Perilous State of Affairs : Mexico: As Baja California’s governor, Ernesto Ruffo Appel has brought about many reforms. But the recent bout of slayings and scandals threatens to engulf his opposition party’s accomplishments.

Amid assassinations, drug violence and political combat, Ernesto Ruffo Appel still projects the image of the down-to-earth businessman who five years ago became Mexico’s first opposition governor.

The signs of changing times are unmistakable, however. The man who once shunned ostentatious entourages, mixing easily with dockworkers and Japanese investors alike, now travels around Baja California with a phalanx of wary bodyguards. Although Ruffo’s manner is still cheerful and plain-spoken, he looks tired of late.

And the governor’s words convey the gravity of recent events that seemed unthinkable when, as Ensenada mayor and a reform-minded political newcomer, he launched his historic bid for the Baja governorship. In two grim months, he has endured a scandal caused by a drug-related shootout between federal and state police, the assassinations in Tijuana of a presidential candidate and the city’s police chief, and the arrest by federal authorities of his deputy attorney general on corruption charges.

“This is a dangerous game,” Ruffo said during an interview Thursday at his official residence in this desert city that serves as Baja’s capital. “And I don’t even want to call it a game, because I never wanted to be a player in such things. But well, these are things that fall into my area, and what can I do? I hope that after this I can live a peaceful life.”

This unconventional leader of a prosperous border state has brought about landmark electoral and human rights reforms, infrastructure improvements, international investment. He has led a campaign for democratization and urged greater power for states in the rigidly centralized Mexican system.

But that has been overshadowed by the violence that threatens to engulf his government, which is controlled by the National Action Party (PAN).

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As Ruffo approaches the end of his six-year term, critics say his greatest weakness has been the persistence of law enforcement corruption. They fault the governor for remaining loyal to Juan Francisco Franco Rios, who stepped down as attorney general last month as the result of accusations of links to drug mafias.

“The drug traffickers have continued functioning with great impunity and tolerance on the part of the government,” said Victor Clark Alfaro, a noted Tijuana human rights activist who has conducted an independent probe of police misconduct.

Ruffo’s state has become another battleground in Mexico’s crisis, a northern counterpart to the conflict in the southern border state of Chiapas. The line between border drug wars and high-stakes political intrigue in Baja is blurring rapidly.

“He’s very vulnerable to having his image and his legacy seriously damaged by all of this,” said Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center of U.S.-Mexico Studies at UC San Diego. “He’s done a lot of very important and constructive things in his state.”

As turmoil deepens in a presidential election year, hostility between the state government under the PAN and the federal government of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has escalated. Ruffo says he has been the target of unprecedented political attacks. He describes tense verbal exchanges with top Mexican officials, who he says have urged him to remain silent about the unsolved slaying of candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio. Ruffo, the most prominent opposition figure involved in the investigation, has been more willing than federal authorities to discuss the unanswered questions in the assassination probe.

Ruffo said he simply wants the Colosio case “cleared up. I want the truth to be known. . . . If not, this story will remain associated with us. And Tijuana will never get rid of that image.”

The assassinations of Colosio and of Federico Benitez Lopez, Tijuana’s police chief and a close ally of the governor, have also left Ruffo concerned about his safety. He and Tijuana Mayor Hector Osuna Jaime have beefed up what were previously unobtrusive security details.

“There is enormous risk,” Ruffo said. “A chief of police dies, an honest, dedicated man, who in my judgment was free of any corruption. It seems that the bad guys are defeating the good guys.”

In the weeks preceding his death in a highway ambush, the chief was worried because he had rejected a $100,000 bribe from drug gangsters who wanted him to curb anti-narcotics operations, Ruffo said. But Ruffo did not discard a possible connection to the Colosio case; some observers say the chief was killed because he was looking into the assassination on behalf of Ruffo and had raised doubts about the official version.

In the aftermath of Benitez’s murder, tensions between Ruffo and Mexican Atty. Gen. Diego Valades broke into the open. Federal agents dispatched by Valades on Tuesday arrested another Ruffo ally, Deputy State Atty. Gen. Sergio Ortiz Lara, at his office on charges of drug corruption. The accompanying deployment of 100 heavily armed federal agents, who briefly confronted state judicial police after Ortiz was hustled away at gunpoint, prompted fears of renewed combat between state and federal officers in downtown Tijuana.

The attorney general charges Ortiz with aiding the escape of gunmen of the Arellano drug cartel during the March 3 shootout between state and federal forces that killed a federal commander and four others, including a state police officer who was allegedly guarding a drug lord. Investigators are also looking into the deputy attorney general’s possible involvement in the police chief’s murder, Valades said.

There have been implications that Benitez’s death is linked to his supposed investigation of corrupt state officials--something Ruffo angrily disputes. In fact, he and his backers suggest that Ortiz’s arrest has more to do with politics than crime.

The political hostilities grow partly from a stark reality in Baja: a justice system besieged by Mexico’s drug mafias.

The Arellano cartel is warring for control of one of the world’s most lucrative smuggling corridors. Two years of machine gun murders and brazen gun battles in the border region and elsewhere culminated in the slaying last year of the cardinal of Guadalajara by Arellano gunmen, who police say were trying to kill an enemy kingpin.

Ruffo has failed to eradicate corruption in state law enforcement, critics say. They say the governor protected the recently replaced former attorney general, Franco, despite serious questions about Franco’s conduct.

Ruffo admits that federal authorities are investigating Franco, who is reportedly the ultimate target of the probe accelerated by the dramatic arrest of the deputy attorney general last week.

But the governor maintains that he has not seen proof that Franco broke the law. Ruffo described a federal investigative dossier on Franco as a “political document.”

Ruffo said the state and federal forces have problems with corruption. The truth behind the chaotic gunfight pitting state against federal police on March 3, Ruffo said, appears to be more complicated than the federal government’s description: that state officers in league with cartel gunmen ambushed an elite federal unit trying to arrest a top lieutenant of the Arellanos.

Ruffo believes that some of the federal officers were also working for traffickers.

A report by Baja’s independent human rights ombudsman provides some backing for that view. The April 11 report is damaging to the state police and implicates many state officers, including a former station commander and a former chief bodyguard for the fired attorney general.

At the same time, however, the report concludes that federal officers may also have been involved in criminal activity, an allegation made by veteran federal officers and Mexican newspapers.

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The state-federal friction is ironic when compared to the harmony that prevailed when Ruffo won the Baja elections in 1989. President Carlos Salinas de Gortari was widely credited with stepping in and “allowing” the PAN its first victory ever, despite the objections of the local PRI, whose administration had been racked by scandal and incompetence.

Ruffo says he has a good relationship with Salinas. Top Mexican officials have been attentive to the governor, according to Cornelius of UC San Diego.

“It was a true test of a modernizing, supposedly democratizing, central government to work with an opposition government in an important state and forge a constructive working partnership,” Cornelius said.

The PAN has subsequently won two other states and Ruffo has been the topic of speculation as a future presidential candidate. Looking back, Ruffo seems bemused at the speed with which he left behind neophyte local politics.

“I never studied for this or thought it was going to be my career or anything,” he said, with the direct manner that distinguishes him from the stiff, florid style of stereotypical Mexican politicos.

Ruffo, a 41-year-old father of three, is the son of a self-made merchant from La Paz. His father arrived in Ensenada with little money or education and established a seafood packaging firm. Ruffo grew up working in the port of Ensenada, an experience that he says cultivated his rapport with working-class people.

As a young executive, he drifted into opposition politics, he said, after publicly denouncing the government corruption he encountered while working for a seafood concern owned by U.S. and Mexican partners. He ended up running for mayor of Ensenada in 1986, with decidedly modest expectations.

“I said, ‘I know I’m going to give them a real fight here in Ensenada, but I know that since I’m on my own, they’re not going to let me win.’ ”

Regardless of who wins the three-way race for president, Ruffo said, the next federal administration will include cabinet-level representatives of opposition parties for the first time. That is just one of the democratic advances that he says are inevitable.

“There are many established interests and old ways of doing politics, there are old ways of doing business, that are accustomed to their advantages and don’t want to give them up,” he said. “But there are many Mexicans who want to share the benefits. And I think it is only natural that the sharing of wealth and political power will resolve the problems.”