Kinkaid assassination

Omar Kinkaid, the President of the United States of Mexico, was killed on 7 December 1879 by a thrown bomb while attending a parade. The identity of the assassin was never found, though twenty-six years later a Mexicano peasant named Carlos Feliz claimed to have thrown the bomb.

The

Kinkaid assa

Omar Kinkaid.

ssination occurred during a Mexicano-based revolutionary insurrection led by former Senator Carlos Concepción of Chiapas. Concepción was the founder and leader of the Moralistas, a Marxist guerrilla movement aiming to overthrow the Anglo-dominated government headed by Kinkaid and replace it with a popular government dominated by his fellow Mexicanos.

At the time of Kinkaid’s death, there was growing speculation among political observers in Mexico City that he was planning to run for a third term in the 1881 Mexican elections, or that he was planning to throw his support behind Liberty Party leader Thomas Rogers. Because the identity of the assassin was never discovered, Kinkaid’s death served to further polarize Mexican politics. Rogers blamed the murder on Concepción, while Concepción blamed the Continentalist Party’s financial backers Bernard Kramer and Monte Benedict, and Kramer blamed Rogers. Sobel cites North American historian Joan Kahn as part of a small group that believes that Kinkaid’s assassination was plotted by North American Governor-General John McDowell.

Kramer and Benedict offered a million dolares reward for information leading to the conviction of the assassin. Kramer also renamed the recently-completed interoceanic canal in Guatemala the Kinkaid Canal, and endowed Kinkaid University in the late president’s California home town. However, Sobel notes that there was no national outpouring of grief such as the one that followed the assassination of President Pedro Hermión in 1851, since Kinkaid was an elderly man, and not as popular as Hermión had been.

Two days after Kinkaid’s death, the Mexican Senate chose Senator George Vining of Jefferson to succeed him.

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Sobel’s sources for the assassination of Omar Kinkaid include the Mexican Congress's Report on the Death of President Omar Kinkaid (Mexico City, 1880); Frank Howard's The Strange Death of President Kinkaid (New York, 1888); David Green's A President Dies: The Assassination of Omar Kinkaid (New York, 1960); and Joan Kahn  's Secret History of the Kinkaid Assassination (New York, 1970).