Mexico’s No. 2 under fire to quit

Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mourino, a rising political star and the second most powerful official in Mexico, came under growing pressure to quit Monday over charges that he acted improperly by signing government contracts on behalf of his family’s gasoline business while serving as a top energy official.

The 36-year-old Mourino, a confidant of President Felipe Calderon who has been mentioned as a possible successor, denies wrongdoing. But the controversy, which has developed over the last two weeks, shows no sign of fading.

On Monday, critics issued fresh accusations that Mourino helped his family’s business while in office, and a newspaper poll showed dwindling public support. In the poll, published by Milenio, two in three respondents said he should resign.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a leftist former mayor of Mexico City who was defeated by Calderon in the 2006 presidential election, has publicized the contracts in what has become an intensive effort to drive Mourino out.

On Monday, Lopez Obrador presented two more contracts, from 2001 and 2003, that he said showed Mourino had represented the family business in dealings with Pemex while serving in the Chamber of Deputies as a member of the energy committee. Previously, Mourino had been accused of signing contracts with the state-owned oil monopoly while he was deputy energy minister in 2004.

Lopez Obrador and allies have urged a congressional investigation into whether Mourino violated ethics laws.

So far Mourino’s critics do not appear to have enough votes in the lower house of Congress to launch an official inquiry, a possible step toward his removal from office.

But analysts said the controversy could hurt Calderon, who was Mourino’s boss at the Energy Ministry and has remained his political patron. The president has made no public comments on the matter.

As head of the Interior Ministry, Mourino oversees a wide range of government functions, from domestic security to immigration, and serves as the president’s point man in dealing with Congress and the political opposition.

Mourino “surely will manage to survive this week’s scandal, but his ability to arbitrate among the country’s political forces and make himself useful to the president has been left seriously damaged,” wrote newspaper columnist Jorge Zepeda Patterson.

Since being named interior minister in January, the Spanish-born Mourino, youthful and handsome, has already faced questions over whether his heritage should disqualify him from holding a Cabinet post -- or someday assuming the presidency.

Mourino, who moved to Mexico with his family in the 1970s, says he meets Mexico’s nationality requirements for officeholders because his mother is Mexican.

Mourino’s family maintained business interests in Spain after emigrating, while striking it rich with gasoline stations and other enterprises in southern Mexico. It was in his role representing the family’s gasoline transport business that Mourino signed the 2004 contract with Pemex.

Mourino acknowledged signing the contract. But he said that while he remained a legal representative of the family business at the time, he had dropped his interests in it two months earlier. In a television interview last week, Mourino insisted that he had acted in “strict accordance with the law” and said he had no plans to resign.

The controversy over Mourino’s dealings with Pemex comes amid a growing debate over whether to allow some form of outside investment to modernize the state enterprise, whose production is falling.

Calderon has suggested that private funding is needed to boost exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. He has said that the only alternative to tapping public coffers may be to follow the lead of nations such as Brazil, China and Norway, which have allowed private investment in publicly owned oil companies.

The question of allowing private parties to invest in Pemex is politically explosive in Mexico, touching on deeply held sensitivities over the issues of sovereignty and national pride.

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ken.ellingwood@latimes.com