Countdown to July
2, 2000
The Narco News Bulletin
1994:
The Consolidation of Narco-Power
Part
Two of Our Special Election Report
June
15, 2000
The true bosses
of the illegal drug trade do not appear on the FBI "Most
Wanted" list. Nor
do they appear on Washington's "narco-list" of "top
foreign drug traffickers," a report that conveniently ignores
a lot (i.e. the entire Mexican South) in its naming of mid-level
managers, teamsters and enforcers in the cocaine trade.
The real chiefs of drug
trafficking appear, rather, in the Forbes magazine list
of the wealthiest men on earth.
The Chief Operating Officers
of drug traffickiing are not Mexicans, nor Colombians: they are
US and European bankers, those who launder the illicit proceeds
of drug trafficking. Institutions like Citibank of New York --
as this report documents -- are the true beneficiaries of the
prohibition on drugs and its illegal profits.
Mexico has an election
coming up on July 2nd in which narco-money is already flowing
freely in a blatant vote-buying campaign (also documented by
this series, in both its historic and its present forms).
Today we look at the white-collar
drug trafficking class of Mexico, those who consolidated their
control over that country's piece of the narco under Presidents
Salinas and Zedillo, Bush and Clinton.
Some of these men -- like
BANAMEX CEO Roberto Hernández Ramírez -- are rags-to-riches
stories. Hernández, according to Forbes magazine, could
not afford to finance an American Express credit card in 1980.
Today he earns the largest annual salary in Mexico -- reported
as $29 million dollars -- and is a billionaire presiding over
Mexico's top banking institution.
Other political businessmen,
like Carlos Hank González, his son Carlos Hank Rohn, TV
Azteca owner Ricardo Salinas Pliego, Serfin bank owner Adrián
Sada González, Bancomer owner Eugenio Garza Lagüera,
Banorte owner Roberto González, and BANAMEX co-owner Alfredo
Harp Helú appear with Hernández on the Forbes list.
The first three have been widely implicated in narco-money, and
the bankers all own banks in which officials have been arrested
for drug money laundering.
Former Mexican President
Carlos Salinas de Gortari is not on the Forbes list but
there is considerable evidence that he ought to be.
His shadow ownership behind
many of the above-named companis dates back to his term as president
(1988-1994) when he privatized the banking and media institutions
that made these men their billions. A sound estimate of the true
value of the Salinas forturne, according to the Mexican news
magazine La
Crisis, is
$18 billion dollars.
If true, that would make
Carlos Salinas the fifth richest man in the world by the Forbes
list's own computations.
One could say that he
still remains "at large" from both the FBI and Forbes
lists.
A review of recent history:
Salinas became president
through a massive and corrupt act of election fraud (see Part One of this series for the facts).
During his term he privatized
the banking industry. And he sold the banks to men who were not
bankers: Roberto Hernández, Adrián Sada, Roberto
González and Alfredo Harp Helú were no more professional
bankers than TV Azteca owner Ricardo Salinas Pliego -- who bought
the station with $29.5 million dollars in laundered money provided
by Salinas' brother -- was a professional journalist. Salinas
sold the banks and other industries to his group; a club
of political supporters of the PRI, known as the "technocrats"
or "neoliberals."
The old-school bankers,
men like Manuel Espinosa Iglesias (who died last week, perhaps
of a broken heart), professionals in the field of banking who
had managed Mexico's banks -- in his case, Bancomer -- since
1982 when then-president José López Portillo nationalized
the bank. The banking pros were all pushed out of the way during
the Salinas term. Espinosa was physically barred from the premises
of Bancomer by then-secretary of treasury Pedro Aspe Armella
when the bank was privatized in 1991.
The single-biggest winner
in the wave of bank privatizations was Roberto Hernández
Ramírez, who received the largest prize of all: BANAMEX,
the National Bank of Mexico. He and his team of investors paid
roughly one billion US dollars for BANAMEX. The first year's
recorded profits equalled, already, one-half of the investment:
$500 million dollars.
Where did this group of
neo-bankers obtain the capital to purchase these banks? It will
never be known. A suspicious fire in the federal treasury department
destroyed all the documents pertaining to the bank sales. But
the tracks have not been entirely charred nor covered.
Roberto Hernández
and others purchased the nation's banks with narco-money.
The privatization of Mexico's
banks was specifically designed by Salinas to make possible the
laundering of illegal drug money. And President Salinas -- using
his brother, Raúl as the bag man -- built into the plan
his own enrichment. It was the single-largest get-rich-quick
scheme in human history.
He also assured that his
political party, the PRI, would receive its secret slush fund
for the 1994 elections (after the 1988 electoral fraud was exposed,
Salinas needed to develop a more sophisticated election-stealing
plan). Roberto Hernández and other members of the Salinas
project would see to that as part of their end of the deal.
Roberto Hernández
had been, according to the newspaper Por Esto!, the financial engineer of the
Gulf Cartel, launched in the 1980s by Juan N. Guerra and based
in the Texas border city of Matamoros, Tamaulipas. The Hernández
narco-trafficking story has been widely explored by Por Esto!
since its first report on December 16, 1996, and also by The
Narco News Bulletin.
And yet Hernández
quickly surpassed the legendary drug-trafficker Juan N. Guerra,
who remained a kind of narco-ecologist: Guerra's primary product
was marijuana. Hernández entered the lucrative cocaine
trade, as documented by the photos of cocaine trafficking on
his Caribbean beachfront properties.
As Jorge Fernández
Menéndez -- columnist for the daily Milenio of
Mexico City -- wrote in his book Narcotráfico y Poder
(1999, Rayuela Editors), and translated by The Narco News
Bulletin:
"The relation of
of Raúl Salinas with the Gulf Cartel presumably surged
at the end of the 1980s and began with Juan N. Guerra, who since
the middle of the decade had led this organization dedicated
to drug trafficking (above all, marijuana) and contraband. In
1989, Guerra made various investments in construction projects,
mainly in Villahermosa, with Raúl Salinas. But, already
an old man with grave health problems, with a limited empresarial
vision of his activity, Juan N. Guerra was not the ideal individual
to head the project that would be settled by the strong growth
of the Cali Cartel: the change from marijuana to cocaine...."
The Gulf Cartel was taken
over by Juan García Abrego, notes Fernández, an
expert on drug trafficking matters:
"...as the person
responsible for the operation of the cartel, Raúl Salinas
de Gortari as the presumed chief of political relations and power
of the same, and Carlos Cabal Peniche as its financial brain."
Carlos Cabal Peniche is
today a prisoner in Melbourne, Australia, fighting his extradition
to Mexico. He was, during the Salinas presidency, on a fast-track
to the Forbes list: Salinas granted him two privatized
banks -- Banco Union and Banca-Cremi -- and made it possible
for Cabal Peniche (Salinas often appeared with him in public
and called him a "model businessman") to purchase Del
Monte Fresh Products.
According to a US Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) report, Cabal took full advantage of
"the infrastructure of Del Monte in Tabasco to export cocaine
to the United States through the port of Dos Bocas, renovated
with the money of Mexican taxpayers by President Salinas, precisely
to facilitate the activities of this company."
Cabal Peniche would also
become one of the largest beneficiaries of the FOBAPROA bank
scandal, in which government-guaranteed loans were never paid
and now leave the Mexican People with a debt approaching $80
billion dollars.
Cabal Peniche disappeared
from view four years later, at the same time that Salinas, now
ex-president, fled to Ireland. Cabal Peniche, according to the
Fernández book: "Is not only accused of multiple
fraud in the Cremi-Union Group... but is also suspected of laundering
money for the Gulf Cartel."
According to Swiss prosecutors,
Raúl Salinas de Gortari was the silent owner of 52 percent
of Banca-Cremi. The Swiss have documented more than $67 million
US dollars in laundered drug funds through this bank alone.
Cabal Peniche, beyond
his key position among the neo-bankers, was assigned another
important task of international significance by President Salinas.
With Del Monte Fresh Products as his cover, Cabal Peniche was
presented by the Mexican president to the presidents of Guatemala,
El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua (after the Sandinista government
was defeated in 1992), Costa Rica, and Panama.
Cabal Peniche's mission:
to involve the bankers and governments of these Central American
countries in the Salinas project -- the Mexican domination of
the cocaine trade.
The beginning of the end
for the neo-bankers came with the unraveling of the FOBAPROA
scandal. (This past week Hernández began to feel the sting
of the end of the Zedillo presidency, when the BANAMEX proposal
to buy Bancomer was squashed after a foreign bank BBV, allied
with the Spanish government, won the battle to take over the
struggling Bancomer.)
FOBAPROA, a program akin
to the FDIC banking insurance fund in the US, was purportedly
designed to insure the Mexican bank industry and keep it solvent.
The neo-bankers, however, took full advantage of its loopholes
to make loans to phony corporations -- owned by themselves and
their friends, often to launder drug money -- that did not have
the capital or business activity to pay the back the loans. They
took the money and ran. That the FOBAPROA fund would pay the
banks for their uncollected bad loans was a money-launderer's
dream; a means by which they could form paper corporations and
make self-loans, never to be paid, and collect the money a second
time from the government. The paper corporations were also ideal
for hiding and moving drug money around.
FOBAPROA would become
the primary fundraising operation of the PRI for its 1994 campaign.
And because of this -- every Mexican bank is implicated
in FOBAPROA according to a Canadian auditor's report -- the Mexican
regime of the PRI refuses to release, even to Congress, the documents
regarding FOBAPROA. And this stance, no doubt, keeps those contributions
coming in today in 2000: hush money from those who ripped off
a nation.
The "free money"
made by the neo-bankers, of course, was not free: the unofficial
tax came in the form of kickbacks to the ruling party and to
Salinas, thus ensuring the election of Zedillo as president to
continue the Salinas-Washington economic model.
Throughout the Zedillo
presidency (1994-2000), PRI officials vehemently denied accusations
by journalists and opposition leaders that FOBAPROA and drug
money were behind the Zedillo campaign.
In the Autumn of 1998,
the PRI received a major boost in its cover-up, when legislators
of the National Action Party, or PAN, joined with PRI legislators
to approve the taxpayer bailout of FOBAPROA and protect the wrongdoers
by keeping the records secret.
But history has a way
of coming full circle. In this case the boomerang moved across
the earth and back again when Carlos Cabal Peniche was apprehended
in Australia. Today he is in the Port Phillipe prison and his
lawyers battle his extradition to Mexico.
Every sexenio --
six year presidential term -- in Mexico needs its scapegoats
so that the succeeding PRI regime and the US government in Washington
can wash their hands of the corruption and robbery to which they
were accomplice in the term before. Indeed, during the next six
years, some of the neo-bankers above may see themselves fall
from grace as swiftly as Cabal Peniche's luck changed.
But Cabal Peniche isn't
taking it lying down. He hired Australia's top P.R. firm, IPR
Shandwick, Ltd., and attempted, at first behind the scenes, to
negotiate his freedom. When that didn't happen, he went ballistic.
In June 1999, still behind
bars, Cabal Peniche began leaking documents to the international
press. It started with the Miami Herald, to which he confessed:
In 1994, the narco-banker Cabal Peniche donated $25 million dollars
to the PRI. Interesting, how this sum corresponds with the $25
million "fee" charged to other Mexican oligarchs at
a fateful 1993 banquet: keep reading.
President Zedillo reacted
angrily, denying up and down that he and his party received $25
million dollars from the narco-banker that was no longer on his
team.
PRI officials defended:
Cabal Peniche had only given about $300,000 US dollars to the
PRI presidential campaign (under US law, that would be 300 times
the legal limit that an individual can give to a presidential
campaign; but it's legal in Mexico, a country with inadequate
campaign finance reporting requirements).
Cabal Peniche then placed
Zedillo and the PRI in checkmate: He furnished copies of the
deposited checks and bank records to the press -- adding up to
$15 million US dollars. This carried the implied threat that
he was saving about $10 million more in proofs as part of his
bargaining game with the Zedillo government.
The PRI placed full page
ads in Mexican dailies, shouting: "CABAL PENICHE LIES."
But the evidence had already proven them to be the liars.
The real losers in this
internecene battle between oligarchs, however, has been the Mexican
people, who must foot the bill for the $80 billion dollar FOBAPROA
bailout. This gigantic sum has as consequence that the true needs
of the country -- in education, economic development, social
programs, etc. -- will not be met in the years to come.
Worse, even after the
FOBAPROA bailout, the banking system was not salvaged. Other
banks are still finding themselves at the brink of falling and
the PRI government has bailed them out. Interest rates for the
general public have soared to 18 percent and millions of debtors
have been financially destroyed for their inability to pay these
usurious rates.
The purchase, now, of
Bancomer by foreign capital demonstrates one reason why the US
government has sat back laughing at the poverty and misery of
the Mexican people: by weakening the banks, the way is paved
for US financial interests to invade. Indeed, the Mexican bank
Confia was recently swallowed by a US giant: Citibank.
But what does all this
have to do with the 1994 elections?
We lead you to the night
of February 23, 1993, toward the end of the Salinas presidency.
Some of the names you have read above -- Roberto Hernández
is central to this story -- you will now read again.
The best account of how
drug money and the profits from its related FOBAPROA robbery
were diverted into the 1994 presidential campaign, illegally
and secretly, comes from the report by Miami Herald correspondent
Andrés Oppenheimer, in his book: Bordering on Chaos
- Guerrillas, Stockbrokers, Politicians and Mexico's Road to
Prosperity (1996, Little, Brown and Company).
Oppenheimer is not a leftist,
nor is he anti-business. To the contrary, he is known worldwide
for his hostility to the Cuban and other left-leaning governments.
This may in fact have helped him gain the sources to reveal this
story. He is also a Pulitzer prize winner in journalism.
In his book, Oppenheimer
reports on the $750 million dollar banquet hosted by Salinas
with the 30 Mexican businessmen who were most enriched by his
presidency. Narco News will provide a link to the full
chapter by Oppenheimer below, but here are a few key excerpts
so that our readers may understand the magnitude of The Buying
of the Election 1994.
Oppenheimer writes:
Nothing made Zapatista
leader Subcommander Marcos's claims that Mexico's political system
was hopelessly corrupt more apparent than a private dinner party
held at the home of former finance minister Don Antonio Oruz
Mena to raise funds for the ruling party's I994 campaign.
It was one of those high-level,
top-secret meetings that seem to exist only in the minds of conspiracy
theorists -- but that turned out to be real.
The party, attended by
President Salinas and Mexico's top billionaires, was supposed
to have remained a confidential affair. It had taken place on
a Tuesday evening about ten months before the Zapatista uprising,
on February 23, 1993.
It was 8:30 P.M., and
one by one, the thirty wealthiest men in Mexico (there were no
women in the group) began arriving in their limousines at the
mansion of Ortiz Mena at Tres Picos Street Number 10, in Mexico
City's exclusive Polanco neighborhood. Their invitations had
asked them to attend "a small dinner party" -- a code
for no wives included and no word out to the media -- with President
Salinas.
The agenda of the secret
meeting, as specified in the invitation letter, was to discuss
a five-point program to help prop up the PRI for the 1994 elections...
and discussing the upcoming electoral campaign fund-raising drive.
The key proposal to be discussed called for getting the PRI to
raise its own funds instead of continuing to receive massive
government financial aid. Mexico could no longer afford to be
described by critics at home and abroad as a state party system.
The time had come for the PRI to sever its financial ties with
the government and help give Mexico a democratic image.
PRI president Genaro Borrego
had organized the dinner with the help of two business leaders
close to Salinas -- banking tycoon Roberto Hernandez and construction
magnate Gilberto Borja....
A uniformed watchman guided
the guests, most of them overweight, folksy-looking men in their
late fifties, to the elevator that took them to the second floor
dining area.... In the middle of the room was a U-shaped table,
with the guests' place cards in alphabetical order. Facing the
center of the table, between its two open wings, was a small
table for three: Salinas, PRI president Borrego, and the host.
...Among the guests were
television tycoon Don Emilio Azcarraga, known as El Tigre ("The
Tiger"), described by Forbes magazine as the richest
man in Latin America (the magazine estimated his net worth that
year at $5.1 billion); telecommunications czar Don Carlos Slim
(net worth: $3.7 billion); cement baron Lorenzo Zambrano (net
worth: $2 billion); Bernardo Garza Sada (net worth: $2 billion);
Jeronimo Arango (net worth: $1.1 billion); Angel Losada Gomez
(net worth: $1.3 billion); Adrian Sada (net worth: $1 billion);
and Carlos Hank Rohn, whose multimillion-dollar fortune was almost
entirely in family-owned businesses and thus unaccountable. Mixed
with the guests were party organizers Borja and Hernandez, who
had -- as an additional show of support for the party -- provided
the Paris-trained kitchen personnel of his Banamex bank to cater
the event....
Thus, when North Americans
look at the photos of cocaine trafficking on Hernández
properties and wonder -- Why isn't this man in prison, or on
the US "narco-list"? Why has the Mexican government
persecuted the journalists who proved the narco-banker's illicit
crimes? Why did President Bill Clinton agree to hold an "anti-drug"
summit at Hernández' hacienda in 1999? -- this story provides
the answers. We return to Oppenheimer's splendidly-researched
text:
....But how much were
the business leaders supposed to fork out? The conversation went
back and forth. Officials at the head table at first avoided
giving a figure, then suggested that the PRI needed a campaign
chest of at least $500 million. Then, Salinas's friend Roberto
Hernández, the banker, threw out the figure that had been
previously agreed upon between the three banquet organizers during
their breakfast at the University Club.
"Mr. President, I
commit myself to making my best effort to collect twenty-five
million," Hernández said.
There was an awkward silence
in the room.
"Mexican pesos or
dollars?" one of the billionaire guests asked.
"Dollars," responded
Hernández and Borrego, almost in chorus. Twenty-five million
dollars each?! There were hmms and ahhs around the table. Don
Garza Sada, of Monterrey's Visa soft drinks empire, said he agreed
-- it was the business community's responsibility to support
the party. Telecommunications magnate Slim, who had won the government
bid to privatize the national telephone monopoly, supported the
motion, adding only that he wished the funds had been collected
privately, rather than at a dinner, because publicity over the
banquet could "turn into a political scandal." In a
country where half the population was living under the poverty
line, there would be immediate questions as to how these magnates
-- many of whom had been middle-class businesspeople until the
recent privatization of state companies -- could each come up
with $2 5 million in cash for the ruling party. Charges of massive
corruption under the Salinas administration were bound to surface....
...Television baron Emilio
Azcarraga stood up, full of enthusiasm, to make his pledge. The
minute he rose from his chair, the room went silent. Azcarraga
was the biggest among the big -- not only financially but physically.
An imposing man of six feet two inches, he commanded instant
attention -- and some fear -- wherever he went. He could be brutal
with his aides and would often publicly embarrass almost anybody
but the president. He gave a vintage Azcarraga performance: loud,
arrogant, and grandiose.
"I, and all of you,
have earned so much money over the past six years that I think
we have a big debt of gratitude to this government," Don
Emilio said. "I'm ready to more than double what has been
pledged so far, and I hope that most in this room will join me.
We owe it to the president, and to the country."
Everybody raised his eyebrows.
Azcarraga was talking of pledging more than $50 million. President
Salinas. smiling broadly, applauded. Others followed suit. A
few did their best to smile, still dumbfounded....
By midnight, when the
president left, Mexico's wealthiest business men had committed
themselves to contributing an average of $25 million apiece to
the ruling party, for a total of about $750 million. The men
swore themselves to secrecy, slapped each other on the back,
exchanged the last jokes of the evening, and walked out to their
limousines.
More clear today in 2000
than in 1996, when Oppenheimer's book was published, is that
Carlos Salinas and his brother Raúl, upon the end of the
presidential term, made off with billions of dollars, and that
drug money was central to that sum. Indeed, one theory on the
crash of the Mexican peso in December of 1994, two weeks after
Salinas' exit, was that it was caused precisely when the Salinas
family converted its pesos into dollars and, in one fell swoop,
destroyed the nation's economy.
Read the entire text of Oppenheimer's report for a more detailed account of
the $750 million dollar banquet and the economic connections
-- the impunity and arrogance -- between the Salinas government
and the New Mexican Oligarchy.
The story does not, of
course, end there. More clear, now than ever, is the role of
some of these magnates -- like the Banamex owner Hernández
and the Carlos Hank family -- at the highest levels of drug trafficking.
Indeed, the exit of Cabal
Peniche from the country -- he hid out in the United States and
in the Dominican
Republic before
he was caught in Australia -- merely created a space for another
PRI friend to take over his narco-turf. Today, the Central American
connections are handled by Carlos Hank González. As the
Geopolitical Drug Observatory describes:
"Carlos Hank González,
one of the wealthiest and most powerful politicians in Mexico,
is untouchable and probably will continue being so in the United
States as well as Mexico, at least until the presidential election
of the year 2000. His company is stockholder in a business that
employes former US Ambassador to Mexico James Jones... and, according
to the former Costa Rica president Rafael Caldera, the successor
of Jones in Mexico, Jeffrey Davidow, was also hosted at the palace
of the unavoidable 'Professor' in Mexico....·
It was the son of Carlos
Hank González, himself also on the Forbes list and present
at the oligarch's banquet, Carlos Hank Rohn, who, it is now well
documented, presented Raúl Salinas to a friend who could
help him hide his illicit millions. Her name was Amy Elliot.
She worked on the 17th floor of the Citibank building in New
York City. Elliot -- blonde, white, well-dressed, educated --
is, more than any Mexican, the true face of narco power.
Elliot has cavorted on
the properties of the late "Lord of the Skies" and
chief of the Juárez Cartel Amado Carrillo Fuentes, according
to La Jornada of Mexico City. Her suspicious behavior
has also been criticized by the US Congress General Accounting
Office. But the US Justice Department, while making its little
list of mid-level traffickers in Mexico, never touched Elliot
or Citibank "not even with the petal of a rose" as
the popular Mexican expression goes.
Amy Elliot was the manager
of Carlos Hank Rohn's accounts in Citibank. That year she opened
up a multi-billion dollar account for Raúl Salinas under
the alias of Juan Guillermo Gómez Gutiérrez. Elliot
knew his true identity -- she admitted that before Congress --
but added, incredibly, "I didn't have motives to suspect
that the money would be dirty."
Likewise, the Hank family
stands accused before the US Federal Reserve Bank of forming
two banks in Texas with laundered monies. In 1993, while Carlos
Hank González was Salinas' secretary of agriculture --
a position that has obvious advantages in the drug trade -- he
met with a Citibank executive in Mexico City and said that he
wanted to buy a controlling interest in the Laredo National Bank
of Texas. And could Citibank arrange for the purchase -- in the
name of his son Carlos Hank Rohn -- using $20 million dollars
from "offshore" accounts in the Virgin Islands? Citibank
obliged him.
Some sincere DEA, FBI
and US Treasury agents tried to blow the whistle on this money-washing
scheme. But US prosecutors and treasury officials did nothing.
Citibank remained untouchable, as did the Hank family.
In fact, US Ambassador
to Mexico Jeffrey Davidow was present with Hank in Costa Rica,
in 1997. Back then, Davidow was a regional chief for the US State
Department. Neither Davidow nor US officials have answered questions posed to him about what happened
during that meeting in Central America. Costa Rican congress
members say that was precisely when and where the deal was sealed
in which Hank would run cocaine trafficking out of that country.
Now, weeks before the
July 2nd Mexican elections, the money spigots have been turned
on. In the coming days, The Narco News Bulletin will publish
documentation of the massive funds being spent to buy and coerce
votes, especially from impoverished rural peasants throughout
Mexico.
Some of these funds come
directly from the government. They are easiest to document and
the proofs are already staggering, as we shall demonstrate. But
since the FOBAPROA bailout, the government's funds are limited.
This is one reason why PRI candidate Francisco Labastida -- and
PAN candidate Vicente Fox -- have been inching closer and closer
to the likes of Carlos Hank and family, Roberto Hernández,
TV Azteca owner Ricardo Salinas Pliego, and other members of
the oligarchy who have been linked to narco money and to FOBAPROA.
PRI Presidential
Candidate Francisco Labastida with Carlos Hank González
Proceso Magazine,
April 30, 2000
And so when President
Zedillo, elected by the interconnected web of narco and bank
fraud money, says that Mexico today has free and fair elections,
the Mexican public does not believe him. That's why his chosen
successor, Labastida, does not count with majority support. And
that's why the scenario could turn even more interesting after
the election: legitimacy may escape the winner.
Any government, observer
group or media outlet that says that the Mexican elections are
"clean and transparent" is being dishonest. There are
many of them -- domestic and foreign -- spouting this fiction
right now and, by doing so, they reveal themselves as part of
the problem, uncommitted to democracy.
But why, you may ask,
isn't the Mexican public more upset about narco money in their
campaigns?
We posed this question
to a prominent Oaxaca businessman, who answered it very frankly.
Indeed, we have heard this sentiment from many Mexican citizens
who have nothing to do with drugs or drug money.
"Narco money in the
campaign?" he repeated the question. "Good! The elections
are the only time when the narco reinvests in Mexico! The rest
of the time their money is put into Swiss banks, into Citibank,
into Grand Cayman, everywhere but here. For all the pain we Mexicans
receive from the narco, the election is the only time when they
give anything back to our national economy."
"That's probably
not the answer you wanted to hear," he concluded. "But
it is the reality of my country."
Tomorrow:
How
Electoral Fraud and the Narco Team Up Now More than Ever to Rob
Democracy from Mexico
Truth From Below