Dinosaurs and Desperados
Caldwell, Christopher
Christopher Caldwell Dinosaurs and Desperados The economy will be fine. Mexico's problem is the mind-boggling corruption of its ruling party—which is discovering it cannot co-exist with...
...The killers then walked into the airport and boarded a flight to Tijuana on Taesa Airlines (in which Rail Salinas also owns a stake...
...And now they are only bound to get angrier...
...But the Washington Post reported this spring that Customs officials had identified Colosio's cousin as the operator of one of the major drug airstrips, and a high-level U.S...
...must now receive constant assurance to that effect...
...The alacrity with which the United States honored the tally is understandable given the candidates' ideologies and an unwillingness to offend a party that looked as if it would remain in power for the next millennium...
...Rubio Canales was himself accused early on of plotting the Ruiz Massieu killing...
...The American Spectator May 1995 45...
...With the lucky accident of disorganization within the PRI, it has led to the replacement of unimpeded corruption by a system in which the (corrupt) left hand didn't know what the (reformist) right was doing...
...Had we known the truth about Mexico, the passage of NAFTA would have been more, not less, important...
...Looking more closely, however, we realize that . . . the steel frame of that structure still consisted of the human material of feudal society and this material still behaved according to precapitalist patterns...
...Therefore, none of the U.S...
...as long as Mexico's economy continued to grow along with the world's, their complaints fell on deaf ears...
...The accusation was widely seen as tainting Salinas, since as minister of planning under de la Madrid, he would have cleared Pemex's corrupt contracts...
...Salinas's move won wide praise in the United States, particularly from NAFTA supporters, who saw it as a means to break Mexico's most powerful and most notoriously corrupt union, and compared it to Ronald Reagan's firing of the Air Traffic Controllers in 1981...
...This leads to incredible riches for the PRI governing class...
...Carlos Hank Gonzalez, meanwhile, is described by one American journalist as "the most careful man in Mexico," and a State Department official calls him "enigmatic, one of those bastards who can wink on the telephone...
...The necessary corollary is immunity for the entire family once the president has left office...
...This is, needless to say, not the way we expected business to be conducted in the newest of First World countries...
...source told me that, while information on Colosio was murky for the last several years of his life, Colosio had been involved in a minor way with one drug organization at the very beginning of his career...
...The assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in March 1994 has been consistently linked to drug interests, although there is little agreement on what Colosio would have done to anger the cartels...
...The planning is not idle: aside from the "push" factor of rising poverty, consider the "pull" factors...
...government sources who work on the Mexico drug problem, the Mexican groups quickly became indispensable: they began to buy the cocaine outright at wholesale prices, and to control its distribution to the U.S...
...The Mexican left has never liked free trade—which it lumps, along with any low-tax or libertarian economic policy, under the (always derogatory) term "neo-liberalism"—and will use the crisis to urge a return to protectionism and the dismantling of NAFTA altogether...
...would look like if you could buy such property in Mexico City after six months' work on a construction site...
...Telmex, which has often been the most traded issue on the New York Stock Exchange, has a profit margin of 37 percent, according to the most recent figures...
...It's cause for optimism because it reflects an awareness on Zedillo's part that no PRI member would dare to do any of this stuff...
...It was Rail Salinas who dreamed up the government program Solidarity—a woefully expensive social redistribution initiative which, its critics say, not only brought the worst aspects of Mexico's near-feudal agricultural paternalism to several sectors of the economy, but also acted as a graft-magnet...
...Moussavi also said he witnessed a contract between the Mitsubishi Corporation and the Mexican government, in which the companylikely we would never know...
...If the Mexican government shows any inclination to persist in a feudalism underwritten by a capitalist engine, or if the PRI should attempt to steal any of the upcoming state elections, the Clinton administration must pull the plug—even if it means letting Mexico and its corrupt governing class wash back down the drain into the Third World...
...This incensed one of the people hostile to the nomination, Fidel Velazquez, the PRI' s big union boss for decades...
...In the first, the archbishop of Guadalajara, Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas, who had been gathering intelligence on the Arellano Felix cartel, was shot several times at point-blank range while waiting in his car at the Guadalajara Airport in May 1993...
...We're not at the point that Colombia was in the late 1980s," says investigative journalist Raymundo Riva Palacio of La Reforma...
...Mexico has indeed opened itself to competition on world markets...
...Slim won the bidding for Telmex, Mexico's national telephone company, when it was auctioned off in 1990...
...But it should be borne in mind by anyone who would grant the Mexicans a monopoly on mocking NAFTA did not cause the peso collapse, but a free market did make necessary the "transparency" that has led investors to reexamine the way Mexican politics operates...
...Ask yourself what the immigration pressure on the U.S...
...Carlos Salinas, having been tipped off about the action by an associate in the Zedillo cabinet, sent fifteen members of his personal Mexican army escort to block Ratil's arrest...
...According to the Washington Post, the change came after a bomb was found on a flight Montes was taking...
...If this end to impunity sticks, it will put an end to the ability of a strong president to place an entire class above the law...
...That is possibly the very best thing that free markets do...
...In other words, "hardline" merely reflects an extreme assessment of what the leadership class feels Mexico owes it for its vanguard role...
...He also accused the de la Madrid–appointed leader of Mexico's national oil company (Pemex) of corruption...
...His wife believes he is dead, although the FBI continues to pursue leads that he is alive and living in the U.S...
...Central bank president Miguel Mancera, speaking noncommittally, said the devaluation would be between "10 and 70 percent...
...Until the end of the Salinas term, the administration's prosecutors, including those who reopened the investigation after Montes's departure, hewed to the "lone, deranged gunman" view...
...The United States is right to help Mexico around this roadblock in its transition to democracy—provided it is indeed a transition, and not a gussied-up hybrid of the old order and the new...
...A Pacto meeting was called for 11 o'clock on the evening of December 19, at which the need to devalue the peso, and soon, was announced...
...When a special prosecutor suggested that one motive for the Ruiz Massieu murder may have been that Ruiz Massieu was obstructing "Salinism," he wasn't speaking of ai governmental philosophy...
...Giordano later received a high executive post in one of the nationalized diesel companies...
...Which hints at what makes this moment so challenging for the United States: Never has it been so imperative that we help Mexico, and never have there been more good reasons not to...
...The New York Times has spoken of Mexico's multiple crises having "stretched the social fabric...
...The PRI has a "double structure" that provides it with a system of antichecks and antibalances, or, to take another metaphor, that tie it together with the strands of Mexican life like a sailor's knot...
...The feud occasioned a desperThe American Spectator May 1995 41 ate series of letters from Ruiz Massieu to Carlos Salinas—to no avail, apparently...
...There are seven significant cartels in Mexico, including three in Sinaloa...
...it was the PRI that cemented the country...
...Mexico is now the source of 60 to 70 percent of U.S...
...Both straight shooters within the PRI and even some people hostile to the party speak approvingly of Mexico's privatization...
...It was an experiment he thought the PRI could maintain control of...
...The official Salinas version was that the cardinal had strayed into a gun battle between two gangs and had been killed in the crossfire...
...just show me where it is...
...As indeed it did, in governor's races in Baja California in 1989, Chihuahua in 1990, and Guanajuato in 1991...
...To the end of the former, according to a report in Excelsior, he bought the entire Isla del Carmen, an enormous island in the Gulf of California...
...These sectorial higher-ups are bought out by the tradition of the mordida, the financial "bite" that the authors of any agreement take away for themselves...
...0 The first investigator of the Colosio killing, Miguel Montes, started a full inquiry last spring...
...At a time when NAFTA is under fire, particularly from the Latin left, it's important to remember that it was the glorious instrument that put the beginnings of a democratic revolution into place...
...A second strain of this anti-neoliberal rhetoric blames foreign capital in the abstract for making exchange rates too hard to control, and calls for a Chilean-style policy under which foreign inflows would be limited to a certain percentage of total investment...
...What's more, there remain a couple of things Americans deserve to be at best skeptical and at worst ripping mad about: (1) Maybe the bailout plan pushed by President Clinton is being made by interested parties...
...The Mexicans refer to it not as immunity but "impunity": impunidad...
...Yes: 92 percent Do you believe that the Salinas government obstructed the investigation into the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio...
...analysts blame the shockingly low growth rates for a privatizing economy (even at the height of the Salinas "boom") on the fact that a handful of PRI-built financial empires were the only entities able to bid for the real prizes...
...The PRI leader Enrique Jackson announced during the party's 66th-anniversary conference, "There is no democratic reform possible without the PRI...
...He was talking about the court of Louis XIV, but the outline fits Mexico almost perfectly: The king, the court, the army, the church and the bureaucracy lived to an increasing extent on revenue created by the capitalist process, [while] domestic and foreign policies and institutional changes were shaped to suit and propel that development...
...Not to mention a great deal of superficial social tranquillity: Thanks to the mordida, unions and business—at least their president-appointed proxies—get along famously...
...The problem in Mexico for the last seven decades has been not military dictatorship or rightist landowners but a one-party corporatist state that fits in somewhere between a U.S...
...Latin American employees of one U.S...
...Most importantly, Cuauhternoc Cardenas, a dinosaur with heartfelt leftist sympathies, broke from the party...
...The first investigator of the Colosio killing, Miguel Montes, started a full inquiry last spring...
...So do business and government...
...News, unnamed federal agencies have been converting disused military bases in the Southwest into camps for Mexican border crossers...
...Lopez's method was nationalizing banks and hoarding oil: he would take a dollar tax off of every barrel shipped abroad, and sometimes more...
...Mexican presidents have traditionally developed grand touristic projects on the lines that this one followed: expropriating small property owners and selling their land (at nominal peso rates) to favored PRI members, who sold it in turn (in dollars) to developers...
...Lopez Portillo notwithstanding, there was no more frequently cited symbol of state-of-the-art Mexican corruption than Ratil Salinas, even before his arrest...
...Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) dates from 1929—when it brought together the feuding factions that had been battling for control of the Mexican state since 1910...
...But it will create a "moral hazard" by helping Wall Street's banks and a few speculators who failed to save for their retirement and now feel they have a divine right to 23-percent returns on their pension investments...
...According to Silvana Paternostro, who authored a long op-ed on the subject in the Miami Herald, Colosio refused to dine with Garcia Abrego...
...His initial findings pointed to a conspiracy, possibly involving high PRI members...
...Starting in 1986, when he accepted the GATT agreements, President Miguel de la Madrid showed an...
...ranging from shop girls and students to corporate CEOs and members of the Zedillo government—the same question: "Is this a democracy...
...Munoz Rocha has since disappeared...
...The relationship of drug interests to Mexico's leading politicians is only vaguely known, but certainly extensive...
...The same source also claims there are indications the Zedillo government may take the unthinkable step of launching an investigation into Hank's wealth...
...If You're an Investor...
...The Salinases and Ruiz Massieus are ex-brothers-in-law: Twenty years ago Adriana was married to Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, whose September 28 murder Radii is now accused of masterminding—and the families have since crossed paths in the interlocking world of Mexican politics and crime...
...Two weeks into Zedillo's presidency, finance minister Jaime Serra-Puche announced that the government was "spending heavily" to protect the peso, but promised not to devalue it...
...It listed the three groups that control the burgeoning traffic in ephedrine...
...Now consider the effect on investor confidence of Raill's role as a middleman in the privatization of state enterprise...
...The result was a division within the party, between the kleptocratic old guard known as the "dinosaurs" and the U.S.-educated economic modernizers—with Salinas belonging to the former politically and the latter economically...
...This party kept the country together in the late 1920s...
...For while our democratic ideals urge us to root against the PRI, our practical need for predictability is driving us to do business with it...
...Hearing the latter figure, the representatives of the business sector protested, and asked for time to discuss the viability of a devaluation with their colleagues—which they did...
...In the case of Mario Ruiz Massieu, throughout the week before his arrest on currency charges in Newark, rumors abounded in Mexico City that within days he would be arrested as an accomplice in covering up his brother's death...
...This nifty trick was managed through a highly intrusive system of government organization and by bald-faced electoral fraud—which the government has always had the institutional might to enforce...
...During The American Spectator May 1995 35 Argentina's 1989 hyperinflation, you could buy a luxury penthouse in Belgrano, one of Buenos Aires's nicest neighborhoods, for under $15,000...
...But U.S...
...cocaine and 9 percent of its heroin...
...In the barest terms, the sudden loss of investor faith in Mexico was due to the perception that, whatever the economy's internal strengths, the country is simply too institutionally corrupt to do business with...
...His initial findings pointed to a conspiracy, possibly involving high PRI members...
...Unlike Salinas, he wasn't born into the PRI: His parents sold candy and took tickets at local spectacles in Mexicali...
...When Mexican strongman Porfirio Diaz was living in exile in Paris after the Revolution of 1910, he was asked how he had managed to rule so absolutely for four decades...
...The PRI's powers are concentrated almost absolutely in the person of the president, who by tradition can hand-pick his successor and all the people who are entitled to partake Never has it been so imperative that we help Mexico, and never have there been more good reasons not to...
...As far as that goes, the feudal elements . come in only under the heading of atavisms...
...The Drug Connection Munoz Rocha was only one of Ratil's links to the particularly corrupt politics of the state of Tamaulipas—and numerous reports in Mexico link the pair to the Texas-born Tamaulipas drug lord Juan Garcia Abrego...
...One State Department source estimates his take at as much as $7 billion, but not less than $5 billion, at late-seventies prices...
...A prime example of how political duplicity confounds economic expectations is the Pacto, the corporatist conclave of economic planning that has been convoked every few months since 1987...
...It will thus be the first of the reforms of the last ten years that the old order simply cannot abide...
...they all gave the same answer: No...
...Under its auspices, representatives of the various occupational "sectors" gather to set ironclad wage and price targets until the next Pacto meeting...
...Ratil has denied it...
...Remember the PRI's role in the tourism industry...
...Then in May, Montes abruptly shifted to the theory of a "lone, deranged gunman," and resigned...
...Carlos Salinas, interestingly, had privately considered using Solidarity as a springboard for launching a new party, and it was to a particularly well-endowed Solidarity neighborhood in Monterrey that Salinas fled when he launched his ludicrous hunger strike in the days after Rani' s arrest...
...For half a decade, Mexico staved off the collapse of its political system with the accident of oil revenues...
...A politician who is poor is a poor politician...
...it was founded alongside Raill's "private" company Ardimex, which was one of Solidarity's largest contractors...
...We're almost there," said a political scientist...
...But in 1982, government profligacy with the windfall led to a huge debt debacle, and the PRI had suddenly to find a new way to put the bone back in the dog's mouth...
...This kind of politics is common, in which foreign observers are led to wonder whether putting away a corrupt political leader is not being done for reasons more corrupt than the original corruption itself...
...policy, the whole history of the Salinas administration is being rewritten retrospectively...
...Billions in new short-term bonds were created in the days immediately following the crash...
...Colombian cartels—particularly Cali's, since this was during the period of the Colombian government's war on the rival Medellin cartel—recruited already-established Mexican crime syndicates to "warehouse" the drugs and move them into the U.S., paying a commission on transshipment...
...This was an improvement that can be directly traced to NAFTA...
...Carlos Slim Held is a close friend of Carlos Salinas, and had a pre-devaluation net worth of $8.5 billion, according to some sources...
...Some idealists in the National Action Party opposition objected to the PRI's rule throughout the decades, butpublic dissent bespoke an end to the PRI's ability to adjudicate intraparty differences privately...
...But now, no...
...Yes: 80 percent In the paper's "Viva Voz" department, a USA Today–style man-on-the-street sounding board, several of the subjects, when asked what they expected to come out of Salinas's hunger strike, said only, "I hope he dies...
...Save occasional variations in phraseology and emphasis, Christopher Caldwell is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...
...0 n the last day of February, when President Ernesto Zedillo sent a squad of judicial police to arrest the brother of expresident Carlos Salinas on murder charges, Mexicans had little idea of how close to typical Latin American–style instability they were coming...
...The centerpiece, the king, was king by the grace of God, and the root of his position was feudal, not only in the historical but also in the sociological sense, however much he availed himself of the economic possibilities offered by capitalism...
...But if nothing drastic is done soon, we'll be there in a matter of years...
...In 1988, with Mexico still in economic crisis, he chose Salinas to succeed him...
...The logical extension of one-party rule and absolute impunity for members of the "revolutionary family" is corruption on an amazing scale...
...A poll in the independent daily La Reforma yielded responses like these: Do you agree or disagree with the declarations of ex-president Salinas [that he was not responsible for the peso collapse and that his brother is innocent...
...To the extent that this is merely more anecdotal proof that societies don't necessarily grow more free as they grow more prosperous, it is a welcome truth...
...According to a high-level U.S...
...Before doing his graduate work at Yale, he went to the National Polytechnic Institute, not the more elite National Autonomous University...
...They don't know how to win elections, to campaign," saysa Mexican political scientist who is on most matters not a PRI opponent...
...Even an earnest young PRI reformer revealed as much when he described the hardline dinosaurs as "the people who think the PRI should never lose an election, who deal in drugs, who are corrupt...
...One of Ruiz Massieu's closest political associates, Abraham Rubio Canales, received such a prize parcel and sold it for $7 million...
...While generally pro-American, Zedillo has had his moments of nationalist posturing, like his meddling in California's Proposition 187 immigration referendum...
...one longtime friend of Colosio says the same...
...authorities were able to discover early on that he had secreted $6.9 million in a Texas bank, and further searches in the following weeks turned up close to $20 million more...
...It may not be literally true that cronies of the regime were "tipped off' before the devaluation, but that's only because Mexico's corruption is so elegantly institutionalized that it was unnecessary...
...And Andrew Reding, a Mexico expert at the World Policy Institute, described it as "difficult to believe" that Ratil Salinas would have acted without the knowledge of Carlos...
...There may be global competition between Mexico and other economies, but for a foreign investor to enter the Mexican telephone market with a new hi-tech product means not to enter the free market but to throw oneself on the mercy of Carlos Slim's monopsony...
...T his reappraisal has seemed to vindicate the bleaker prophecies of protectionists, nativists, Perotistas, and other NAFTA foes...
...The illegal acts of Raul are rumored to extend to his sister Adriana and her husband Luis Yafiez and the Salinases' father, the former commerce minister Raul Salinas Lozano...
...44 The American Spectator May 1995 "The devaluatory crisis shows the weakness of the Mexican model," one liberal economist told me in Mexico City...
...And his decision in early March to re-impose high tariffs on countries with which Mexico has no free-trade agreement has led many free-marketers to worry that, on trade policy at least, he will be inclined to throw out Salinas's economic baby with the political bathwater...
...Tricky Choices "Mexico has never been so strong, Mexico has never been so weak," wrote a Mexican political analyst in the Washington Post last summer...
...In light of recent revelations about Ratil's links to the Tamaulipas drug cartel, a look at La Quina's role as a local PRI godfather might yield some fruit...
...The problem, says one U.S...
...Slim, an aluminum and copper magnate, also owns a nationwide empire of department stores and resorts...
...market...
...politicians most exercised about Mexican corruption seems inclined to attack this source of it...
...As often as not, these concerns are well run...
...Critics who have seen in this aspect of the PRI a parallel with Leninist ideas of party supremacy are not far off the mark...
...December's peso collapse, the failure of the Mexican economy to right itself with the promise of cash infusions from abroad, the arrest of Ratil Salinas on charges of plotting the murder of ruling party leader Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, the flight of Ruiz Massieu's brother on the grounds that he helped cover up that murder, the revelation of links between Mexico's ruling class and seven new drug cartels, the near-certainty of drug involvement in three notorious recent assassinations—all of these have led to a reappraisal of Salinas in particular, and of Mexico's new status as America's trusted friend in general...
...42 The American Spectator May 1995 the Arellano Felix family, while the largest and most powerful is Garcia Abrego's...
...According to U.S...
...It named the leaders of Mexico's seven regional drug cartels, and pointed to 90 smaller drug organizations scattered throughout the country...
...One appalling result of presidential impunity and its extension to family members is that Ratil Salinas denied even having met his co-plotter, Manuel Munoz Rocha, a Tamaulipas congressman who was one of his oldest friends and closest associates...
...In Mexico City in March, I asked a dozen people—liberal, conservative, leftist...
...For more on the economics of the peso bailout, see the sidebar at pp...
...The PRI The U.S...
...young and old...
...By the time the 15-percent devaluation was announced on the radio at 6 a.m., European capital markets were already open, and billions of dollars of hard-currency reserves were already on their way out of the country...
...On the other hand, Pemex is, under the bailout agreement, our catheter to Mexico's collateral...
...And according to El Financiero's Reveles, Kaveh Moussavi, a British IBM executive who visited Mexico on a trip to sell aerial navigation equipment to the government, says he was asked for a million-dollar kickback by three officials who came to his Mexico City hotel room claiming to be representatives of Solidarity, a government aid program that was Ratil's brainchild...
...T he United States must now risk supporting the conversion of Zedillo into an effective power politician in order to end power politics...
...But until Ratil's arrest on February 28, it appeared Mexican and U.S...
...From the standpoint of investors, Mexico is already worse off than Colombia, for this corruption has dovetailed far more with the business of running the Mexican state and (by extension) the Mexican economy...
...Cuauhtdmoc's campaign, under the banner of his new hard-left umbrella party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution, was widely popular...
...Zedillo was breaking a long tradition of impunity for family members of ex-presidents, and it was not something the old order took lying down...
...The PRI is about control—not representation...
...S alinas quickly moved to consolidate his power...
...Ratil and Enrique (another Salinas brother) were given a 50 percent share in the take of Mexico's Hippodrome of the Americas for the next twenty years...
...Cardenas's father Lazaro—revolutionary general, organizer of the "revolutionary party" that was to grow into the PRI, president from 1934-40, and nationalizer of Mexico's oil wells—is a national hero...
...Ratil Salinas" in order to build a multi-million-dollar oil refinery in Salina Cruz, Oaxaca...
...This was the second investigation in which the Salinas government publicly condoned a cover-up...
...According to U.S...
...In retrospect, then, Carlos Salinas's naming of Mario Ruiz Massieu to supervise the investigation into his brother's death was either a piece of shocking cynicism or macabre irony...
...It is here that the Mexican privatization is held by its detractors to follow the Russian model: the "sole proprietors" who now control Mexico's gigantic concerns and the extraction of its natural resources are more or less the same bureaucrats who ran them before...
...He wound up walking out in the middle of Salinas's nomination speech...
...The day after he 40 The American Spectator May 1995 was taken into custody, the political commentator German Dehesa wrote, "To tell the truth, the only thing I can say about Raul Salinas is that in the last seven years I still have not met a single man or woman who has anything good to say about him...
...After forty years of working for the government, he has retired a billionaire—and still exercises huge influence within the PRI through surrogates...
...For what the country is facing is not an economic crisis, but a political crisis with economic repercussions...
...But it was not lost on observers that (a) La Quina would never have gone to jail had he not broken with Salinas, and (b) his absence from Tamaulipas allowed Rat...
...He bridled at the suggestion that "hardline" therefore didn't reflect any ideology, only a tendency to view the party as a mechanism for self-enrichment...
...Reveles speculates that a large part of Ratil's project was devoted to preparing for not only his but also his brother's retirement...
...Regardless of U.S...
...This gives the president (and, for cultural reasons, his family) more bribing power than any other leader in the world, and such absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely...
...the journalist Mane Dornbierer received threats after reporting this secret deal in the Excelsior newspaper...
...36 The American Spectator May 1995 in the mordida...
...The recent spate of crises appears more likely the last gasp of the old guard than any permanent accommodation between the dinosaurs and a new business class...
...oil company claim that entire tankers full of Mexican oil would arrive in the port of the country in which they were working, billed "off-ministry": that is, with the money going not to Pemex but to a privately owned shell company...
...NAFTA did not cause the peso collapse, but a free market did make necessary the "transparency" that has led investors to re-examine the way Mexican politics operates...
...It is an ideology," he shot back angrily...
...This perspective unfortunately ignores that, for a country like Mexico, abroad is where the capital is...
...To the extent that it emboldens those on the left who would add economic unfreedom to political unfreedom, it could spell disaster for the developing world...
...This is not to say it is a corrupt agreement—in fact, it is qualitatively a standard bailout strategy, even if it is quantitatively of staggering size...
...38 The American Spectator May 1995 How the Corruption Works There are those who say the PRI believes it rules through divine right...
...A dog with a bone in his mouth," said Diaz, "will neither bark nor bite...
...They can only buy elections, steal them...
...It is only a slight distortion to identify these bidders with the dozen new Mexican billionaires Forbes identified as having been created between 1993 and 1994...
...His most famous saying is Un politico pobre es un pobre politico...
...to do a great deal more business in Pemex...
...Hank was director of tourism in the late 1980s, when Radl was operating at Punta Diamante...
...It is Lozano who is responsible for the three important initiatives that give Zedillo a claim to be a different type of Mexican leader: the government negotiations with the Zapatista rebels in the southern state of Chiapas, the reconstitution of the traditionally corrupt Supreme Court, and the end to impunity, best seen in the prosecution of Rail Salinas...
...What's more, Velazquez and Bartlett's 1994 wave of assassinations, the Tamaulipas labor leader Joaquin Hernandez Galicia, known universally as La Quina ("Quinine"), the head of Mexico's Petroleum Union, refused to accept Salinas's victory, and began to take up the call that Salinas and the PRI had stolen the elections...
...In fact, Mexico is, with the exception of Cuba, the least democratic country in the hemisphere...
...Mexican journalists have done an extraordinary body of investigative work on Ratil Salinas, among which that of El Financiero's Jose Reveles—who suggested Ratil's involvement in the Ruiz Massieu murder two weeks before his arrest stands out...
...Only when the troops sent by Salinas were approaching the house in their bulletproof Volkswagen Jettas did they receive a message over their radios—from the Minister of Defense, speaking on behalf of Zedillo—to turn back...
...nfortunately, it U makes the economy nearly impossible to invest in...
...source, it was Hank who bought Carlos Salinas the 20-acre estate in the Boston area that he recently moved to...
...government sources who work on the Mexico drug problem, the Mexican groups quickly became indispensable, and were able to set better terms: they began to buy the cocaine outright at wholesale prices, and to control its distribution to the U.S...
...But that's more a function of the Times's overreliance on high-level sources (referring in March, for instance, to the assassination of "the PRI's reform-minded Secretary General, Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu") than of the situation on theground...
...La Quina was a gangster...
...Rail had loathed Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu since heand Radl's sister were married, but the two clashed over business in the development of Punta Diamante, a peninsula in the Acapulco area, when Ruiz Massieu was governor of Acapulco's state of Guerrero...
...until 1989, it had never lost a local election...
...The PRI is indeed stretched, but the social fabric, whatever that is, seems to be showing unusual cohesion, almost a unanimity, in fact, in demanding an end to the corruption under which Mexicans live...
...municipal employees union and Italian fascism...
...On the other it is a "sectorial" one: the "labor," "peasant," and "popular" sectors have been incorporated systematically into the government, with PRI bureaucrats at the top...
...The plane was held for 11 minutes for them, and no one was there to arrest them when the flight landed in Tijuana...
...What has given rise to more optimism is Zedillo's willingness to entrust the most important position in his cabinet—attorney general—to a young lawyer from the opposition National Action Party, Antonio Lozano Gracia...
...was blinded to Mexico's undemocratic nature partly by looking for typically Latin American indices of repression...
...No one rises to power in this system by being an angel, but there are some indications that Zedillo will have a better chance than any president to date to clean up the mess...
...The greatest Mexican offender of all time was clearly President Jose Lopez Portillo, who stole more money from Mexico than Marcos did from the Philippines...
...It has never lost a national election...
...Mexicans in conversation often equate the party with the state, in the word prigobiemo: the "PRUGovernment...
...Before his flight, Mario Ruiz Massieu claimed he thought Carlos Salinas "was informed" of the decision to kill Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu...
...Although he tends to favor market policies, he has said that he will never denationalize Mexico's oil and electricity...
...The advent of drug cartels in Mexico came only about seven years ago—when Vice President Bush's South Florida Task Force successfully shut off the Caribbean supply routes to the U.S...
...As director of distribution for the government food conglomerate Conasupo in the 1980s, which gave him control over 12,000 shops and 199 warehouses, Ratil was alleged to have demanded bribes for transport of goods, taken over many of the agency's trucks as a personal shipping business, and charged a 30-million-peso ($10,000) "collaboration" for each regional director he named...
...What follows next is unclear: it appears Rail was angered at having been shut out of this piece of business...
...But Ratil's corruption—and to a lesser extent that of both Ruiz Massieu brothers—has been so flagrant that a considerable paper trail exists...
...An example: The United States theoretically wants Pemex privatized, and that would certainly rob corrupt Mexican leaders of one of their most time-honored sources of booty...
...40-41...
...It was Ruiz Massieu's goal to initiate such a development at the state level...
...But the U.S...
...But throwing out our free-market principles over Mexico's troubles would be a grievous mistake...
...Then in May, Montes abruptly shifted to the theory of a "lone, deranged gunman," and resigned...
...In this country of 90 million, with an economy about the size of Florida's—$300 billion—that's a fortune equivalent to 3 percent of GDP...
...This is the tradition that Zedillo broke with the arrest of Raul Salinas...
...Another contender, Manuel Bartlett, an important Tabasco politician whose specialty was rectifying vote counts and arranging election victories, warned that a delivery of the PRI machinery from its old loyalists into the hands of technocrats would mean that the PRI would begin to lose elections occasionally...
...he certainly committed the excesses he was accused of—and much more, including plotting a murder in the early 1980s...
...investment analyst, is that there is no mid-level of companies to absorb new investment opportunities, and the giant holding companies that are the avatars of state enterprises wind up shoveling subsidiaries back and forth among one another.--, The American Spectator May 1995 43 Two of the biggest beneficiaries are Slim and Hank, which is not a country-western duo but the actual surnames of two of Mexico's richest men...
...To take an example: even while elements of the PRI continue to profit from protecting drug traffickers, Mexico's new Institute for the War on Drugs, established during NAFTA negotiations, composed a 35- page document that was leaked to the Mexico City daily El Financiero, which published it in January...
...And that is what is so awkward about this political moment for the U.S...
...In the second month of his administration, Salinas had La Quina jailed on weapons charges...
...Mexico's problem is the mind-boggling corruption of its ruling party—which is discovering it cannot co-exist with capitalism...
...The most violent is thought to be the Baja-based cartel of According to U.S...
...Disagree: 78 percent Do you believe that other politicians [besides Raul Salinas] were involved in the assassination of [Jose Francisco] Ruiz Massieu...
...In the late 1970s, that prosperity began to collapse under the twin threats of global economic slowdown and the majority rule...
...inclination to solve the problem of plummeting living standards in the way that had worked for the rest of the west: by releasing the free market...
...On the one hand it is a territorial organization, with PRI committees everywhere, right down to the city, town, and block...
...A protégé of Rani's, the undersecretary of the comptroller, Salvador Giordano, had Rubio Canales sentenced to jail for fraud...
...But in a vote count marked by universal accusations of computer fraud, Salinas was declared the winner with just over 50 percent of the vote...
...Mario Ruiz Massieu, who, interestingly, was Mexico's drug czar, has been linked to the Garcia Abrego group, says a State Department official, who adds, "We never thought he was straight...
...He runs Mercedes Benz of Mexico and a number of banks in Mexico and Texas, along with a variety of automotive companies...
...Decades ago, Joseph Schumpeter described the kind of transition Mexico faces now...
...In what was correctly seen as the biggest crisis for control among the PRI leadership prior to the staggering corruption of the 1976-82 Lopez Portillo government...
...The entire city was baffled when Ruiz Massieu went free, although Mexican sources now explain that the goal was to determine his plans (they involved fleeing to Monaco, which has no extradition treaty with Mexico), and to trace his bank accounts.agreed to pay a commission of 10 percent for "the services of Mr...
...2) NAFTA was to some extent sold to Americans under false pretenses: that Mexico had left behind its Third World ways and deserved a reward for expanding political freedoms...
...In fact, he won the election handily, according to reliable exit polls conducted by the Los Angeles Times...
...Mexican payoffs are very often a matter of No me des, pero panme donde hay, to take the local saying ("Don't give me anything...
Vol. 28 • May 1995 • No. 5
