WITH DRUGS AND GANGS RIFE, MEXICAN GOVERNOR RESIGNS (NYT)

MEXICO GOVERNOR STEPS DOWN AFTER CITIZEN PROTESTS (SF CHRONICLE)

CUERNAVACA, Mexico -- A state governor who faced growing citizen protests
over the blatant local activities of kidnapping gangs and drug traffickers
announced Tuesday that he was stepping down.

The governor of Morelos, Jorge Carrillo Olea, a retired general who is a
prominent member of President Ernesto Zedillo's governing party, made his
announcement in a brief radio broadcast.

"Today, the last day of my governorship, I want to help foster peace and
tranquillity by presenting my request for a leave of absence," Carrillo
said in the broadcast from Cuernavaca, the state capital, just south of
Mexico City. Officials said the leave would be permanent, and that Carrillo
would relinquish powers when the Morelos Congress formally accepted his
request, perhaps as early as Wednesday.

In an exercise that will mark a new test of Mexico's emerging democracy,
the 30-seat local Congress, which is controlled by 18 opposition deputies,
has 30 days to select Carrillo's successor. Under the traditional system
that operated in Mexico until recently, state governors who ran into
trouble were relieved of their duties by the country's president, who also
handpicked their replacements.

Corruption charges dogged Carrillo for more than a year, but the crisis
deepened in January, when the commander of the police anti-kidnapping squad
in Morelos was arrested in a nearby state as he dumped the body of a
prisoner he had tortured to death. The commander later testified that the
Morelos police had helped several traffickers turn the state into an
operating base.

In an article last year, The New York Times quoted a U.S. government report
saying that during Carrillo's tenure as Mexico's anti-narcotics chief, from
1990 to 1993, he had been an associate of a major trafficker. The governor
responded with a criminal defamation complaint that federal prosecutors
eventually dismissed.

For months, Carrillo had resisted calls for his resignation, and opposition
lawmakers were preparing to open public investigative hearings on his
governorship this week. Hugo Salgado Castaneda, Morelos' government
secretary and the state's No. 2 official, said in an interview Tuesday that
"faced with the prospect that every day he'd have to be fighting with his
enemies," Carrillo decided on his own on Monday that it was time to quit.

In his 15-minute radio address Tuesday, Carrillo said that "political
forces who oppose peace and tranquillity have been magnifying events that I
profoundly lament, creating an environment that is hostile to the governor,
based on accusations that they've never been able to prove."

Aides to Zedillo said that the president had brought no pressure on
Carrillo to resign. Carrillo met with Mexico's interior minister and
telephoned Zedillo on Monday to inform them of his decision, the aides said.

In March, however, Zedillo appeared to withdraw his support, publicly
criticizing "governments that have not at all times cared for the law,"
thereby causing "a lot of damage" to the governing Institutional
Revolutionary Party. Zedillo did not name Carrillo, but the governor
acknowledged later that "I felt I had been alluded to in an embarrassing
way and I felt a kind of shame."

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski