The Attorney General’s Office (FGR) arrested Jorge Antonio Sánchez Ortega, a former agent of the defunct National Research and Security Center (CISEN), on Saturday afternoon in Tijuana. Sánchez Ortega has been viewed for decades as the alleged second shooter at the scene of the killing of Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta, the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s presidential candidate in 1994. Mexican authorities have not released details about this weekend’s arrest, although local press reports indicate it was due to a federal arrest warrant.
Sanchez Ortega was arrested around 5:00 p.m. In Los Reyes, a neighborhood located 13 kilometers south of Lomas Torrenas, the site of the famous Colosio murder in March 1994 during that year’s presidential campaign. That afternoon was the first time Sanchez Ortega had been arrested. His presence at the crime scene and his clothes stained with the politician’s blood made him one of the prime suspects. Hours later, he tested positive for sodium rosonate, which traces residue left by a firearm.
The then-prosecutor’s office released him on March 24, one day after the attack, after concluding that the shot that ended Colosio’s life came from the gun of Mario Aburto, the former candidate’s admitted killer. Aburto remains in prison today thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision and despite obtaining an injunction that would have restored his freedom after 30 years in prison.
After decades of being forgotten and the Colosio case being considered a judicial case, Sánchez Ortega’s name was once again put in the spotlight in 2024 thanks to the Attorney General’s Office and then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The president confirmed in July of that year that the judiciary had refused to issue an arrest warrant against the former intelligence officer. The Morena leader insisted that Sanchez Ortega had been identified decades ago as the second shooter in the assassination and that he had received state protection for not appearing at the investigation.
The District Attorney’s Office reported in January 2024 that it had sufficient elements to support the theory of a second shooter at the Coliseo rally on March 23. Those responsible for the investigation then confirmed that they had a “large body of evidence” with which they could implicate Sanchez Ortega in the murder. This announcement was a 180-degree reversal in relation to the position of the Public Prosecution itself, which released the suspect specifically due to a lack of elements and after taking his statement. Despite this supposed accumulation of incriminating elements, the district judge subsequently refused to grant an arrest warrant against Cisen’s client.
FGR and López Obrador linked Genaro García Luna, Felipe Calderon’s former security minister, to the murder plot in Colosseo. The officials who gave the new oxygen to the assassination claim that Garcia Luna, who was then deputy director of Secun operations, bore the responsibility for “covering up and expediting his removal from Tijuana by Sánchez Ortega.” The US Department of Justice sentenced Garcia Luna in October 2024 to 38 years in prison on charges of drug trafficking and organized crime.
According to the file in the hands of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, Cisen’s agent received the order to follow Colosio’s march just three hours before the candidate arrived in Tijuana. Sánchez Ortega, who was born in Sinaloa and settled in Tijuana, spent only seven months at the intelligence center. A day later, the agent, now a suspect in the murder, would announce that the blood stain on his clothes was due to him carrying the candidate’s body. He also claimed at the time that he had not fired a gun in more than two years. Today he will have to face those accusations again.
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