Mexican Ruling Party Crisis Denied : Latin America: Leader acknowledges problems but says the party isn’t culprit. She welcomes exoneration in scandal.

The president of Mexico’s long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party conceded Friday that the party’s image has been damaged by a “great scandal” engineered by its enemies and by an economic crisis that has drained the peso of much of its value in less than a month.

But, speaking over breakfast to the national press and members of the party, known as the PRI, Maria de los Angeles Moreno insisted that “the PRI is not in crisis. The PRI is working. It is acting.

“Certainly the impact of the financial problem has repercussions. There is uneasiness in society. It’s necessary to provide answers, to look for ways to overcome this crisis as briefly as possible and restore confidence.”

But Moreno, a member of the Mexican Senate and the first woman ever to lead the party that took power in 1929, insisted that the government and her party should not be blamed for the crisis and instead should redouble their efforts “to restore the road to growth.”

Moreno reserved her strongest comments for the decision Thursday by Mexico’s attorney general not to prosecute her and two other PRI leaders for obstruction of justice in September’s assassination of the party’s second-ranking official, Francisco Ruiz Massieu.

“From the beginning, we said that there was an injustice, that it was totally illegal, that it was absurd,” she said of the obstruction charge made last month by Ruiz Massieu’s brother, Mario Ruiz Massieu, who was then deputy attorney general.

“Effectively, (the accusation) hurt the party, it hurt various people, not only me. . . . All of it was an unjust attack, perhaps with very personal interests, that obviously injured an institution, injured the country and injured society,” Moreno said.

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During a nationally broadcast speech in November, the former deputy attorney general rocked the ruling party and the nation when he publicly resigned from his post and from the party, alleging that his brother’s murder was the result of a wide-ranging conspiracy hatched and covered up by ranking members of the PRI.

Mario Ruiz Massieu announced that he was leaving for the next attorney general sealed boxes filled with evidence that backed his charges, and he later applauded President Ernesto Zedillo’s appointment of opposition party member Antonio Lozano to the top law enforcement post. In addition to accusing Moreno, Ruiz Massieu also implicated former Atty. Gen. Humberto Benitez Trevino and party President Ignacio Pichardo in the alleged cover-up.

Lozano, the first opposition member ever to serve in a PRI government, stated Thursday night that what Ruiz Massieu turned over “lacked sufficient evidence of criminal conduct” to pursue formal charges.

Neither Benitez nor Pichardo, who is now serving as Zedillo’s secretary of natural resources, commented publicly on Lozano’s decision. But Moreno made it clear that she was speaking for her colleagues when she thanked the prosecutor for his work and outlined the work that lies ahead for the party.

“Now, what we must look for are ways to repair this damaged image,” she said. “What am I going to do? For me, it’s sufficient what the attorney general did. The declaration and the exoneration and freedom from any possible guilt is enough for me. I don’t want more scandal.”

As Moreno spoke, though, the Mexican currency was weakening still further.

When the markets closed Friday, the peso was trading at 5.75 to the dollar--down from 3.4 when Zedillo’s ruling party government decided to lift controls on the peso and ultimately let the currency float freely on the open market. And many of the questions Moreno fielded Friday morning focused on an economic crisis that most Mexicans blame on the ruling party and the previous president.

With the latest opinion poll showing that 59% of Mexicans blame the devaluation and ensuing crisis on former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari--just 9% blame Zedillo--Moreno dodged a question about the ruling party’s stand on opposition demands that Salinas be held publicly accountable for the financial disaster.

“It’s too simple to say where was the guilt or who should answer,” she said, adding that it is more important “to go beyond the negative factors of the crisis and again find the road Mexicans always have found through history.”