Family Of Mario Aburto, Lone Gunman In 1994 Luis Donaldo Colosio's Assassination, Say Their Son ‘Didn’t Shoot’ Mexican Presidential Candidate

On March 23, 1994, as Luis Donaldo Colosio, candidate for the Mexican vice presidency with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), plodded along behind a throng of party members and voters who turned up to a campaign rally in Tijuana, Mario Aburto pushed his way through the crowd, pressed a revolver to Colosio's head, and squeezed the trigger. At least, that's how the official version of the assassination goes. But since Aburto's conviction and imprisonment almost 20 years ago, he has denied his guilt, saying that the man who appears in the videos of the murder is not him. Now, with the possibility of parole coming up in 2014, Aburto's family is campaigning for his release, citing a letter in which he calls himself a "scapegoat for a crime that I never committed".

El Universal reported on Monday that in a letter sent to his father in December 2011 from prison and obtained by the newspaper, Aburto writes, "[I am] so certain that I didn't shoot Licenciado Colocio [sic] that even the fingerprints found on the pistol were of another person who looks like me," adding that the "videos of my case are altered, manipulated and in some parts they've been erased." He also writes that he had been forced to plead guilty at his trial through the use of "different physical and psychological tortures", saying that he never had a "true defense" afforded to him. Much of the Mexican public might be inclined to sympathize: 90 percent of them believe Colosio's murder was a conspiracy.

Aburto's brothers and sisters and his parents have not been able to see him in his nearly 20 years of incarceration, having fled for the United States, where they were granted political asylum after their claim that they had been detained and tortured was meritorious. From California, Aburto's father, Rubén, told El Universal that his son should be given parole. "There's no proof against him," he said. "Everyone knows that he was a scapegoat. Release him. Enough's enough. They already ruined his life, his brothers and sisters' lives, his family's lives. I don't want to die without seeing him!"