FRIENDS LIKE THESE TWO PRESIDENTS TALK UP THE DRUG WAR IN THE HOUSE OF
A DRUG TRAFFICKER

FEBRUARY 15, 1999: President William Clinton met today with Mexican
president Ernesto Zedillo to negotiate better cooperation between
their nations in the fight against drugs. Incredibly, the
anti-narcotics summit was hosted by powerful Mexican banker Roberto
Hernandez Ramirez, a man publicly accused of trafficking cocaine and
laundering illicit drug money.

But that story wasn't reported in the States, despite a controversy
over Hernandez's alleged involvement in the drug trade that's raged on
the Yucatan peninsula for two years.

A valentine to the press

The heart-shaped box appeared on Air Force One. It was Valentine's Day
1999, and the Comeback Kid was getting out of Dodge. Bill Clinton had,
just two days prior, escaped vanquishment by the U.S. Senate in
Washington, DC. The presidential jet roared out of the February chill
toward the tropical city of Merida.

Clinton, in a video image broadcast across the globe that evening,
stepped into the press cabin of the plane wielding a big pink
heart-shaped box and doled out valentine chocolates to the reporters
and photographers covering this trip. And to underscore with levity
that the subject would now be changed-from impeachment and Monica to
"drugs"-the White House press handlers regaled the journalists with
bottles of hemp beer. The marijuana in the brew's recipe was
reportedly non-intoxicating. Still, they were high, on laughter if not
impunity, on Air Force One.

Awaiting the presidential entourage in Merida was the U.S. ambassador
to Mexico, Jeffrey Davidow. In the weeks before, while most of the
White House staff was busy steering the president through domestic
political crisis, Davidow had been in Mexico, laying the groundwork
for the presidential visit. Davidow is no novice. He cut his
diplomatic teeth at the U.S. embassy in Santiago, Chile, from 1971 to
'73, the period when the U.S. and General Augusto Pinochet were
plotting to destabilize the elected government of president Salvador
Allende. By the time Air Force One landed in Merida, everything on the
ground was under control.

The city's central streets were deserted. Nine square blocks had been
sealed by Mexican state and federal police. Hundreds of U.S. Secret
Service agents had blanketed the region days in advance. They peered
through their sunglasses from rooftops. Their network of cell phones
fell like a web over the ancient Mayan capital. The city's annual
Carnaval with its wild nightly parades, when seemingly every one of
Merida's 750,000 residents emerges onto the streets and dances in
plumed costumes to Caribbean rhythms, had been disappeared for the
evening. The Dry Law was imposed.

Merida on a normal day or night is an unusually tranquil city. Not
even the police are armed. The response of the citizenry to the
evening's invasion-of-state was to ignore the presidential summit
almost completely. During the previous night's parades, throughout the
city not a single banner was hung; nothing to welcome or to protest
the arrival of Clinton and Zedillo. About 300 people did show up in
City Square to cheer the gringos' arrival. They were supporters of
Mexico's ruling political party who had received tickets to pass
through the police lines, or they were folk dancers hired to provide a
festive view from the second-floor dining hall where the dignitaries
would nosh.

The two presidents would be flown by helicopter the next morning,
February 15, a short distance to the Temozon Sur plantation-the
luxurious refurbished ranch owned by Roberto Hernandez Ramirez,
president-owner of BANAMEX (the National Bank of Mexico before
Hernandez bought it from the government a decade ago). Forbes magazine
lists Hernandez as number 289 among the wealthiest men on earth.

Narcotraficante

President Zedillo had been staying at the Hernandez estate since
February 12, though Hernandez himself was not present at the summit
meeting. That two presidents would enjoy the hospitality of a powerful
businessman would not, by itself, raise many eyebrows. But had just
one of the White House correspondents holed up in the Fiesta
Americana, the Hyatt, or the Holiday Inn wandered downtown or even
downstairs to a newsstand, the official history of the summit might
have been very different. Even a reporter who did not read Spanish
might have comprehended the banner headline in the Merida daily Por
Esto!: ROBERTO HERNANDEZ RAMIREZ: NARCOTRAFICANTE. (Part I, Part II,
Part III.)

That same Valentine's Day, Por Esto! published the first installment
of a three-part series about the banker, his rise to wealth and power,
his political clout, and his alleged involvement with drugs and drug
money. The series included 350 column-inches of text documented by 45
photographs, plus three maps tracing the route of Colombian cocaine
through the banker's properties.

According to the newspaper and its sources, coastal marshlands
purchased by Hernandez in the late '80s and early '90s were the port
of entry for massive volumes of cocaine delivered in small Colombian
speedboats. From there, tons of the drug were loaded onto small planes
and flown north from Hernandez's private airfield. Hernandez, the
newspaper charged, was hiding behind empty "eco-tourism" resorts to
wash drug profits.

The series was a journalistic tour de force, the culmination of a
26-month investigation into the 43 kilometers of beachfront property
owned by Hernandez-a region known by the locals as the "Coca Triangle."

The newspaper went even further: it filed federal criminal complaints
against Hernandez for drug trafficking, for the robbery of national
archeological treasures (his properties include the ancient Mayan
ruins of Chac Mool and others), and for the environmental destruction
caused by the cocaine-trafficking operations to the Sian Ka'an nature
preserve.

Not a word about this controversy would appear in the U.S. news media
before or after the Clinton-Zedillo summit. One could search the
Internet, Lexis-Nexis, the major dailies, the wire services, the
entire English-speaking world; the story was neither published,
promoted, criticized, nor rebutted.

And yet the story has raged in Yucatan and the eastern Yucatan coastal
state of Quintana Roo, where the property in question is located,
since December 16, 1996, when a fishermen's cooperative blew the
whistle on Hernandez's cocaine port and airfield to Por Esto! and
pointed the newspaper to the evidence. Por Esto! published the
fishermen's accounts of threats and harassment by Hernandez, who, they
said, wanted to drive them off their lands to eliminate witnesses to
his drug-smuggling operation.

Hernandez returned fire in 1997, filing charges of trespassing and
defamation against reporter Renan Castro Madera, regional editor
Santos Gabriel Us Ake, and editor and publisher Mario Menendez Rodriguez.

Public opinion has not favored Hernandez's complaints. Since 1996,
more than 100 town councils, unions, and civic organizations
throughout the Yucatan Peninsula have passed resolutions supporting
the newspaper in its fight to expose the man they call a
narco-banker.

The governor flees

The story got new legs on March 28, when the powerful governor of
Quintana Roo, Mario Villanueva Madrid, disappeared during his last
week of office, fleeing from drug-trafficking charges. An often crude
but always media-savvy politician, Villanueva has issued videotaped
communiquE9s and even bought newspaper ads from his hidden locations
claiming that the prosecution against him is an act of political
vengeance. The now ex-governor of the Caribbean state that's home to
the world-class Cancun tourist resorts is not going down quietly. He
may drag others down with him, including Clinton's pal Roberto
Hernandez Ramirez.

"I have a lot of information," Villanueva told the Mexican national
daily Reforma on March 23, a few days before his disappearance. "A
lot. It can involve more people. In the event that this is not
resolved, I will make it known."

The story is migrating north, and there's not a border patrol that can
stop it. Until now, international media accounts of rampant drug-war
corruption on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula have for the most part been
managed and controlled by official U.S. and Mexican sources. The
investigation and prosecution of Villanueva-a joint venture of the
U.S. and Mexican governments and, now, the 176 nations of the
international police agency Interpol that have joined the manhunt-was
supposed to reinforce the party line that narco-corruption at the
highest levels will no longer be tolerated.

But the takedown of Villanueva-suspected of deep involvement in
protecting the illicit drug trade and in other criminal and
anti-democratic ventures-merely diverts attention from the wheel of
institutionalized corruption in which he was a cog. By profiting from
drug traffic, Villanueva was simply enjoying the fruits that all
governors of the ruling party have been granted for decades. The same
institutions that chase him today protected him for almost six years
in office. Villanueva's mysterious escape, and his promise to spill
the secrets of the Mexican narco-state, have already begun to shake
the comfy worlds of powerful people-among them BANAMEX owner Hernandez
and his presidential houseguests.

Hernandez blamed Villanueva, at the time Quintana Roo's governor, for
Por Esto!'s 1996 reports about his alleged drug crimes. The banker
addressed the problem the way most public-relations disasters are
managed in Mexico. "Hernandez complained to President Zedillo,"
reported the Mexico City daily El Universal on April 5, "who at his
turn had spoken with Villanueva, but the attacks did not cease."

This was the first time El Universal or any national newspaper had
mentioned Hernandez in connection with narco-news. And even then, it
was included almost as an aside in a colorful profile by writer Mario
Lara Klahr on governor-turned-fugitive Villanueva. The spin of the
profile was that the governor and Hernandez were at war because
Villanueva was "interested" in the bank owner's coastal properties.

That same day, El Universal, one of Mexico's two major establishment
broadsheets, published an almost full-page interview with Hernandez
about the banking industry-a puff piece complete with flattering photo
portraits. The daily did not ask Hernandez about the drug charges or
about the Mexican banking industry's current drug-money-laundering
crisis-even though, just five days before, three major Mexican banks
(including BANAMEX's top competitor, Bancomer) had pled guilty in U.S.
federal court to hiding hundreds of millions of dollars for the giant
cocaine cartels. Lara's piece, meanwhile, also included the
unsubstantiated supposition that Villanueva was an owner of Por Esto!
In fact, Villanueva's government had harassed and threatened Por Esto!
repeatedly-withholding payment for government advertising, failing to
provide police response to a payroll robbery at the newspaper's Cancun
offices, and excluding the paper's reporters and photographers from
official functions.

Por Esto! is published by Mario Menendez Rodriguez, a well-known and
combative veteran journalist whose political activism dates back to
Mexico City's 1968 student movement. Menendez publishes dailies in
both Merida and Cancun and has been imprisoned several times for his
anti-government reports.

"The governor of Quintana Roo is not an owner of Por Esto! That's
ridiculous," says Menendez. "Look at the printing machinery we use.
It's always breaking. The people of this region know how I live and
how this newspaper works. If El Universal has some documentation or
proof that he has anything to do with this newspaper, I challenge them
to show it."

(A week after the El Universal story, the national magazine Proceso
reported that Hernandez himself had orchestrated the leak of documents
upon which Mexico's national press had based the report.)

Mexican government implicated

On April 12, Por Esto! resumed publishing the results of its
investigations into Hernandez's affairs, vowing: "Loyal to the truth,
Por Esto! will not fold in the fight. ... The federal executive branch
is the major accomplice of the drug barons in Mexico."

The accompanying story linked a BANAMEX legal-department director-the
Republic's former first assistant attorney general, who was fired,
according to Por Esto!, for his illegal activities related to drug
trafficking -to three known drug traffickers, one a witness under the
protection of U.S. anti-drug prosecutors, and charged that the U.S.
government has "wide and deep knowledge" of Hernandez's
drug-trafficking activities. The newspaper also identified the state
delegate of the Mexican federal prosecutor's office as a former
BANAMEX employee and reported that the Mexican armed forces
responsible for drug enforcement on the peninsula have received orders
not to enter Hernandez's coastal properties, which, according to Por
Esto!, are still being used as a major cocaine-trafficking port.

That Menendez continues with the investigation is no surprise. What is
new is that, for the first time, other journalists are taking on the
story. Carlos Ramirez, editor of the feisty national political
magazine La Crisis, publishes a daily column in both El Universal and
Por Esto! In an April 6 column analyzing the Villanueva case, he
blamed the ex-governor's fall from grace on his antagonism with
Hernandez, "the all-powerful owner of BANAMEX," over
tourist-development sites in and around Cancun.

"Villanueva lost due to the weight of the power relations of BANAMEX,"
Ramirez wrote, going on to describe a strong personal and social
relationship between BANAMEX's Hernandez and Mexican president Ernesto
Zedillo, who, Ramirez reported, has vacationed at the banker's Cancun
haciendas and at a Hernandez-owned Caribbean island that's been linked
to the late Colombian narco-trafficker Pablo Escobar Gaviria.

The April 11 edition of Proceso, the most respected newsweekly in
Mexico, ended the Mexican national media's long reluctance to repeat
Por Esto!'s drug-trafficking charges against Hernandez. Under the
headline WITH THE FLIGHT OF VILLANUEVA, ROBERTO HERNANDEZ ESCAPES AN
ENEMY, Proceso recounted a private September 1998 meeting between
then-governor Villanueva and journalists during which Villanueva
confided, "Behind this smear campaign that has been unleashed against
me I see the hand of Roberto Hernandez." The piece went on to describe
Por Esto!'s campaign to portray Hernandez as a drug trafficker,
relaying the paper's reports that almost 30 percent of the nearly 30
tons of cocaine intercepted by the Mexican prosecutor general's agents
had been seized on property owned by the BANAMEX chief. It noted
Hernandez's 1997 suits against the paper and reported that, the
previous week, Quintana Roo judge Marco Antonio Traconis Varguez had
issued arrest warrants against three of the paper's
journalists.

Spin Ciudad

The gamble taken by the White House and the US Embassy in Mexico-that
the drug story on Clinton's host would never get out-has already been
lost. Jorge Madrazo Cuellar, Prosecutor General of the
Republic-Mexico's equivalent of the attorney general-is understandably
nervous about Villanueva's escape and its mounting consequences for
his own job. Opposition leaders have already called Madrazo before the
federal House of Deputies to answer charges that he intentionally let
Villanueva slip away. (At that meeting, Madrazo divulged that many of
his former prosecutors and officers have gone to work as cocaine
traffickers-an admission by the chief federal prosecutor that his
office has functioned as a narco-school.)

The defendant ex-governor remains at large, buying full-page ads in
national dailies and issuing video communiquE9s that may soon begin
to implicate his nemesis Hernandez directly in the
narco-trade.

And so in a bizarre act of prosecution-by-publicity, the prosecutor
general is defending his behavior by taking out ads of his own. The
opening advertisement for the prosecution, published on April 9 in all
of Mexico's major national newspapers, enumerated five major denials
that were surreal in their capacity to suggest the opposite of their
intent. The ad stated: that the drug charges against Villanueva were
not politically motivated; that no United States agency had pressured
Mexican prosecutors to jail Villanueva; that the Villanueva
prosecution was unrelated to the fifth anniversary of the homicide of
1994 presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio and was not an
attempt to divert public attention from that case; that the Villanueva
prosecution was not motivated by "personal obsession by the Prosecutor
General of the Republic"; that the Villanueva investigation had
nothing to do with Roberto Hernandez Ramirez's legal action against
Por Esto!

All of the above are plausible in their inverse; the case could be
motivated by a confluence of political factors. If we heed the
journalistic principle "follow the money," the weightiest of
them-reaching to the White House in Washington-involves presidential
pal Hernandez and his vast power as the BANAMEX owner.

Por Esto! reported the story, and the result was that three of its
journalists are today being persecuted with live arrest warrants. But
the escape of Governor Villanueva has forced Mexico's national press
to accept that there is indeed a story here. Whether U.S. media
organizations that cover Mexico will do their job remains to be seen.
But when Bill Clinton agreed to hold his anti-drug summit with the
Mexican president on Hernandez's plantation, he inadvertently invited
their scrutiny. The invitation came with the heart-shaped box.