Exclusive: Historic FBI Report On Murder Of Eugenio Garza Sada
Guerrillas who killed Tec de Monterrey founder moved in US and got guns there; FBI investigated
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By Juan Alberto Cedillo and Ioan Grillo
On the morning of Sept. 17, 1973, one of Mexico’s top businessmen, Eugenio Garza Sada, was riding to work in Monterrey in a black Ford Galaxie when a pick-up packed with gunmen cut in. The assailants were in a communist guerrilla group who wanted to kidnap Garza for ransom; Garza, then 81, ran an empire of breweries and factories and founded the prestigious Tec de Monterrey university.
However, when a guerilla came up to the Galaxie window with a rifle, the driver, Bernardo Chapa Pérez, pulled out a pistol and fired. In the ensuing struggle, two guerillas, Chapa, a bodyguard called Modesto Torres, and Garza himself died. More than 150,000 people attended the funeral of the magnate, considered Monterrey’s foremost businessman of the twentieth century.
In a CrashOut exclusive, we publish here for the first time information from 55 pages of an FBI probe into Garza’s murder obtained through a freedom of information request. FBI agents have operated in Mexico going back many decades, along with officers from the CIA, DEA and other agencies, and were interested in such a major event as the killing of the man they described as a “Mexican multimillionaire industrialist,” and of the guerilla group behind it. The work of U.S. agencies south of the border is of particular interest following the death of two CIA operatives here last month.
However, the FBI was also investigating leads in the Garza murder in the United States, where members of the guerilla group moved and where it procured firearms. The FBI files reveal an alert that one of the killers could have fled over the border, the questioning of a gun shop owner in San Antonio, and the records of workers in Dallas. They also gives extensive details on the…
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