Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, the outspoken Roman Catholic leader of Guadalajara who served since his predecessor's tragic death 18 years ago, has resigned. The official announcement was made by the Holy See in Vatican City.
Cardinal Sandoval Íñiguez assumed responsibility for the huge Guadalajara archdiocese, Mexico's second largest, after Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo was assassinated in the parking lot of Guadalajara International Airport on the afternoon of May 24, 1993. He was shot 14 times and died in his car. Six other people, including his personal driver, were also killed in the assault. A government inquiry concluded that Posadas Ocampo was caught in a firefight between rival drug cartels and was mistakenly identified as a drug boss, but the case has never been resolved to the satisfaction of many people. Cardinal Sandoval Íñiguez has been a frequent critic of the government's investigation of the murder, maintaining that evidence has been covered up and that high ranking officials have been protected by prosecutors. Sandoval Íñiguez has said that he believes the assassination of Posadas Ocampo was politically motivated and ordered by persons connected to the drug trafficking industry. He reported receiving death threats over the years as he lobbied for further investigation of the case and for public disclosure of the evidence. Sandoval Íñiguez once sought protection from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Cardinal Sandoval Íñiguez, who was born in Jalisco state in 1933, was appointed archbishop of Guadalajara in April 1994, assumed his duties in May of that year and was named a cardinal by Pope John Paul II in October 1994. In accepting the resignation today, the Vatican immediately named Cardinal José Francisco Robles Ortega as the new archbishop of Guadalajara. Cardinal Robles Ortega has served as archbishop of Monterrey for the past eight years.
Two weeks ago Cardinal Sandoval Íñiguez said that cartel violence throughout Mexico had reached "barbarous" levels. "Our priests are living side by side with drug traffickers, they (the traffickers) know them to be priests and let them pass by, but that doesn't make it any less worrisome," claimed the archbishop. Sandoval Íñiguez said that in recent weeks he had had a "premonition" that something terrible was going to happen in Guadalajara, which had been largely free of the worst acts of narco terror since the war against the drug cartels was launched in December 2006. On Thanksgiving Day, the bodies of 26 execution victims were found abandoned in vehicles on a major city street.
Dec. 15, 2012 - A Federal Bureau of Investigation report obtained by the Houston Chronicle under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) concluded that the 1993 assassination of Cardinal Posadas Ocampo was a case of mistaken identity. The heavily redacted government report was made public by the newspaper yesterday, and concealed the names of confidential sources. The FBI said that a cartel headed by the Arellano Félix brothers was trying to kill Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, infamous leader of the Sinaloa Cartel who has been on the lam since January 2001, when an execution team machine gunned Posadas and the others instead. Many here will reject that claim. The most popular theory is still that the Guadalajara archbishop was killed on direct orders of high government officials, to protect well connected drug traffickers. The Chronicle, which filed its FOIA request in 2008, did not explain the four year delay in production of the FBI report.
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