Acapulco Mayoral Hopeful Calls Corruption Rife in City

Rogelio de la O Almazan started his political career as do most of Mexico’s local elite--as a low-level aide to one of the nation’s most powerful families.

As he toiled his way up the ranks in political jobs in Acapulco, De la O gained the trust of the Figueroas, a family dynasty that has governed this Pacific resort and the state of Guerrero for much of this century through Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

Three years ago, De la O’s loyalty was rewarded: Ruben Figueroa, then Guerrero’s governor-elect, backed him as the party’s mayoral candidate in this town of great potential riches where the PRI has never lost. Neither did De la O.

But today, in an election campaign to replace the 64-year-old Acapulco mayor, who is constitutionally prevented from seeking a second term, the opposition is casting him as an example of how the ruling party has kept itself in power for 67 years.

The story of De la O is also a case study in how Mexico is grappling with the problem of corruption--a problem that the PRI’s leadership in Mexico City acknowledges and plans to address head-on during a three-day landmark assembly for party reform that began Friday evening in Mexico City.

Acapulco’s mayoral campaign has become a public forum for debate on the corruption issue, provoked by opposition candidate Zeferino Torreblanca.

Armed with stacks of documents he says were leaked from City Hall, Torreblanca asserts--and the mayor denies--that De la O has presided over a corrupt system of patronage that has enriched the mayor and his family.

In a Sept. 13 letter to The Times, the mayor called the opposition’s charges “false and insidious” and said Torreblanca’s claims amount to a case of political sour grapes.

De la O defeated Torreblanca in the 1993 election, and the mayor suggested that Torreblanca, who is now a congressman, is trying to use the corruption issue for personal political gain.

“All of the attacks of Zeferino on me and my family are the product of his . . . political frustration,” the mayor told The Times in his letter, adding that Torreblanca “was born to lose.”

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A state criminal investigation of De la O’s activities as mayor, based on Torreblanca’s charges, is pending. His lawyers have filed a lengthy denial in their legal response to the charges; their brief says the case has “all the makings of a cheap television novel.”

A complaint that Torreblanca filed with state prosecutors against De la O last December was reviewed by the state legislature, which the PRI dominates, and dismissed earlier this year.

Torreblanca says the leaked documents offer a rare glimpse of how the PRI works and how it wins elections in a resort city where thousands of Americans vacation each year.

“This is a chronicle of a sick society,” declared Torreblanca as he turned over copies of the documents to The Times. “You have corruption everywhere, and at all levels.”

Curbing corruption nationwide is a main demand of a new, well-armed guerrilla group that targeted Mexican soldiers and police last month in lightning raids in central and southern Mexico, including one attack in Acapulco. And corruption, which President Ernesto Zedillo has vowed to combat, was a dominant concern of average Mexicans in a recent poll by The Times and Mexico City’s Reforma newspaper.

Since Zedillo took office in December 1994, federal prosecutors have filed corruption charges against more than half a dozen prominent Mexicans, including the elder brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. (Raul Salinas is also charged with murder.) Several former governors are under investigation for corruption as well.

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But corruption cases are still uncommon at the local level, where opposition leaders say a strict code of silence still prevails. In the case of Acapulco, Torreblanca said a city worker broke that code and leaked him the documents.

“For the United States, this corruption is an international issue,” Torreblanca said. “The more corruption we have, the more poverty we have. And the more poor people we have, the more illegal immigrants you are going to have in the United States. There is a definite link.”

Torreblanca’s Acapulco documents, which The Times examined, show the names of scores of local PRI officials, journalists and union leaders on the city payroll. Many of those people say they do no work for the city and receive no salary. But city funds are paid out in their names every month, according to the documents.

In a second complaint filed against the mayor in July, Torreblanca alleges that the payroll records amount to “fraudulent administration,” a charge the state prosecutor’s office confirmed is part of the pending criminal investigation.

National PRI leaders believe that the corruption allegations may well hurt the PRI in Acapulco’s Oct. 6 election, although the party’s polls show that the PRI is still far ahead.

The PRI’s national president, Santiago Onate, declined to discuss the allegations against De la O in an interview with The Times, saying they are part of a pending criminal matter.

But Onate stressed that corruption is a key issue the party must confront during this weekend’s national assembly, which is designed to reform the party and its authoritarian image after several key election defeats last year--and before several important contests in the year ahead.

“One of the problems that most disturbs the citizens of Mexico is that of corruption,” Onate said.

“We are convinced that we must give a firm answer to society--a new ethic--and reaffirm that the act of governance and the exercise of public power is not an avenue to enrichment,” Onate said on television Sunday night.

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The depth of popular concern about corruption, and its implications for the PRI, was clear during a recent debate featuring three of Acapulco’s four mayoral candidates. It was sponsored by the Acapulco Civic Assn., the city’s most influential group of educators, merchants, lawyers and politicians. Only the ruling party’s candidate, Juan Salgado Tenorio, refused to attend.

As the surf rolled onto empty beaches outside and as Mexican army trucks packed with combat troops rumbled toward nearby villages in search of the new rebel group, much of the debate in the Fiesta Americana Hotel’s Jewel Room focused on the causes and effects of corruption.

Even ruling party members in the room--angered by the absence of their candidate--joined in the criticism.

A mid-level official of De la O’s own party was among them.

“These charges of corruption are credible--our society views them as true,” said Andres Navarrete Ramos, who sits on the civic association’s board and is one of many local PRI stalwarts advocating party reform. “The new generation must improve the leadership. There have been errors. Our mayors are not perfect. . . . And there are many protests within the PRI.”

Acapulco attorney Gerardo de Rayo, an association member who said he stopped supporting the PRI two years ago, was harsher.

“Our group is very concerned about corruption,” he said during a break in the forum. “It’s a national crisis, a general psychosis. . . . For the PRI, it is a fatal illness on the national level, a cancer that is very advanced.”

During the debate, Torreblanca outlined many of his charges, focusing on the ghost workers issue.

He also attempted to show how corruption has affected Acapulco, a city where a coastal necklace of luxury high-rises contrasts sharply with scores of tin-roofed slums.

Just a few yards off the well-maintained coastal strip, streets are crumbling, sewers are above ground and traffic is undirected chaos.

Torreblanca, a 42-year-old millionaire from a wealthy family who is the candidate of the populist Democratic Revolutionary Party, asserted that there are 5,192 workers on the city payroll and that only about 1,800 are legitimate.

The rest, he said, are aviadores, or “fliers,” Mexican slang for the workers who many opposition critics say form the local backbone of the PRI and get out the vote.

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Martha Sanchez appears to be a case in point. Sanchez, who works in her family’s one-room grocery store, is the PRI’s equivalent of a ward heeler. For the last 12 years, the 55-year-old block president has attended to the needs of her Cumbres de Figueroa neighborhood--named for former Gov. Figueroa’s father, who prevented police from removing its original squatter settlers.

As a link to powerful PRI politicians, Sanchez has helped her poor neighborhood get drinking water, electricity and paved streets. And at election time, Sanchez gets out the vote.

“But I have never received any money” from the city or the PRI, she insisted. “I’m a PRI-ista out of conviction.”

Yet Sanchez’s name appears on the city’s payroll records along with the names of dozens of others who, Torreblanca’s investigators say, are active in the local PRI. At least half a dozen of them are on record as saying they never received a peso from City Hall.

Individually, the sums are not large. In Sanchez’s case, the records show that $140 has been paid out in her name every month since Feb. 16, 1994. But ghost payments, Torreblanca and other critics assert, add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars that have left city coffers virtually empty and that could have been used for civic improvement.

In his letter to The Times, De la O did not answer allegations about ghost workers or any other specific charges. As for the impact of the accusations on his image and that of Mexico’s most famous resort, the letter cited a recent survey by the Autonomous University of Guadalajara that showed “a high degree of popularity for me, personally, and for the image of Acapulco.”

Times special correspondent Joel Simon in Mexico City contributed to this report.