Mexico Hints at Cover-Up by Ex-Official : Corruption: Former investigator Ruiz Massieu may face extradition from New Jersey. Probers cite ‘well-founded indications’ he shielded Salinas clan.

Even as former Special Prosecutor Mario Ruiz Massieu prepared to face a U.S. magistrate in New Jersey today on customs charges, investigators here were laying the groundwork for his possible extradition on accusations far more serious and bizarre: that he was part of a cover-up as chief investigator in his own brother’s murder.

Specifically, Mexico’s attorney general confirmed late Saturday that his investigators have discovered “well-founded indications” that Ruiz Massieu shielded the elder brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari from prosecution during the investigation. The elder Salinas was arrested last week, accused of being the mastermind of the September assassination of ruling party official Francisco Ruiz Massieu.

Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano stressed that a decision to extradite Mario Ruiz Massieu has yet to be made, saying only that “he could be extradited” from the United States soon.

And he released no proof to implicate Ruiz Massieu in a cover-up in the death of his brother, who was the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party’s second-ranking official when he was gunned down in downtown Mexico City last year.

Mario Ruiz Massieu became an overnight symbol of Mexican political reform last year when he himself charged that the ruling party had been involved in a cover-up in his brother’s death. Last week, he emphatically denied that he had been involved in any cover-up, saying he had come up with no evidence to link the killing of his brother to Raul Salinas de Gortari.

The deepening drama of the Ruiz Massieu and Salinas families, analysts said, dramatically illustrates the level of turbulence rocking Mexico’s political elite after President Ernesto Zedillo started making good last week on his unprecedented policies of internal reform and equal justice under a new rule of law.

And a nation already reeling from political and economic crises was left stunned by so sudden a seeming fall from grace of a man who last year had thrilled the country with his denunciations of the PRI, the ruling party.

With the triumphant outrage of a lone reformer, Ruiz Massieu took Mexico by storm Nov. 23 when he accused the two top officials of the PRI--and his own boss--of a cover-up in his brother’s assassination. In an unprecedented attack on the party, the prosecutor announced that his 57-day probe into his brother’s slaying had documented a conspiracy within the party itself.

Ruiz Massieu became an overnight legend, the hero of videotapes, political stage plays and reformist forces fighting nearly seven decades of authoritarian, one-party rule. His autobiography capped the crusade, hitting the streets just two weeks ago under the title “I Accuse.”

But Ruiz Massieu himself stands accused today in Newark on charges he violated U.S. Customs laws by allegedly carrying undeclared quantities of cash that exceeded the $10,000 limit allowable under U.S. law. His lawyers and family say he is innocent of the charges because he believed he was in transit and the declaration law didn’t apply.

The ever-deepening Ruiz Massieu case appears to underscore the incestuousness and intransigence of the system that has ruled Mexico since 1929.

Ironically, perhaps, Ruiz Massieu had predicted that he would do just that when he shook the nation with that 40-minute speech in November, which broke all the rules that had governed Mexico’s politics of impunity under the PRI.

At the end of an address that accused the highest levels of the PRI of obstructing his investigation, Ruiz Massieu resigned from the case, his post and the party to underscore his conviction that the PRI “does not understand that this country is changing,” moving away from its “corrupt and criminal” political past.

“The demons are loose,” he declared to thunderous applause and headlines the next day proclaiming, “Mario Accuses the System.”

Almost unnoticed in that historic speech, however, was the lavish praise Ruiz Massieu heaped on a singular figure within that system--a figure whose recent fall in stature has been almost as rapid as his own. It was former President Salinas, who similarly broke with tradition last week when he spoke out publicly against Zedillo’s government and then staged a 44-hour on-again, off-again hunger strike demanding that his own name be cleared after the arrest of his elder brother.

“The rectitude of President Salinas in the course of these investigations demonstrated to us his valor, his qualities and his broad-mindedness,” Ruiz Massieu said of the president in November.

Although hardly a smoking gun, analysts concluded that the former prosecutor’s unabashed accolades for the former president in a speech that seemed to attack everyone and everything else in the system now appear to reinforce the most recent suspicions surrounding the Ruiz Massieu case.

In outlining them last week, Special Prosecutor Pablo Chapa Bezanilla, who inherited the Ruiz Massieu case a week after his predecessor’s resignation, told reporters in Mexico City that the government’s case against Raul Salinas as mastermind of the murder was ironclad.

It was, in fact, based on the testimony of key suspects that Ruiz Massieu had arrested and interrogated. And yet, Chapa stressed, Raul Salinas’ name did not appear in a single shred of the voluminous investigative records that Ruiz Massieu left behind.

Chapa added in a radio interview the following day that the motive in the murder, which has yet to be publicly determined, could well go beyond politics.

“There were family disputes,” he said of the Salinas and Ruiz Massieu families, which were linked by a quarter-century of friendship and ultimately through marriage--later broken by a bitter divorce. Francisco Ruiz Massieu had been married to the former president’s sister, and rumors about the parting have spread throughout Mexico’s political circles ever since the PRI official was slain.

Apparently suspecting a cover-up in which Mario Ruiz Massieu agreed to protect the names of both families, Chapa summoned the former prosecutor to his old office for questioning Thursday. After a six-hour grilling, Ruiz Massieu faced reporters gathered outside and declared with a broad smile, “Everything will be cleared up perfectly.”

That night, he left the country.

Ruiz Massieu and his attorney in Mexico City later insisted that he was merely on his way to previously scheduled speaking engagements in the United States and Canada. At 9:15 p.m. Friday, however, U.S. Customs agents at Newark International Airport stopped Ruiz Massieu as he was about to board a flight for Madrid. Within minutes, he was under arrest.

“He was arrested for failure to declare currency,” U.S. Customs Service spokesman Steve Duschesne told reporters Saturday.

Once again, Ruiz Massieu had shocked the Mexican nation.