Ex-President Salinas Alleges Plot to Make Him ‘Villain’ : Mexico: Politician in hiding as evidence against brother mounts. He claims predecessor is trying to smear him.

Nine months after he quietly slipped out of the nation he had ruled with near-absolute power for six years, former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari sprang back to life just before midnight Sunday on fax machines throughout the Mexican capital.

The geographical source of the former president’s disembodied voice was unclear. Salinas disappeared from public view after he landed in New York following his elder brother’s arrest Feb. 28 in Mexico on murder charges. In the months that followed, the former president was verbally abused, informally accused and almost universally reviled from the floor of the Mexican Congress to the front pages of almost every Mexican newspaper. And there have been rumored Salinas sightings from Canada to Cuba.

A week ago, there was a five-paragraph fax: Salinas stated that he knew nothing about the tens of millions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts that investigators said were linked to his brother.

The message in Salinas’ rambling eight-page statement Sunday night was clearer than his whereabouts, and it touched off a political firestorm Monday. In the statement, faxed with no return address to news organizations in Mexico City, Salinas said he has become Mexico’s “favorite villain” through a conspiracy led by another former president and an assortment of enemies ranging from opposition politicians to international drug traffickers.

Salinas went so far as to suggest that the same conspiracy was at work in last year’s murder of ruling-party presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, which he called “a tremendous blow against me, personally and politically.”

Salinas denied that he is in exile; he said he is willing to come out of hiding to defend himself and his six-year presidential record against all recent allegations, moral and legal. He has yet to do so, he said, “in order to prevent my words or my presence from being used as a pretext to affect [Mexico’s] internal situation.”

In the Sunday night pronouncement, the former president, whom most Mexicans blame for the nation’s deep economic crisis, took the offensive for the first time since leaving office a year ago. Overnight, he heightened the country’s political drama as he abandoned the last vestiges of Mexico’s decades-old tradition that former presidents keep quiet and resolve squabbles in private.

Salinas offered no public defense in the fax for his brother in the face of the Mexican government’s recent disclosures linking Raul Salinas de Gortari to the tens of millions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts. The elder Salinas, in jail on charges of masterminding the murder last year of a top official of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, is under investigation for possible corruption and drug-money laundering during the years he served in government.

“I had no knowledge of those activities,” Salinas had said earlier of the Swiss accounts. But the former president, who staged a brief hunger strike just before his departure from Mexico, in part to proclaim his brother’s innocence of the murder charge, had no such message on Sunday.

“It is essential to insist once again that, for me, the deceit of my brother Raul is unacceptable,” he wrote.

In the former president’s message, he was clearly trying to transform himself from villain to victim. He alleged that the wave of public attacks against him following the allegations against Raul Salinas are part of “a tremendous power struggle” led by former Mexican President Luis Echeverria, who served from 1970 to 1976.

Echeverria was a conservative PRI hard-liner who opposed Salinas’ free-market economic reforms. He has been living in mostly silent, wealthy retirement in Mexico City--until Monday, when he emerged to declare in a brief statement that Salinas’ allegations were false.

“There is nothing further from reality than what Carlos Salinas opines,” Echeverria said. “I do not coordinate anyone, not even my many children and grandchildren.”

Several other politicians named by the former president as co-conspirators against him also denied Salinas’ theory. They and independent analysts called it a desperate attempt by the image-conscious Salinas--who left office on Nov. 30, 1994, with the highest popularity ratings of any president in modern Mexican history--to clear his name with the Mexican public.

Porfirio Munoz Ledo, a former ruling party politician who served in Echeverria’s Cabinet but broke ranks to head the opposition Democratic Revolutionary Party, called the assertions “the last kicks of a drowning politician, which reveal desperation and an irrepressible conspiratorial mentality.” He said Salinas’ charge that he was part of a conspiracy is absurd.

Neither President Ernesto Zedillo nor his advisors commented directly on Salinas’ accusations. But the president, who was handpicked by Salinas after Colosio’s death, indirectly rejected his predecessor’s claims that politics is involved in his government’s investigations into the Salinas family and administration.

“We are determined that our judicial system be ruled by laws and not by politics,” Zedillo said in a speech Monday, “and that it provides impartial justice for all, without exceptions and without impunity.”

Zedillo has vowed several times since taking office to resolve the Colosio killing, which most Mexicans believe was the result of a high-level ruling-party conspiracy. Salinas fueled those beliefs in his Sunday message.

Without providing concrete evidence, Salinas implied that Echeverria played a role in the assassination. Echeverria recently spoke out against the liberal economic policies shared by Salinas and Colosio, as well as by Zedillo. Salinas added that Echeverria privately came to him to push his own choice of candidate soon after Colosio was gunned down in Tijuana in March 1994.

Responding to suggestions in numerous Mexican publications that Salinas too may have played a role in the killing, Salinas said, “My relationship with Luis Donaldo Colosio during the days and weeks before the assassination were always of mutual confidence, affection and loyalty, as it was during our 15-year relationship.”

Salinas also flatly denied that he was the cause of the current economic crisis, which has plunged Mexico into one of its worst recessions in modern history.

“Upon handing over the presidency, I left problems, yes. But I did not leave a crisis as an inheritance,” he said.

What he did leave behind, the former president stressed, is enemies.

“The political offensive against me by Luis Echeverria cannot be considered a coincidence,” he said. “I understand that his project for the country was that of a closed economy without political competition, which led to strong antagonism between the diverse social classes.

“But they are not the only opposition I face. There were those who were affected by the reforms I carried out, and, in particular the drug traffickers, who were decidedly persecuted during my government.” In fact, U.S. and Mexican law-enforcement officials now say the drug mafias actually flourished during Salinas’ administration.