An Attorney General Is Out, a Mexican Mini-Crisis Is In

It’s no surprise that Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo finally ran out of patience and fired the attorney general he had unconditionally supported for two years. There is a long list of cases that Antonio Lozano Gracia and his foremost prosecutor, Pablo Chapa Bezanilla, left unsolved due to sloppy procedures or incompetence.

However, the manner, the timing, the background and the possible consequences of the firing have stirred a political mini-crisis. The two main opposition parties and the media are demanding an explanation from Los Pinos, the presidential office. The dry communique announcing the removal of Lozano, the first opposition party Cabinet minister in Mexico’s modern history, is not enough.

Privately, the president’s men denounced Lozano’s prosecutorial failures, underscoring the lack of progress in the investigation of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio’s assassination three years ago. The biggest flop, however, was the abysmal probe of the 1994 assassination of Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, secretary-general of the ruling Party of the Institutionalized Revolution. Having publicly accused Raul Salinas de Gortari, brother of ex-President Carlos Salinas, of masterminding the killing, prosecutor Chapa turned to psychics and anonymous informants to produce what he claimed was the evidence, a body unearthed on Raul Salinas’ property. Now it appears that the body bore marks of an earlier autopsy.

Lozano clearly was not up to the task of being attorney general. But that does not excuse the way President Zedillo’s office handled Monday’s announcement. It was rude and unexpected in the culture of Mexican politics and left no room for a negotiated exit that might have avoided roiling the scene even further. The fact that Lozano belongs to the National Action Party, which polls say is favored to win the governorship of Mexico City in 1997, fuels suspicions among many that politics was the true motivating force behind the firing.

The new attorney general, Jorge Madrazo Cuellar, is an honest and competent lawyer whose record as head of National Human Rights Commission shows courage and determination to expose politically delicate cases of rights violations. That he lacks experience as a prosecutor may prove to be an asset given the rampant corruption in such posts. Mexicans hope that Madrazo’s investigations of difficult cases will be more credible. Lozano couldn’t do the job. Madrazo may.