PAGE ONE Unsolved Scandals Mount in Mexico
Coverups feared in highprofile assassinations, drug cases

Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer

The sound and fury over drug trafficking and political
assassinations in Mexico has begun to echo with a strangely
tinny ring.

Recently, a series of loudly hyped investigative advances
have turned into quiet failures that underscore the gap
between rhetoric and reality.

Critics say the failures are proof that both the Mexican and
U.S. governments have shied away from aggressive
investigation of the scandals because of unwillingness to
challenge the political status quo south of the border.

For example, expectations that the U.S. trial of a top
Mexican official would reveal details of corruption at the
highest levels finally came to naught when the star witness
refused to testify.

And the arrest of Mexico's antidrug czar on charges of
protecting the nation's top drug lord was severely undercut
soon afterward, when it was revealed that the government had
freed two men believed to be leading drug cartel figures.

Mexicans of every political persuasion view the latest
developments as yet more reason to suspect nefarious plots,
coverups and lies by authorities in Mexico and the United
States.

As with the 1963 assassination of President

John F. Kennedy, even the most paranoid explanations are
given credence.

``There are a lot of vested interests involved in these
crimes, but it's very complicated,'' said a Mexican
government official who asked not to be identified. ``There
is a struggle for power economic power, political power,
drug power. The really difficult problem is to figure out .
. . who is who.''

Rarely has the gap between hype and substance been so large
as in the U.S. trial of Mario Ruiz Massieu, who had
deposited $9 million cash in a Houston bank while working as
a top federal prosecutor in Mexico. He was charged under
civil law that allows the government to confiscate
drugrelated proceeds.

Expectations of breakthrough revelations were skyhigh
because of pretrial testimony by Magdalena Ruiz Pelayo, a
convicted drug trafficker who said she had worked for eight
years as secretary to the father of exPresident Carlos
Salinas.

She implicated the highest level of the Mexican power
structure: the Salinas family; Ruiz Massieu and his brother
Jose Francisco, the former rulingparty deputy head who was
assassinated in 1994; and Luis Donaldo Colosio, the ruling
party presidential candidate who also was gunned down in
1994.

But Ruiz Pelayo and another key prosecution witness
mysteriously refused to testify just before the trial,
leaving the allegations unexplored in court.

Prosecutors said Ruiz Pelayo was scared off by the publicity
surrounding her accusations. Some analysts also noted that
investigators had been unable to verify her claim of having
worked for the elder Salinas which he hotly denied.

At the trial, prosecutors appeared to handle some
sensational testimony with kid gloves.

A former federal policeman's account of delivering sacks of
drug cash to the attorney general's office in Mexico City
was left unpursued, leading some observers to wonder whether
prosecutors were squeamish about drawing links to
thenAttorney General Antonio Lozano, a member of the
conservative opposition National Action Party (PAN) and a
favorite of the U.S. Embassy.

More eyebrows were raised by U.S. Customs agents and an
Internal Revenue Service official, who testified that in
1994 and 1995, when Ruiz Massieu was sending the $9 million
across the border, they were aware of the cash shipments
(which were properly declared on Customs and IRS forms).

Customs took no action other than calling Ruiz Massieu's
bank to confirm that the money was being deposited there.
When the bank concerned that it might be violating
federal moneylaundering laws later called Customs to
report that the cash deposits were suspicious, it was told
not to worry.

The prosecution's evidence against Ruiz Massieu appeared
flimsy. The only incriminating witness was a former
policeman who said that in 1994, he put two suitcases of
drug cash in a car that Ruiz Massieu was riding in. But the
witness acknowledged that the encounter lasted only 10
seconds and that it was the only time he had seen Ruiz
Massieu before the trial.

After the jury finally ruled that Ruiz Massieu must forfeit
$7.9 million in illgotten funds, U.S. District Judge Nancy
Atlas said the government's case ``barely gets over the
line.''

Peter Lupsha, a drug policy expert at the University of New
Mexico, said the prosecutorial caution was similar to that
displayed in last year's Houston trial of Mexican drug lord
Juan Garcia Abrego.

Lupsha noted that Garcia Abrego's indictment included
charges such as bribery of public officials that were
expected to blow the lid off Mexican government corruption.
But the prosecution decided to drop the most explosive
charges, so almost no new information was publicly revealed
in the trial.

``The (U.S.) Justice Department has tried to do as little
damage as possible to the Mexican government,'' Lupsha said.

``It's obvious that Ruiz Massieu and Garcia Abrego could
have implicated high officials in the Salinas and Zedillo
administrations. . . . The Clinton administration is so
focused on protecting the economic and political status quo
that getting the truth takes a back seat.''

Many analysts say Washington officials prefer the
longruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to its
political opponents, believing it better able to preserve
stability and freemarket policies.

Both trials took place during another shouting match that
quickly died to an anticlimactic murmur: the annual debate
over U.S. certification of Mexico as an antidrug ally.

Last month, a rebellious Congress threatened to overturn the
certification, saying the Clinton administration's defense
of President Ernesto Zedillo was no longer credible. But the
move was finally blocked by a White House lobbying blitz of
Congress and the threat of a presidential veto.

This year's debate was enlivened by a spate of evidence that
drug corruption has reached the highest ranks of the Mexican
military.

Army General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, the head of Mexico's
anti narcotics agency, was arrested on charges of
protecting Amado Carrillo, the nation's most powerful drug
lord. Soon after, another army general, Alfredo Navarro, was
charged with protecting cocaine shipments from Tijuana into
California.

Although the arrests created a scandal among politicians and
the press in Mexico and Washington, officials in both
countries declared the glass halffull, saying the arrests
showed that the Mexican government was cleaning house.

Amid the hubbub, however, Mexican authorities released from
jail Humberto Garcia Abrego and Jose Luis Duron Guerra. The
two men reputedly are top officials of the Gulf Cartel run
by Juan Garcia Abrego, Humberto's brother.

U.S. Embassy officials in Mexico City declined to comment on
the releases.

For many Mexicans, the recent lack of progress is nothing
new. The investigations of the past three years' spectacular
crimes have, by all accounts, been spectacular failures:

CARDINAL JUAN POSADAS. Killed in a 1993 shootout in the
Guadalajara airport. At first, investigators said he was
caught in a shootout by rival drug gangs. The theory was
widely derided, with experts pointing out that the cardinal
clearly was the sole target of the gunfire. Investigators
then adopted the theory that gunmen from the Arellano Felix
brothers' Tijuana Cartel had mistaken Posadas for a rival
drug lord.

Few Mexicans believe that version either. Debate still rages
over the motives for an intentional hit because Posadas
had spoken out against traffickers, or because of some
darker conflict?

Mexicans' suspicions grew more paranoid when papal Nuncio
Girolamo Prigione admitted that months after the killing, he
met secretly with the Arellano Felix brothers at their
request and heard their confessions. Then, as now, the
brothers were among Mexico's mostwanted men.

LUIS DONALDO COLOSIO. The PRI's presidential candidate
was shot to death at a campaign rally in Tijuana in March
1994. Investigators promptly laid all the guilt on the
gunman captured at the scene, factory worker Mario Aburto.
But with public opinion almost unanimous in suspecting a
plot, investigators changed their theory, arresting security
agent Othon Cortes, who they said was a second gunman.

Conspiracy theories focused on political or military
hardliners, or on drug lords who believed Colosio favored
their rivals.

Cortes was released last year for lack of evidence, and the
case has collapsed. A Mexican congressional panel that
reviewed a 28,000 page government file concluded last month
that the investigation has been ``incomplete'' and ``far
from the truth.'' Aburto remains in prison, although polls
show that most Mexicans still believe he is a sacrificial
lamb.

In a nationwide survey conducted last month by Mexico City's
Reforma daily, 55 percent of the respondents said it will
never be publicly known who ordered the hit on Colosio, 91
percent blamed a conspiracy and 86 percent said the
government is covering up for the culprits.

JOSE FRANCISCO RUIZ MASSIEU. The PRI's secondin command
was shot to death on a Mexico City street in September 1994.
The government blamed a lone gunman. Pundits and the Mexican
public again smelled a conspiracy, blaming hardline PRI
``dinosaurs'' for eliminating the ostensibly reformist Ruiz
Massieu.

But some analysts pointed out that in the murky netherworld
of PRI politics, Ruiz Massieu had been both a reformer and a
hard liner, running his home state of Guerrero with an iron
fist and participating in tourism projects that allegedly
included investments by drug traffickers.

Captured gunman Daniel Aguilar said PRI Congressman Manuel
Munoz Rocha contracted him for the killing. When Munoz Rocha
suddenly disappeared, suspicion soon focused on his
political patron, Raul Salinas.

Since then, however, the investigation has stalled.

RAUL SALINAS. Brother of the former president. He made
$100,000 per year as a government functionary. After he left
office, investigators found that he held $120 million in
Swiss bank accounts under a false name.

Salinas was arrested and jailed in 1995, charged with
involvement in the killing of Ruiz Massieu. Government
prosecutor Pablo Chapa carried out a flamboyant media
campaign of accusations and leaked ``evidence'' against
Salinas, who soon became the country's No. 1 villain.

Few Mexicans publicly disagreed when Salinas' former
psychic, Francisca Zetina, claimed to have proof that
Salinas had bludgeoned Munoz Rocha to death. After Zetina
helped Chapa find a body buried on Salinas' ranch outside
Mexico City, the prosecutor triumphantly announced that the
body was Munoz Rocha's and that the case was solved.

But in November, forensic tests showed that the body was
Zetina's fatherinlaw's and had been dug up from his grave
and planted on Salinas' ranch to frame Salinas. Chapa had
paid Zetina $500,000 for her information. The case crumbled,
and the Mexican justice system became a worldwide
laughingstock.

Chapa is now a fugitive. But many analysts and average
Mexicans believe the circle of Mexico's disgrace soon will
be closed: Raul Salinas will be freed from Mexico's
highestsecurity prison, they fear, and brother Carlos will
feel sufficiently vindicated to return from his twoyear
exile in Ireland.

``Three years of investigations, and we know just as little
as we did at the start, if not less,'' Francisco Cardenas
Cruz, an influential columnist for the Mexico City daily El
Universal, wrote recently.

``The only result is increasing cynicism and total disbelief
among all Mexicans.''