An old political feud gets personal

The long battle of words between former Mexican President Vicente Fox and his legion of detractors took an unusually personal turn Friday, with Fox saying that one of his critics was involved in drug trafficking.

The critic, a leading senator in Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, known by its Spanish acronym, PRI, had linked Fox’s family to the death of 21 Pemex workers in the aftermath of an oil rig accident this week in the Gulf of Mexico.

Fox and his family’s finances have come under intense scrutiny, in part thanks to a September spread in the glossy Mexico City magazine Quien that brought Fox’s comfortable and apparently luxurious post-presidential life to the public eye.

Many Mexicans suspect that Fox, like presidents past, grew rich during his time in office. His six-year term ended in 2006.

On Thursday, Sen. Manlio Fabio Beltrones called for an investigation into Tuesday’s collision of a Pemex offshore oil platform and drilling rig, saying that Fox’s wife “appeared to be linked” to the company responsible for supplying lifeboats that sank in stormy seas after the accident, accounting for most of the dead.

The company, Oceanografia, had failed to test the lifeboats, Beltrones said. And his office, the senator added, received evidence linking the company to “the businesses of the family of Mrs. [Marta] Sahagun,” Fox’s wife and the former first lady.

Angered by the suggestion that he, his wife and his stepsons might somehow be partly to blame for the oil rig tragedy, Fox shot back in an angry press release early Friday.

“Mr. Manlio Fabio Beltrones should focus on his duties as a senator, rather than trying to jump-start his presidential aspirations,” Fox said in the communique. Mexico’s next presidential election is in 2012.

“Manlio Fabio Beltrones has a record with the DEA related to drug trafficking,” Fox continued, referring to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. “Mexico doesn’t deserve this political spectacle.”

A DEA official in Washington declined to comment on Fox’s statement.

In 1997, Beltrones, then governor of the northern state of Sonora, was the subject of a New York Times article that said American officials believed he was an associate of one of the world’s biggest drug dealers.

The accusations, denied by Beltrones, came three years before Fox won the presidency. Beltrones was never charged.

In his own press release Friday, Beltrones accused Fox, of the rival National Action Party, or PAN, of “recycling old slanders.”

“Ten years ago, in an investigation [I] requested, the attorney general’s office found these accusations fraudulent and unsubstantiated,” Beltrones said.

Fox’s finances are being investigated by a congressional commission, which the former president has called illegal.

Fox said his family had provided the panel with records that showed it had no link to Oceanografia.

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hector.tobar@latimes.com