MEXICO TRYING TO TRACK SOURCE OF HUGE ACCOUNT

Ex-President's Brother Calls Funds Legitimate

MEXICO CITY - More than $100 million is sitting frozen in a Swiss bank
account once controlled by Ra=FAl Salinas de Gortari, the brother of a
former president of Mexico. Now, after seven years, the source of
those millions may become clear.

Wednesday, Swiss officials gave Mexico's government thousands of pages
of files from a long but unresolved money-laundering investigation of
the Salinas account.

No one -- not the Swiss, nor the Mexicans, nor American officials --
has ever figured out the origin of the money.

The Swiss suspect it came from cocaine deals in which Ra=FAl Salinas
offered drug kingpins high-level protection for their shipments.
Investigators in the Mexican government think it may have flowed from
a secret slush fund traditionally controlled by presidents of the
Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ran Mexico from 1929 until
2000.

The answer is crucial for the former governing party, which is already
trying to extinguish smoldering suspicions that it skimmed tens of
millions from the state-run oil company, Pemex, to finance its failed
2000 presidential campaign.

If the money trail can indeed be traced back from Switzerland to the
party's headquarters, rather than a cocaine stash, party leaders may
have a harder time trying to refurbish their tainted image. They are
striving to regain power from President Vicente Fox, the first
outsider to defeat them.

Ra=FAl Salinas has been in a maximum-security prison since 1995, serving
a 27-year sentence for ordering the slaying of his brother-in-law, who
was the Institutional Revolutionary Party's secretary-general.

His brother, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, president from 1988 to 1994,
lives in self-imposed exile in Ireland.

Ra=FAl Salinas has always maintained that the money came from legitimate
business deals, in which Mexican businessmen and investors entrusted
him with their funds.

``I have suffered the consequences of manufactured evidence,
bought-and-paid-for testimony, and the conspiracy of Mexican
authorities,'' he said in a letter from prison this week.

The Swiss -- whose banking laws had long shielded billions stolen by
regimes or dictators including the Nazis, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire
and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines -- began during the 1990s to
cooperate with international investigations.

In the Salinas case, the money trail has been traced from a numbered
account in Zurich through an elaborate labyrinth.

The $103 million in Switzerland was held in the name of a Cayman
Islands shell corporation, Trocca Ltd., secretly controlled by Salinas.