FBI: ‘El Chapo’ was target of airport killing

The assassination of Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo at Guadalajara airport in 1993 was an accident, with Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman the intended target, according to a newly released FBI report.

The conclusions of the FBI investigation into the high-profile killing were finally published in the Houston Chronicle last week, following a request made four years ago under the Freedom of Information Act.

“The Tijuana-based Arellano-Felix brothers attempted to assassinate Joaquin Guzman at the Guadalajara Airport. They mistakenly killed Guadalajara’s Archbishop, Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo, instead,” reads the FBI’s heavily redacted three-page report from October 1993. Eventually released by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the file was originally shared with the CIA and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

The cardinal and his driver were shot dead when gunmen riddled their Grand Marquis vehicle with at least 38 bullets at the airport on May 24, 1993. His successor, Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iñiguez, has always maintained that Posadas was the victim of a conspiracy, but then President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and his Attorney General Jorge Carpizo McGregor both said they believed the killing was a mistake, with the assassins from the Tijuana cartel meaning to kill Guzman, head of the rival Sinaloa Federation.

Efforts to capture Guzman intensified after the killing and he was arrested in Guatemala on June 9, 1993. He was convicted of possession of firearms, drug trafficking and the murder of Posadas – although the latter charge was later dismissed by another judge – and was held in the maximum-security Puente Grande prison just outside Guadalajara until his escape in 2001.

Guzman remains Mexico’s most wanted criminal and is widely considered the most powerful drug trafficker on earth, with an estimated fortune of one billion dollars.