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Born into a family with a long political heritage in Magdalena de Kino, Sonora, Colosio Murrieta studied at the ITESM, after which he joined the PRI (1972). After that he went on to do postgraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania in the USA and research work at the National Applied Systems Institute in Austria before returning to Mexico. In 1979 he joined the Ministry of Budget and Planning under future president Carlos Salinas.
He was elected to Congress as the federal deputy for his home town in 1985 and, in 1987, he was selected to serve on the PRI's National Executive Committee. In 1988 Carlos Salinas chose him as the campaign manager for his (successful, although suspicious) presidential campaign. In the same election, Colosio was elected to the Senate, representing Sonora.
In the early years of Salinas's presidency, Colosio served as the chairman of their party's National Executive Committee. In 1992, Salinas chose him to serve in his cabinet, in the newly created position of Social Development Secretary. In November 1993, the PRI announced that Colosio was to be its candidate for the upcoming presidential election.
Colosio proved popular not only with the president, but with the public in general too. He was greeted by large crowds throughout his presidential campaign. Since Mexico's constitution allows presidents to be on power for only one term, and as a rule PRI presidents hand picked their own successors (the party's first primary election in history took place in 1999), Colosio apparently enjoyed the president's favor.
However, at a campaign rally in a poor neighborhood of Tijuana in the early evening of 23 March 1994, Colosio was mysteriously shot in the head at a distance of less than a meter. He collapsed, and was subsequently rushed to the city's main hospital. His death was announced a few hours later.
Although the shooter, arrested at the site, never wavered from his story that he had acted alone, rumors still surround Colosio's assassination. Blame was initially laid at the feet of former foreign minister Manuel Camacho Solís, another of Salinas's protégés and allegedly very bitter at having been passed over as his successor. The finger of suspicion also pointed in the direction of organized crime, particulary the Tijuana drug cartel. With the passage of time, however, the most persistent rumor is that Colosio was shot on the orders of Salinas himself, because of the populist turn his campaign had taken, threatening to undermine Salinas's neoliberal reforms.
With only four months before the election, the PRI found itself hamstrung by the constitutional requirement that no presidential candidate could have held political office during the six months immediately prior to the election; this effectively disqualifyied the entire cabinet, where most of the more promosing replacements were. Of the few potential candidates available, the party eventually chose Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León, who had been working as Colosio's campaign manager.