- Montezuma's Revenge - Page 139

commander and vowed not only to avenge his fallen comrade, but to end corruption in the ranks. He lasted 28 days. On September 14, after flying to Mexico City in secret, he and his aides were blown to bits by machine gunners who pulled alongside on the way in from the airport. Meanwhile, Javier Arrellano Felix continued to be spotted from time to time, driving through the beach community of Playas de Tijuana in a white Mercedes.^[17]

But by the time Carlos Salinas left office, the thrilling and fruitless pursuit of the Arrellano Felix brothers would turn out to be a mere sideshow of the main event. In September of 1994, six months after the Colosio assassination, a senior PRI party official, Francisco Ruiz Massieu, was shot to death in downtown Mexico City. Here was yet another widely respected reformer dropped in his tracks in broad daylight, and an outraged President Salinas vowed to get to the bottom of it.  He took the unusual step of naming the dead man’s brother, Deputy Attorney General Mario Ruiz Massieu, as special prosecutor. Surely the victim’s blood brother could be trusted above all others to pursue the truth wherever it might lead. 

Wrong again. After an initial burst of arrests, the investigation quickly ran aground, and U.S. intelligence officials thought they knew why. They suspected that Mario Ruiz Massieu had been bought and paid for.  As Deputy Attorney General, he was chief of the Federal Judical Police—the country’s front-line anti-narcotics force—and therefore, at the pinnacle of a nation-wide pyramid of kickbacks. Mario had one of the most coveted jobs in Mexican law enforcement. “He decided which police chief got which region,” said a senior Mexican official.  “One of the good regions like Tamaulipas or the other border states can sell for $1 million to $2 million.”  But why would President Salinas have appointed an investigator who was so obviously compromised? One possibility came to light shortly after Salinas left office in December of 1994.^[18]

President Ernesto Zedillo came on stage with the standard promise to end high-level corruption once and for all, then shocked everyone by installing a member of the opposition as