Word: colosio
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...first shot not only killed Luis Donaldo Colosio, the ruling party's handpicked successor to Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, but it also crippled the confidence of a country striving to enter the select company of First World nations. The murder was the latest blow in a year that has . brought violent rebellion, economic uncertainty and political disruption to a land whose citizens believed they had achieved peace and stability. Mexicans grieved not just for Colosio but for themselves and a future they now viewed with trepidation. In the weeks ahead, they will discover whether their institutions and maturity...
Rumors blamed everyone: Colosio's party rivals had planned the killing, or Tijuana's notorious drug gangs did it. No one seemed to know whether there was a conspiracy or if the assassin was another of the solitary, deranged killers who disfigure history. Mexicans reacted not only with horror and outrage but also with something close to fear. No matter what the motive, the public murder of a leading politician inflicted a national trauma, a sense of disorientation that came with the recognition that things were not what they so comfortingly seemed...
...last murder of a national leader occurred in 1928 when President-elect Alvaro Obregon was shot. Colosio's assassination jolts Mexicans with the prospect that violence may be subverting the modern society they thought they were building. It also puts the political focus between now and the Aug. 21 presidential election on two main issues: What will be done to ease the poverty that still afflicts so many Mexicans, and how much electoral reform will the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or P.R.I., accept without endangering its 65-year grip on the presidency -- which opponents regularly charge has been maintained through...
Mexican Presidents cannot serve more than one term, but traditionally they have secretly selected the party's nominee and, in the process, their successor. Salinas picked Colosio, who then headed the government's social development secretariat last November, and most experts considered his election close to a sure thing. Now, only five months before the balloting, the P.R.I. has to find another candidate quickly, not only to resume campaigning but also to tamp down the tide of anxiety and insecurity. Uncharacteristically cooperative, the eight candidates suspended their campaigns...
Agustin Lopez Santiz understands that all too well. He lives in the southern state of Chiapas, at the opposite end of the country from the shantytown where Colosio was shot. Santiz, 66, sits barefoot in the dust of Tuxaquilja, a village of 600 people, picking corn off a cob to feed his chickens. The earth is dry, rocky, infertile. Roads are ruts, and there are few public services. Looking down at the dirt, he says in a mixture of Spanish and Tzeltal, the local Indian tongue, "This is where we are from. We cannot leave...