Rumors

Wow. According to an online survey of almost two thousand people on the website of El Siglo de Torreón, 24 percent believe the government's case that the Mouriño plane crash was caused by pilot error in response to turbulence. Seventy percent say they have doubts, with the remainder not expressing an opinion. Given the openness of the government in the wake of the crash, such numbers are a bit disheartening.

Jorge Buendía addresses the persistence of rumors in today's column:

The rumor of an attack being behind the air tragedy is plausible because of the ruthless war between the federal government and drug traffickers, and also because Mouriño was accompanied by Santiago Vasconcelos, a key figure in that war and over whose head death threats hung. Those two elements, the war against drug traffickers and the presence of the ex-subprocurador [equivalent to maybe an undersecretary in the US bureaucracy], easily and rapidly created the attack hypothesis.

Rumors like those that surround the death of the Secretary of the Interior also require the existence of a conspiracy. The conspiracy is based on presenting as an accident what is believed to be an attack. No one talks about an attack ordered from governmental spheres, as was the case with Colosio, but rather that authorities simply quiet the fact that Mouriño was the victim of an attack prepared by drug traffickers.

That last line could be something of a silver lining in all this: yes, the government remains distrusted by 70 percent of the population, but at the very least no one suspects the active involvement of one faction or another of the government in Mouriño's death. I haven't been in Mexico long enough to really gauge this change, but that seems like progress; less than 15 years ago, members of the government were suspected by the public not only in Colosio's death, but also that of Pepe Ruiz Massieu and, to a lesser degree, Cardinal Posadas.