A MEXICAN OFFICIAL'S ACCOUNT OF HIS BACK-DOOR ESCAPE

MEXICO CITY, Feb. 14 - A former governor who fled to avoid arrest on drug
charges as his term ended last year is "living like a guerrilla" in a
tropical region, sleeping by day and often moving by night, a journalist
who met him recently said today.

The former official, Mario Villanueva Madrid, has grown his curly hair long
and looks haggard, partly because he sleeps frequently in the open air, the
journalist said.

"He's hiding like an animal in the jungle," the writer, Isabel Arvide, an
independent journalist with broad contacts in the governing party, said.
She interviewed Mr. Villanueva last month in a rustic dwelling infested
with cockroaches in southern Mexico or in Belize or Guatemala, the two
countries to the south, Ms. Arvide said. She refused to pinpoint the exact
location.

Mr. Villanueva wept openly as he described to Ms. Arvide the trauma of his
11-month flight and his feelings of betrayal by President Ernesto Zedillo
and other leaders of Mexico's governing party, she wrote in an account of
her meeting that was published on Sunday in a weekly newsmagazine, Milenio.

The former governor accused his colleagues in the Institutional
Revolutionary Party of breaking pledges to protect him. He said he had
honored their requests to abuse his powers as governor of Quintana Roo to
guarantee election victories for his party.

"I did my part," Mr. Villanueva said, Ms. Arvide's account recounted. "I
made all the party's candidates win. I gave them money. I ran campaigns for
them. I controlled the state."

Mr. Villanueva has been sought on drug and racketeering charges since April
1999, when he dropped from sight days before he was to leave office.
Mexican and United States authorities have accused him of putting his state
police at the disposition of traffickers who use the Yucatan Peninsula as a
beachhead to smuggle Colombian cocaine north to the Texas border.

Mr. Villanueva confessed to Ms. Arvide that in his governorship, starting
in 1993, he had pocketed millions in corruption profits, but denied
involvement with traffickers. He accused senior Mexican officials of having
joined in the graft. Mr. Villanueva said he had pocketed $1.6 million for
enabling a business group to obtain the water concession for Cancun, the
resort. The deal was negotiated, Mr. Villanueva said, by a former PRI
governor who is in in Mr. Zedillo's cabinet, Eduardo Robledo.

"Wait just a minute," Mr. Robledo said today, when a reporter asked him to
respond. Then he turned and disappeared into a government office building.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Robeldo, Virginia Bello, returned to say he preferred
not to comment.

Mr. Villanueva was reported to have said that as prosecutors were
assembling their charges against him before he left office, he met a PRI
patriarch, Carlos Hank Gonzalez, who amassed a fortune when he was Mexico
City mayor in the 1970s'. "According to the advice Hank gave me before I
fled, I sold everything I could, collecting money, because he warned me,
'To go underground you'll need cash, lots of cash,' " Mr. Villanueva told
Ms. Arvide.

Mr. Hank's secretary, Yolando Morales, said today that Mr. Hank was
traveling in the United States. "I'm sure he's not seen Mario Villanueva
for a long time," Ms. Morales said.

As for his financial descent, Mr. Villanueva complained that an
unscrupulous lawyer tied to the PRI had cheated him out of more than $5
million.