-year-old named Daniel Aguilar Treviño, originally from the state of Tamaulipas, shot him in the neck. After said attack he was transferred to a private clinic, arriving still alive. The gunshot wound to his neck caused massive blood loss, causing his death within an hour of his arrival at the hospital. Aguilar Treviño was detained by security elements after a brief pursuit. Aguilar Treviño's accomplice turned out to be a cousin of his named Carlos Ángel Cantú Narváez. The latter was also arrested, although he was not present at the crime scene, but despite this, there was evidence and charges against him.

Both accomplices are serving a 50-year prison sentence. This occurred precisely six months after the assassination of the then candidate for the presidency of the Republic by the same party, Luis Donaldo Colosio, on March 23, 1994. As in the case of Colosio, the then president Carlos Salinas de Gortari again was questioned for this fact.

Research

His murder is considered one of the biggest scandals in the recent history of Mexico, since Raúl Salinas de Gortari, brother of former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, was implicated as the mastermind of the murder, because in 1994, There were numerous rumors of clashes between Raúl Salinas de Gortari and José Francisco Ruiz Massieu. His brother, Mario Ruiz Massieu, who was serving at the time as Deputy Attorney General of the Republic, was left in charge of the murder investigations.

In the statement of the alleged material murderer (Aguilar Treviño), he revealed the names of Fernando Rodríguez González (former technical secretary of the Hydraulic Resources Commission of the Chamber of Deputies) and former deputies Manuel Muñoz Rocha (friend and compadre of Rodríguez González) and Abraham Rubio Canales, pointing to them as the main masterminds of said homicide and claimed to have received a payment of MXN$50,000 new pesos (USD$5,000 dollars) to carry out the attack. Rodríguez González's wife, María Eugenia Ramírez Arauz, decided to turn herself in to the PGR authorities and she confessed to having housed both Aguilar Treviño and Cantú Narváez days before the assassination. In addition, Rodríguez González assured that the crime was intended to prevent Ruiz Massieu from reaching the leadership of the Lower House and launching a series of political and administrative reforms of which Muñoz Rocha did not agree. In a last statement by Rodríguez González, he pointed out that at that time there was a group of former legislators whose purpose was to rescue leadership positions in the country and that this group was made up of Muñoz Rocha himself and former senator Enrique Cárdenas González –among 10 other parliamentarians– and They had contact with organized crime gangs. Jorge Rodríguez, Fernando Rodríguez's brother, turned himself in to the authorities and confessed that both he and his brother received from Muñoz Rocha a list to assassinate several important PRI politicians, including Ruiz Massieu himself, the then president of the Senate of the Republic, Fernando Ortiz Arana, the governor of Tamaulipas, Manuel Cavazos Lerma, the senator for that same state, Laura Alicia Garza Galindo, and the deputy Claudia Carola Santos Cruz who, according to the Rodríguez González, was given half a million of new pesos to assassinate Ruiz Massieu and she never appeared, so they also planned to liquidate her.

At the end of October 1994, Mario Ruiz Massieu (the victim's brother) accused the then PRI president, Ignacio Pichardo Pagaza, and the appointed secretary general, María de los Ángeles Moreno, for obstructing the evidence surrounding the case. Pichardo Pagaza and Moreno themselves demanded to see evidence against them, which was impossible to clarify since they entered into collusion with the then Attorney General of the Republic, Humberto Benítez Treviño, to validate a request for a leave of absence from office (apocryphal) to the then federal deputy, Manuel Muñoz Rocha. The Rodríguez González brothers are currently serving a sentence in the Reclusorio Sur in Mexico City

At the beginning of the six-year term of the newly elected Ernesto Zedillo, he appointed PAN lawyer Antonio Lozano Gracia as Attorney General of the Republic and ordered him to head the commission that would investigate the crimes of Ruiz Massieu, Luis Donaldo Colosio and Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo. Lozano, in turn, instructed the lawyer Pablo Chapa Bezanilla to start the investigations. Chapa Bezanilla surprised public opinion by arresting Raúl Salinas de Gortari in Mexico City as the intellectual author of the death of Ruiz Massieu, based on a statement by Fernando Rodríguez González who assured that it was Raúl Salinas himself who ordered Muñoz Rocha and provided him with the per diem to assassinate his ex-brother-in-law because both began to have fights within the PRI. According to Rodríguez González, Muñoz Rocha was a puppet within the Lower House of Representatives and within the party of Raúl Salinas himself, and in addition to being a personal friend of Abraham Rubio Canales. This was one of the most scandalous investigations in the country due to facts presented during the years 1995 and 1996, during which time the investigations lasted and evidence and witnesses were presented that would definitively convict the brother of a former president for political assassination. Among the statements, the head of security, Lieutenant Colonel Chávez Ramírez, stood out, who claimed to have heard in a meeting held at the Presidential Palace in 1993, the Salinas de Gortari brothers, along with their father, planning the assassination of José Francisco, due to because, according to his own words, "they had already left the jacal" and was "a hindrance to Salinismo ", which required his immediate elimination. Although this testimony was attached to the investigation report, it was never taken into account as evidence in the trials against Raúl Salinas de Gortari of his intellectual authorship in the assassination of his ex-brother-in-law.

"El Encanto" scandal

At the end of 1996, a seer named Francisca Zetina, alias "La Paca", delivered a letter from Pablo Chapa Bezanilla with a statement from an anonymous person who would later be identified as Ramiro Aguilar Lucero, from how he had witnessed that on September 30, 1994, two days after the murder of Ruiz Massieu, Raúl Salinas de Gortari had beaten Manuel Muñoz Rocha to death in a house on Paseo de la Reforma, in Las Lomas, where he later ordered to dismember the corpse. What's more, Aguilar Lucero had made a sketch for the medium to be able to get to where, after the murder, Raúl and his accomplices had taken the body to be buried in a house belonging to Raúl Salinas called "el Encanto", located in the Delegation of Cuajimalpa in Mexico City.

Lieutenant Colonel Chávez Ramírez confessed on October 14, 1996 that, on Raúl's instructions, covering his hands with socks, he drove the Jetta in which Muñoz Rocha was last seen to the residence on Paseo de the Raúl Salinas Reform where he would be assassinated, to be left abandoned on Palo Santo street, a few blocks from the Estado Mayor sports hall. He also declared that Justo Ceja, private secretary of the President of the Republic, had been involved in the disappearance of the traces of the murder and burial of Muñoz Rocha.

After learning of the location of the alleged remains of Manuel Muñoz Rocha in "El Encanto," the Attorney General's Office entered the Raúl Salinas farm with excavating machinery where they found human remains that would apparently condemn Salinas himself. Said remains were taken on December 1, 1996 to the DNA Analysis Division of the FBI in Virginia (the same unit that at that time was investigating the case of the death of the Colombian girl Sandra Catalina Vázquez, allegedly at the hands of her father, a Colombian police officer) which proved that they were not the remains of Muñoz Rocha.

Ernesto Zedillo decided to request the resignation of Antonio Lozano and the rest of his team, including, of course, prosecutor Pablo Chapa Bezanilla, who would go from persecutor to persecuted after it was revealed that he paid $500,000 to Fernando Rodríguez González to testify against Raúl Salinas in the interrogations of the PGR. On January 31, 1997, the Federal District Attorney General's Office reported that after expert reports and investigations it had determined that the remains found had been placed there a few days earlier by Francisca Zetina's son-in-law, La Paca, and they were his father's. That is, the in-law of the medium. La Paca, the son-in-law and the author of that anonymous letter ended up in jail but after 10 years the couple would obtain their freedom. All of them had also received money from the Attorney General's Office for their collaboration in the investigation. Finally, Chapa Bezanilla would also go to jail accused of having planned the "El Encanto" show with Zetina. Raúl Salinas was found guilty of the crime of Ruiz Massieu despite the mounting evidence in 1999. In June 2005 he was released after exonerating him of the assassination and other crimes.

To this day, Manuel Muñoz Rocha continues to be a fugitive from justice, having been declared missing in 1999, although in 2009 the arrest warrant issued against him expired. Her wife Marcia Cano assured that her husband communicated with her for the last time on September 29, 1994, one day after Ruiz Massieu's crime, where he assured that it was a normal communication in which he heard the voice of she agitated from her; she asked him to take care of her. According to Marcia Cano, that was the last time she communicated with her husband.

Political Legacy

José Francisco Ruiz Massieu was married to Adriana Salinas de Gortari, sister of the then President of the Republic, Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Their marriage ended in a scandal, despite which José Francisco remained close to Carlos Salinas, so much so that from his position as Secretary General of the National Executive Committee (CEN) of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Ruiz Massieu he played a key role in articulating some of the most important reforms developed by the government of Carlos Salinas. Likewise, he was the father of the former Secretary of Foreign Relations Claudia Ruiz Massieu Salinas.

Published works (selection)

• Constitutional regulation of political parties in Latin America (Mexico: UNAM, Legal Research Institute, 1974).
• New Mexican Constitutional Law (Mexico: Porrúa, 1983).
• Political Law Studies of States and Municipalities (Mexico: UNAM, Legal Research Institute: Porrúa, 1986).
• Time ideas: the perspectives of democracy (Mexico: Diana, 1990).
• The Democratic Process of Mexico (Mexico: Economic Culture Fund, 1994).
• Democratic construction (Mexico: Miguel Angel Porrúa, 1994).