Zedillo Breaks Down Mexico’s Code of Silence : Politics: Arrests among ruling-party elite shatter traditional impunity. And sources of great wealth are coming under scrutiny.

Few Mexicans flinched 13 years ago when former President Jose Lopez Portillo moved into his new mansion on a sprawling compound just outside the capital, even after he bankrupted the nation and impoverished millions of his countrymen.

There were angry whispers in the street, to be sure. Many motorists even dared to roll down their windows as they drove past the mansion to bark as loudly as they could--a derisive salute to the president who vowed to “defend the peso like a dog,” just before the currency suffered what was then its worst devaluation in history.

But there were no calls for investigations by the political opposition. There was no real political opposition. There was only Mexico’s decades-old, institutionalized code of silence surrounding the money and power of its ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) elite.

“For decades in Mexico, there has functioned a variant of the Sicilian omerta --the PRI-ista,” observed Mexican historian Lorenzo Meyer, as that code began to collapse last week.

Referring to several studies almost a quarter-century old that compared Mexico’s PRI to the Cosa Nostra in Italy, Meyer concluded, “Today, amid the dismantling of the oldest authoritarianism on the planet, we are becoming convinced they hit on a sad similarity.”

It is against the Draconian backdrop of that now-shattered code of silence -- which had protected past PRI presidents, their aides and families from scrutiny since the party took power in 1929 -- that the events of the past week are so profound and so mind-boggling, Meyer and other analysts said.

And Tuesday, the revolutionary process that began a week ago when President Ernesto Zedillo signed off on the arrest of Raul Salinas de Gortari, his predecessor’s brother, on charges of masterminding the murder of Francisco Ruiz Massieu appeared to enter a bold new phase.

Zedillo’s investigators started to follow a money trail--an almost $7-million bank account in Texas in the name of Mario Ruiz Massieu, the former president’s deputy attorney general. He is accused of shielding Raul Salinas’ alleged role in the assassination of Ruiz Massieu’s brother Francisco, the PRI’s No. 2 official.

Although the investigation into Mario Ruiz Massieu’s finances clearly is an extreme case, that a new Mexican administration would even consider such a probe was beyond most Mexicans’ imagination. That was, after all, at the core of the omerta, a code of impunity that protected, above all, the source of wealth that generations of Mexicans simply assumed came with power.

The Mexican capital and countryside are littered with monuments to the code.

“Dog’s Hill” is the most dramatic. That is the popular nickname of the hillside between the capital and the outlying town of Toluca where Lopez Portillo built a retirement compound so massive it included separate houses for all his brothers, sisters and children.

Despite the reign of impunity, most former presidents and Cabinet ministers have been dignified and careful not to flaunt their retirement wealth. Still, their homes are all stately manors in the capital’s finest tree-lined neighborhoods. They stand behind towering compound walls, heavily guarded by private and state security. And their driveways are packed with late-model sedans and sports cars.

The children of these former top officials attend the most costly, prestigious private schools, many commuting in Corvettes and Cadillacs.

Despite Mexico’s economic recession, the families of the ruling elite have made few--if any--sacrifices. Any question about the origins of a youngster’s wealth is answered with the single sentence, “Oh, his father is a PRI-ista.”

The most garish symbols of omerta were built by a singular character in Mexico’s ruling-party politics, an individual selected, as in all administrations, as a scapegoat.

Arturo Durazo Moreno, Lopez Portillo’s childhood friend and his handpicked police chief of Mexico City, built a mansion in the Pacific resort of Zihuatanejo.

It instantly was nicknamed “The Parthenon.” Modeled after a Greek temple, down to its Doric columns, the retirement home became one of two symbols of the extreme of wealth available even to a mid-level Mexican bureaucrat. The other, located halfway between the capital and Cuernavaca, was Durazo’s weekend estate, which included a private racetrack, disco, heliport and full-sized gymnasium.

In what appeared on the surface to be an attempt at accountability within the omerta, Durazo eventually was charged with tax fraud and extortion.

He fled the country soon after Lopez Portillo left office, evading capture for nearly 18 months before being arrested by U.S. authorities in Puerto Rico. He fought extradition from Los Angeles for almost two years before he was returned to Mexico City for trial.

But after most witnesses refused to testify against him and evidence evaporated, Durazo was convicted on lesser charges and served only a short prison sentence.

Not once during the process, though, did the Mexican government try to track Durazo’s sources of wealth. And never did anyone suggest publicly that they were tied to corruption in the Lopez Portillo administration or to the former president himself.

But a lawsuit filed in January by the left-leaning Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) underscores the change that is unraveling omerta in Mexico today, a process that began before Zedillo sanctioned Raul Salinas’ arrest.

The lawsuit, filed by leaders of a party that split from the PRI in part to protest authoritarianism, charges former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, several members of his Cabinet and the governor of Mexico’s Central Bank with committing crimes “against the national wealth.”

Opposition members, “responding to the general clamor of the Mexican people,” stated in the lawsuit that they were seeking the filing of formal charges against Salinas and his officials for deceiving the Mexican people about the state of Mexico’s finances and for failing to properly manage the economy. They asserted that this caused the economic crisis that recently has impoverished millions of Mexicans almost overnight.

The lawsuit stops far short of accusing Salinas or any of his Cabinet ministers of misusing their positions for personal gain.

But opposition politicians and independent analysts speculated that this could be the next step after the Zedillo government started investigating Mario Ruiz Massieu’s alleged money trail Tuesday.

In several recent speeches during which he explained why he broke the omerta, Zedillo has sought to blunt widespread speculation that he is just seeking to discredit the previous government to strengthen his own.

He insists he has begun to enforce a new rule of law in Mexico, under which everyone--including PRI elite and former presidents--is equally subject to scrutiny and possible prosecution.

Perhaps so, analysts say. But all agree that, in the short term, the impact of that new policy on a political class that has ruled without such a challenge for 66 years will be profound. “The cost of fortifying Ernesto Zedillo is not going to be paid only by the Salinas family,” historian Meyer concluded, “but by the entire, traditional political class that is losing one of its major privileges: impunity.”