Zedillo Vows to Give Congress Oversight Power

President Ernesto Zedillo took a concrete step Friday toward ceding the authoritarian power and secrecy of the Mexican presidency, announcing that he is opening his administration to outside scrutiny for the first time in this nation’s history.

In a state of the nation address delivered after nine nightmarish months in office, Zedillo told Congress that he will submit legislation creating an autonomous congressional committee of auditors with sweeping judicial powers that supersede those of the president.

The law, he said, would empower Congress to investigate and prosecute official corruption and oversee federal spending at all levels of government.

In a nation that has been ruled by a single party for 66 years, Zedillo’s commitment to congressional oversight met with praise from Mexico’s political opposition, independent analysts and diplomats. It was the highlight of an 82-minute speech packed with his trademark themes of federalism, democracy and continuing economic austerity.

Zedillo’s address, in what analysts said was a clear reflection of his cold personal style, was the shortest in the six decades that the presidential informe --an annual address encrusted with pomp, ceremony and endless discourse--has been delivered.

By comparison, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s 1994 speech--his final one--lasted four hours and 40 minutes. In 1934, Abelardo Rodriguez rambled on for almost eight hours.

Amid Mexico’s worst recession in 15 years, Zedillo also broke the tradition of parading through this capital’s streets and hosting a hand-kissing ceremony for bureaucrats and elected officials in the National Palace after his remarks.

As most analysts expected, the president devoted most of his comments to the nation’s moribund economy. His administration has been blamed for a bungled currency devaluation in December that triggered a financial crisis and impoverished most Mexicans overnight.

Friday, Zedillo promised a skeptical and suffering people that economic recovery would begin to show in their lives next year.

He spent almost half his address defending what he said were the correct but bitter remedies that his government has imposed in an emergency plan that sent taxes, unemployment, inflation and interest rates soaring to record levels.

Zedillo insisted that the austerity measures prevented “a complete breakdown of the national economy” that would have cost “millions of jobs.”

He acknowledged that unemployment has doubled since he took office Dec. 1. But he stressed that the Mexican peso and the nation’s financial markets have finally stabilized--largely through spending nearly half of a United States-led $50-billion credit bailout to pay off bonds held by wealthy and institutional investors.

“The costs of the crisis have been very great and very painful, but they would have been much worse if the economic adjustment plan had not been adopted,” he said.

*

A continuing commitment to the austerity measures is among the Clinton Administration’s conditions in lending Mexico $20 billion in its credit package. But Zedillo said his government will spend several billion pesos on education, health and temporary job-creation programs in an effort to ease the Mexican people’s pain in the months ahead.

After a technocratic and “sober”--in the words of opposition leader Carlos Castillo Peraza--accounting of the national economy, Zedillo, a 43-year-old Yale-educated economist, turned to crime and the prevailing sense of national insecurity here.

Zedillo stressed his commitment to establishing “a new rule of law” and to rooting out the brutal, corrupt police practices that plague Mexico. He also vowed to fight organized crime, especially the powerful drug cartels that have made Mexico the key route for most of the cocaine sold in America.

“Drug trafficking has become the most serious threat to national security,” Zedillo declared, adding that he will submit a new organized crime bill to Congress in its new session, which formally opened with the president’s address.

Clearly the most dramatic element of the address, though, was Zedillo’s proposal to open his government, Cabinet and every federal department to congressional scrutiny, analysts said. Any such oversight body most likely would be controlled by the opposition National Action Party. The move was what one analyst described as a “revolutionary” concession by a ruling party president.

“In his own way, Zedillo is trying to write the ‘Federalist Papers’ of Mexico,” M. Delal Baer--a United States-based Latin American expert at Friday’s address--said, referring to the classic American work on constitutional government. “He’s a president truly committed to strengthening the checks and balances, the separation of powers.”

But Baer and others wondered whether Zedillo’s latest reform proposal--like many other impressive, idealistic suggestions he has offered--can be brought to fruition. “The speech reads beautifully,” she said. “The question is, how do you implement it into reality?”

Riordan Roett, director of the Latin American Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, called the speech “a modest but moderate extension of the themes” of Zedillo’s inaugural address. “How he will do it all remains unclear.”

As an example of the clashes between the president’s vision and reality, Roett singled out for criticism the Zedillo government’s inability to offer acceptable explanations of last year’s two major political assassinations, as well as the 1993 murder of Guadalajara’s Roman Catholic cardinal.

In his speech Friday, the president--who has vowed that the controversy-shrouded crimes would be resolved to the satisfaction of the increasingly skeptical Mexican public--never mentioned the killings of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party’s presidential candidate and its secretary general.