Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo

The Posadas case was reopened after President Vicente Fox won power in 2000, ending seven decades of one-party rule. Fox took office vowing to clear up several high-profile murders. Deputy Attorney General María de la Luz Lima Malvido cited serious irregularities in earlier probes, including police obstruction and the disappearance of over 1,000 key documents. Since then, she has said she received death threats "from powerful quarters," her teenage daughter was held at gunpoint, and her two other children were fired at in their car.

New leads emerged after the case's opening, including testimony from a childhood friend of Posadas. He said that Posadas told him that he had been summoned to Mexican President Carlos Salinas’residence and threatened just weeks before his death. "There is a lot of proof that leads us to conclude that we are before a crime of state, prepared, organized and with the participation of state security forces," Fernando Guzmán, a conservative state legislator, said. Guzmán is close to the investigation because he represented the wife of Posadas's driver, who was also killed in the attack. He said that investigators have ruled out the involvement of drug cartels, at least as the case was presented by Salinas's government. The new theory that the murder may have been ordered by members of the government was based on allegations that a senior Salinas aide warned Posadas to keep his mouth shut about information that he had uncovered linking senior politicians with the drug trade and prostitution. No one has alleged that Salinas was personally involved.

Around the 10th anniversary of the killing, senior church members urged Fox in a letter to keep his word and to see the case is solved. Posadas's successor, Cardinal Juan Sandoval, is convinced the murder was politically motivated. He, his lawyer, and Guzmán have also reported death threats and appealed to the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights for protection.

On 15 August 2006, US Department of Justice officials announced that US federal drug agents had arrested Mexican drug lord Francisco Javier Arellano Félix, a leader of the Tijuana Cartel responsible for digging elaborate tunnels to smuggle drugs under the US border. In the aforementioned press release, Department of Justice officials said that Javier Arellano Félix was also charged in Mexico in 1993 with conspiring to assassinate Posadas.[5]