Mexico, Nov 12: Mexico's interior minister, Francisco Blake Mora, a key figure in the country's battle with drug cartels, died on Friday in a helicopter crash that President Felipe Calderón said was probably an accident.
Calderón said the helicopter was flying in fog when it went down in a remote area south-east of Mexico City and that all possible causes were under investigation.
“Mexico has lost a great patriot … and I lost a dear friend,” said Calderón. “He was not only an exemplary minister, he was an exemplary Mexican.”
Authorities said the junior minister for human rights, Felipe Zamora, was among the seven others also killed, including the pilot.
Calderón appointed Blake Mora as interior minister in July 2010. That put him in charge of co-ordinating domestic policies including security, human rights, migration and the president's relation with the legislature and opposition parties.
His death, while a blow to the government, is not likely to change policy or day-to-day operations.
Blake Mora was travelling to a prosecutors' meeting in the neighbouring state of Morelos when the helicopter went down in a mountainous area of Mexico State.
Calderón lost another interior minister, Juan Camilo Mourino, in the crash of a Learjet in Mexico City on 4 November 2008. Despite widespread speculation that the accident, which killed 16, was caused by sabotage, investigators eventually blamed pilot error.
Suspicions commonly swirl around the deaths of prominent people in Mexico, and Calderón appeared to try to quell any suggestions of sabotage this time, saying Blake Mora's helicopter “was always under guard” in the hangar of Mexico's secret service and that it had recently undergone maintenance.
One of Blake Mora's last postings on his Twitter account commemorated the loss of Mourino. “Today we remember Juan Camilo Mourino three years after his death, a person who was working to build a better Mexico,” Blake Mora tweeted on 4 November.
Blake Mora, 45, started his political career in the mid-1990s as an official in his native Tijuana and served as a federal congressman through the 2000s, as well as interior secretary of Baja California.
Blake Mora's funeral was scheduled for Saturday. Calderon cancelled many of his appearances, including a trip to the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation meeting of world leaders in Hawaii next week.
