Former Mexican President Implicated in Brother's
Scandals

By JULIA PRESTON

MEXICO CITY Mexican prosecutors released evidence
Wednesday suggesting that former President Carlos
Salinas de Gortari took part in a coverup of the role
his brother is accused of playing in a 1994 political
assassination.

The special prosecutor said Wednesday that, according to
new testimony, the former president was officially
informed early on that his older brother's name had come
up repeatedly in the investigation of the shooting death
of a prominent politician.

Within days of the murder, Carlos Salinas arranged a
meeting at the presidential palace for his brother,
Raul, and the Mexican attorney general, and at that
meeting, Raul Salinas asked to be left out of the
inquiry, according to the testimony.

The disclosures mark the first time that government
investigators have directly implicated the former
president in the expanding scandals involving his
brother.

Prosecutors did not say that they have opened an
investigation of the former president, who has never
been charged with a crime. Rather, they presented the
evidence to revive the case against Raul Salinas, which
had been on the brink of collapse. He is charged with
being the mastermind of the slaying.

When Carlos Salinas was in office, he was embraced as a
close ally by the United States, but soon after his term
ended in 1994, he plunged into disgrace and was forced
into exile.

Carlos Salinas has maintained that during his presidency
he was unaware of most of his brother's business and
personal dealings. Recently he has remained silent
rather than defend his brother against mounting charges
of graft and fraud.

But he has continued to say that he is convinced his
brother is innocent of the murder of the politician,
Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu. Ruiz Massieu had been
married for a time to a sister of Carlos and Raul
Salinas and was a close friend of Carlos.

The new evidence includes a recently discovered audio
cassette and a statement given in January by former
President Salinas. The prosecution entered the evidence
into the court record Wednesday, said the special
prosecutor, Jose Luis Ramos Rivera.

The evidence refers back to events surrounding the Ruiz
Massieu killing and its first investigation. President
Salinas hastily appointed Ruiz Massieu's own brother,
Mario, to be the first special prosecutor in the case,
with orders to report directly and exclusively to the
president.

After Carlos Salinas left office, a new attorney general
brought charges against Raul Salinas as the person
planning the slaying. He also accused the first special
prosecutor of twisting the investigation to conceal any
mention of Raul Salinas.

Mexico tried unsuccessfully to extradite Mario Ruiz
Massieu from the United States to face charges of
coverup and abuse of authority, among others. He is
living in New Jersey.

Part of the new testimony comes from Victor Humberto
Benitez Trevino, Mexico's attorney general in the last
years of the Salinas presidency. He testified that he
strongly objected to President Salinas' choice of Mario
Ruiz Massieu to investigate the killing of a member of
his own family.

Benitez said in testimony in February that President
Salinas summoned him to his offices in the presidential
palace a few days after Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu's
murder in a Mexico City street on Sept. 28, 1994.

But instead of seeing the president, the attorney
general was ushered into a side office where he found
Raul Salinas, "who expressed his concern that he might
be connected to the investigation," Benitez said.

In Carlos Salinas' statement, taken in Dublin, Ireland,
where he is living, he acknowledged that Mario Ruiz
Massieu told him soon after taking over the
investigation that Raul Salinas' name had been mentioned
more than once in connection with the slaying.

A former special prosecutor who was building the murder
case, Pablo Chapa Bezanilla, is a fugitive from justice,
accused of bribing witnesses and conspiring to frame
Raul Salinas by planting a body on his horse ranch.

The prosecutors who took over from Chapa last December
said Wednesday that they had found an audio tape of a
session in which investigators questioned a key witness
one day after the killing. The witness is serving a jail
sentence as accomplice to murder for buying the weapon.
On the tape, the witness can be heard twice naming Raul
Salinas as the man who ordered the killing.

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company