November 25, 2000
by John Ross

MEXICO CITY -- When Vicente Fox straps on the red, white, and green sash this December 1st to become Mexico's first opposition president in seven decades of authoritarian rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), he will no doubt promise a glowing future for this distant neighbor nation of 100 million -- but it is the past that he should be weighing with great caution. Just opening the closet doors at Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, could bury him in such an avalanche of skeletons and scandals, fraudulent elections, the onus of massacres, and the overweening stench of corruption that he may not be heard from for the next six years.

71 years of one-party rule enveloped Mexico in a ceaseless cycle of corruption, impunity, silence, and violence on a par with Latin America's most nefarious dictatorships. The collective body count of the PRI's "perfect dictatorship" (a phrase coined by novelist Mario Vargas Llosa who was bounced from the country the next day) probably equals the Argentinean holocaust in which 30,000 citizens "disappeared" during the long night of the 1970s and early 1980s.

But whereas the military juntas that ran Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile during those dark years have been blessed with amnesty from prosecution for their crimes, and commissions of "reconciliation" established to obliterate the memory of past sins, Mexico's new president has pledged to seek justice rather than forgetfulness. Over and over again in the months before he took office, Vicente Fox has promised the creation of a blue-ribbon "transparency commission" that will delve into unsolved state crimes.

To thwart further police abuses and corruption during his administration, Fox is establishing a super public security secretariat which will concentrate the nation's scandal-ridden police forces in one ministry. Some cynics say that such an umbrella bureaucracy will only concentrate the corruption in one place.

Battling PRI corruption was the theme-song of Fox's winning campaign during which he seemed to heartily enjoy blasting his once-ruling party opponents as "coruptos" and "ratas." But whether the new president and his party, the conservative National Action or PAN, have the stomach to battle corruption while in office, remains to be tested. Certainly, the PAN. which has governed the narco-riddled state of Baja California Norte for the past 12 years has failed to staunch drug violence and the wholesale purchase of public officials during the party's long reign in Baja.

Fox's new super police secretariat is intended to replace the office of the Attorney General which has its own highly redolent judicial police - the dread "judiciales." In 1995, another PANista, then-attorney general Antonio Lozano Gracia, the first opposition cabinet official in a PRI administration, tried to fire nearly 900 "judiciales" in a single day for a variety of abuses ranging from extortion and kidnapping to being drugged while on duty. In the end, Lozano lost his own job and most of the accused agents were reinstated with back pay.

Fox's plan would also transfer police functions from the Secretariat of the Interior, a powerful, catch-all ministry that variously oversees "internal security" and regulates the nation's political forces. For decades, the Interior Secretariat, which includes the secret Center for National Security Investigation (CISEN) has spied and harassed opposition political parties and civil organizations, operating as a shadowy political police.

At the root of police corruption in Mexico is the booming drug trade which buys immunity by simply putting significant police commanders on the payroll -- "plazas" or commands on the northern border with the United States have traditionally been sold to the highest bidder for millions of Yanqui dollars, a detail revealed by one of Lozano's underlings who the then-attorney general promptly imprisoned.

Now Fox wants to break the back of police corruption by firther shifting drug war responsibilities to the military. But the military's role in the U.S.-sponsored War on Drugs has already tainted that institution from top to bottom -- 160 high-ranking military officers, including 12 generals, amongst them once-upon-a-time drug war chieftain Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, are currently languishing in military prison.

Other Fox thrusts to vanquish the sins of the PRI past are the appointment of an anti-corruption czar, former Chihuahua governor Francisco Barrio, who is charged with weeding out larceny in public agencies, a Herculean task after seven decades of corruption-saturated PRI administration, and the establishment of the long-heralded transparency commission.

Assigned to re-open and resolve cases that have assailed public credibility for years, the commission will probe a host of horror stories: the 1968 massacre of hundreds of students at the Tlatelolco housing complex in Mexico City by elements of the army; the disappearances of 500 campesinos and social activists in the "dirty war" of the 1970s and 1980s; the violent deaths of more than 600 members of the left-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) since its founding in 1988; the more recent massacres at Acteal, Aguas Blancas, El Charco, and El Bosque that have taken nearly a hundred Indian and campesino lives during the presidency of Ernesto Zedillo.

No less dramatic on this long list of crimes committed under 14 consecutive PRI presidencies are scandals including the Carlos Salinas-ordered privatization of the nation's banks and telephone company (sold for a pittance to the richest man in Latin America); the FOBAPROA banking scandal in which the cost of millions stolen by fugitive bankers and donated to PRI election coffers, were then dumped on the backs of Mexican taxpayers; the stealing of the 1988 presidential election from the PRD's Cuauhtemoc Cardenas (the vote counting computers crashed for eight days) -- and for that matter, the stealing of the elections of 1929, 1940, and 1952, all fraudulently claimed by the PRI and its predecessor state parties.

Probing such past sins opens a Pandora's Box that could reach all the way back to the assassination of presidential candidate Alvaro Obregon in 1928, thought to have been ordered by strongman Plutarco Elias Calles, the founder of the PRI. 66 years later, the Kennedy-like assassination of another PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was the crowning point of a spate of high profile homicides that include the gangland gunning down of the Cardinal of Guadalajara (1993) and the secretary general of the PRI (1994), the latter in a plot masterminded by Salinas's blacksheep brother.

Other questions the transparency commission will be asked to answer are where is Mario Villanueva, fugitive PRI governor of Quintana Roo, who reportedly sat on the board of directors of the Cali cocaine cartel until he disappeared from sight last year? Where is Oscar Espinoza, Zedillo crony and former Mexico City mayor, who vanished after being indicted for multi-million dollar fraud? Who killed Manuel Buendia, the muckraking newspaper columnist -- rumors have always pinned the hit on ex-president Miguel de la Madrid? And what about the many mysterious "suicides" of high-ranking PRI officials ranging from ex-drug war prosecutor Mario Ruiz Massieu to the recent throat-slashing of national vehicle registry director Raul Ramos Tercero?

All of these blood-splattered episodes focus on one player -- the once-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. But even if the PRI has been stripped of the presidency, it remains a potent political power which controls the senate, holds parity with the PAN in the lower house, governs 19 states, dominates significant sectors of the labor movement, and has a continuing chokehold on the media. The ex-official party will bring all of these forces to bear to keep Fox's transparency commission from delving into the litany of unsolved PRI crimes. Should, in fact, the commission be chartered by congress, the silencing of witnesses and homicidal revenge against the PRI's rivals, will surely be the next items on Mexico's political agenda.

Past efforts by new administrations to clean house have usually settled for symbolic scapegoats. De la Madrid's "moral renovation" crusade, designed to pin blame for the 1982 oil bust, was abruptly braked after the jailing of the director of the national petroleum conglomerate, PEMEX. Carlos Salinas collared narco kingpin Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo (the business shifted to more favored capos) and oil workers union boss Joaquin "La Quina" Galicia in the first days of his fraud-wracked administration. Zedillo jailed his predecessor Salinas's brother as a scapegoat for 1995 economic collapse. Vicente Fox's candidate numero uno for scapegoat -of-the-year is no doubt Carlos himself.

As a prominent player in the next millennium of Mexican politics and business, Vicente Fox well comprehends that corruption is so ingrained in the structures of government and commerce that trying to clean house could bring that house down. For the new president, holding the PRI accountable for the sins of its past risks bloodbath and economic confusion, and the best bet is that he will opt to continue to do business as usual.

John Ross (johnross@igc.apc.org) is concluding an arduous tour of North America where he has been flogging his latest handiwork, "The War Against Oblivion - Zapatista Chronicles 1994-2000." He returns to Mexico December 1st just in time to report on the Foxian Future.