Mexicans Go to Court to Learn Zedillo’s Salary

For years it was one of this nation’s best-kept secrets: How much did the president earn?

While supposedly receiving civil-servant paychecks, past Mexican leaders built sumptuous mansions and piled up fortunes.

Now, in a sign of growing anger over official abuse, a citizens group has taken the extraordinary step of going to court to find out President Ernesto Zedillo’s pay.

The demands by the group, Alianza Civica (Civic Alliance), have provoked a very public tug of war with the government over the president’s salary and the other perks of Mexican office.

“Here in Mexico, there are many things that people don’t ask the president. He’s all-powerful,” said Sergio Aguayo, a human rights activist who heads the alliance. With the group’s legal action, “what we wanted to say was that the president is a citizen, equal to us.”

The controversy reflects the vast change sweeping Mexico as its traditional one-party system comes under increasing challenge from citizens groups and the press. And it occurs as an outraged public is receiving, for the first time, a vivid accounting of how relatives of Zedillo’s predecessor, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, apparently amassed a fortune during his rule.

“This is the oldest authoritarian system in the world,” said Lorenzo Meyer, a prominent historian. “One of its characteristics was that no one challenged the president. No one dared to ask where his money came from.”

The quest to learn Zedillo’s salary began in March 1995. The alliance, a nonpartisan group that promotes democracy and fair elections, wrote to the president asking about his salary and office budget. A second letter followed a month later. Still, no response.

Finally, in March of this year, the alliance went to court. Last month, the group announced that a judge had finally ruled it should receive the information.

But it had an even more explosive announcement. Based on its study of official documents and press reports, the group concluded that Zedillo’s salary had jumped more than 300% since he took office in December 1994. “The increases . . . during an era of austerity and poverty [in Mexico] are offensive,” the group said.

The president’s office was quick to respond. Zedillo’s salary was actually less than Salinas’, it said in a statement. The current president earned only about 59,000 pesos after taxes--about $8,000 a month--it said.

But in a second communique, it offered a reason for the group’s error. The alliance, it noted, had relied on official budget figures to learn Salinas’ salary in 1994, at the end of his six-year term. They showed him earning about 14,000 pesos a month after taxes--$4,000 at the exchange rate of the time.

With bonuses, however, Salinas had actually earned a stunning $35,000 a month.

He was, in other words, better paid than President Clinton. (The U.S. president, by law, receives $200,000 annually, plus a nontaxable sum not to exceed $100,000 for travel expenses and a taxable $50,000 for other expenses.)

“This was the first time we knew that Salinas earned $35,000 a month,” Aguayo said. “We don’t doubt the need for the president to earn a high salary. What we’re fighting for is information.”

Information about presidential finances has always been in short supply in Mexico. The press, which received juicy subsidies and advertising revenues from the government, was long too timid to ask. And it was widely assumed that the president’s salary was symbolic; his real money came from corruption.

“Faced with the enormous power of the president, it was impossible to do anything,” historian Meyer said. “You could only suspect. You saw the lifestyles they had. You could see, physically, the suitcases of cash their assistants carried” on presidential trips, to be doled out to journalists, business people and other presidential friends, he said.

But the birth of a more independent, aggressive press has changed Mexican politics. Meanwhile, increasingly informed, demanding citizens have formed hundreds of civic groups. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which has ruled for 67 years, is coming under increasing criticism.

Emboldened, the alliance is now pushing the president to make public his income-tax statements--something Zedillo has so far declined to do. And, poring over government budget figures, the group has demanded an explanation of the $90 million in secret funds controlled by the president, as well as the $2.5 billion doled out in bonuses to government employees.

The president’s office insists the alliance is going after the wrong target. When Zedillo took office, he voluntarily gave up all extra bonuses and receives only the salary listed in the official budget, presidential spokesman Antonio Ocaranza said.

How can the public be sure? “This is what the president of the republic says,” Ocaranza responded sternly.

In fact, Zedillo is famed for his austere lifestyle. In his previous job, as education minister, he claimed to own only half a dozen suits. And Zedillo has taken steps to reduce Mexico’s imperial presidency, a vastly powerful office that has reflected the importance of the supreme ruler since Aztec days.

But citizens are growing increasingly angry about government corruption. That outrage was fanned again last month when a disgraced former official in Salinas’ government revealed that senior officials routinely received million-dollar bonuses they never declared.

“The government gives away money, and as long as you behave yourself, nothing happens,” Mario Ruiz Massieu, the former deputy attorney general, said in a television interview. Ruiz Massieu has fled to the United States and is wanted in Mexico on charges of illicit enrichment.

But the biggest drama unfolding in Mexico is the story of how Salinas’ brother, Raul, accumulated at least $100 million during his brother’s term. A public official himself, Raul Salinas never earned more than $190,000 a year. He is now in jail, charged with illegal enrichment and ordering the murder of a politician--the brother of Ruiz Massieu.

Increasingly, politicians, business people and others are demanding that Carlos Salinas be questioned about whether he covered up his brother’s activities. No former president has ever been investigated for corruption.

In a sign of a new age in Mexico, Zedillo himself has proposed the creation of a congressional watchdog body to check on official expenditures. But whether the government is ready for U.S.-style press scrutiny of officials’ salaries isn’t clear.

Last month, as the controversy over Zedillo’s salary broke, reporters asked the salaries of three Cabinet secretaries giving a news conference. The independent daily Reforma reported that Foreign Relations Secretary Jose Angel Gurria Trevino looked startled, “as if he had sucked on a bitter lemon.”