More Skeletons From Salinas’ Closet : Mexico: Concerns about last year’s election climate gave the kidnapers of banker Alfredo Harp Helu license to run with the ransom, insiders say.

In the never-ending stream of revelations concerning the sometimes astonishing events that shook Mexico in 1994, we must now add this week’s news about the ransom paid last year for the country’s best-known kidnaping victim, banker Alfredo Harp Helu. The capital’s leading business daily, El Financiero, reported on Monday that Harp’s family paid the $17-million ransom to kidnapers in the southwestern state of Guerrero, in a region that has been linked to peasant organizations and guerrilla movements dating back to the 1970s. In the same vein, the news weekly Proceso ran a long interview with Father Maximo Gomez, an elderly priest from the region, who said that he had delivered the ransom money, having fulfilled similar missions in the past.

This region--the Atoyac-Coyuca de Benitez-Tepetixtla triangle--was the home of the Party of the Poor guerrilla movement led in the early 1970s by Lucio Cabanas, and some of the presumed kidnapers of Harp are either relatives or old companions in arms of Cabanas. Other individuals linked to the area or to that troubled past have been arrested and accused of violent activities in Mexico City and elsewhere in recent years.

What makes this particular revelation so curious is that it comes in the wake of the massacre of 17 peasant activists by Guerrero state police June 28 in the community of Aguas Blancas, inside the very region in question.

The tragedy of Aguas Blancas is still being investigated, but it is known that the 17 victims were members of the Organizacion Campesina de la Sierra del Sur. This group has been accused and/or suspected of fomenting insurrection and of being linked by family ties, traditions and political affinity to the old Party of the Poor, to the go-between priests and now, to a much more vague extent, to some of last year’s most notorious kidnapings. It remains unclear why the police opened fire on a truckload of peasant organizers on their way to a demonstration, but the governor of Guerrero has been quoted recently as having given orders to stop the demonstration at any cost.

An additional revelation in El Financiero makes all of this even more confusing and disquieting. According to leaks from the Office of national security in the federal government, the Salinas administration last year knew exactly who had kidnaped Harp and to whom the ransom was paid, and was perfectly aware of the politically motivated nature of the kidnaping. Yet when National Security chief Arsenio Farrell asked the president for authorization to act, he was instructed by Carlos Salinas de Gortari to back off because, in the words of the national security sources, “it was a bad time to make noise about the existence of a guerrilla movement just before the elections.” This was all occurring in June of last year, two months before the presidential vote.

At a time when everyone in Mexico is leaking everything to everybody, it is difficult to gauge whether the Guerrero/Harp/guerrilla scenario is accurate; yet the fact that two of the Mexican publications most widely known for their integrity are reporting largely the same story at the same moment lends it credence.

If true, the affair is one more cover-up in what seems to be an endless string of audaciously irresponsible attempts by authorities in Mexico--and by their friends in the United States--to deceive the public about the true state of affairs in Mexico. We know that in 1993, the Salinas administration covered up the existence of the Chiapas-based Zapatista guerrillas to avoid jeopardizing passage of NAFTA in the U.S. Congress. Thanks to Sen. Alfonse D’Amato’s hearings in the Senate Banking Committee, we also know that throughout 1994, the Clinton Administration was saying one thing in public about Mexico and something entirely different in private, essentially covering up its awareness of the gravity of Mexico’s economic situation. Now it turns out that the kidnaping of the owner of the nation’s largest bank was political--that it involved guerrilla movements and the Mexican government knew this but did nothing about it, in ways that resemble its inaction on so many other fronts during that fateful year.

Too many people and institutions on both sides of the border had too great a stake in the success of the Salinas experiment in Mexico. They all wanted it to work whatever the cost or consequences and regardless of the adversity involved. When this sort of dynamic is unleashed, things can go wrong, and usually do. They did, to a far greater extent than anyone suspected and perhaps to a far greater extent than we know, even today.