Officials’ Alleged Bonuses Anger Mexicans

Former Deputy Atty. Gen. Mario Ruiz Massieu said he wasn’t the least bit surprised a month before Christmas in 1994 when then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari handed him the equivalent of $150,000 in cash.

It was his bonus, Ruiz Massieu recalled from the witness stand in U.S. federal court last year.

And it was smaller, he testified later, than those received by some more senior officials, who got about $1 million each.

“The [real] salary is very, very different from the official salary. The official salary that I have seen in several documents is a salary that does not exist,” Ruiz Massieu testified in Newark, N.J., where he was fighting extradition to Mexico.

The bonuses make all the difference, he said.

Although Ruiz Massieu is charged in Mexico with illegal enrichment and is under investigation for allegedly extorting millions of dollars while working as Mexico’s No. 2 law enforcement official, the huge bonuses that he says he and other top government officials received were--and remain--not only legal but expected by senior bureaucrats.

But as Christmas approaches again in cash-strapped, crisis-ridden Mexico, the officials’ Christmas bonuses are at the center of a seething controversy that reportedly involves vast sums of public money.

At a time when President Ernesto Zedillo is promising a more open and democratic government, critics say the bonuses remain among the government’s most closely held secrets and are paid out of funds that are not subject to public scrutiny.

Ruiz Massieu testified--and many Mexicans say they believe--that the bonuses total millions of dollars each year.

As the majority of Mexicans still suffer from the country’s worst economic crisis in modern times, critics charge that the bonuses are a source of sanctioned corruption that has no place in a democracy.

“This is [given] to reward loyalties. . . . What Salinas paid Mario Ruiz Massieu was for his complicity,” asserted Sergio Aguayo, whose Civic Alliance citizens group is now leading a legal effort to make public the amounts of the bonuses, which are paid not only at Christmas but sometimes quarterly or even monthly.

“A transparent system of salaries is a requisite for a democratic country,” he said.

The prime focus of the bonus debate this Christmas season is not at the federal level.

The main target of Aguayo’s group and other civic activists is Mexico City’s mayor, Oscar Espinosa Villarreal, a presidential appointee who will continue to govern one of the world’s most populous cities until the capital’s first mayoral election is held in July.

In response to public clamor, the mayor’s office took the rare step of releasing figures that show Espinosa’s salary at about $6,300 a month and his Christmas bonus at $8,333.

Civic Alliance says Espinosa’s monthly salary is about $6,600. And the group estimates, based on city documents obtained last year by the opposition Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, that his total 1995 bonus was between $80,000 and $120,000.

It is, the alliance asserts, among the largest of about 350 such bonuses paid to high-ranking city officials, who it says together will receive a total of $4 million this year before Christmas Day.

City officials consistently have declined to comment on the bonuses. But the city’s citizens groups are reacting loudly in the streets.

Last week, 200 protesters, led by a costumed, self-styled crusader known as Super Barrio, pulled a horse cart bearing a giant sack stuffed with paper and labeled “the mayor’s aguinaldo [Christmas bonus]” through Mexico City’s downtown plaza to demonstrate public outrage.

The group, Super Barrio explained, “could not stand idle with its arms crossed in the face of the mayor’s need for his aguinaldo, so we came to give our small contribution.”

But in a nation where the minimum wage still averages about $3 a day and nearly a quarter of the 93 million people live in poverty, the bonus controversy also extends to the federal level, where officials say Zedillo maintains a discretionary fund of $86.6 million for contingencies, which they suspect include Cabinet-level bonuses.

Those officials asserted, however, that contingency expenditures are subject to congressional review.

Alejandro Valenzuela, a senior Treasury Department official, said Zedillo has reformed the bonus system since taking office two years ago.

“Before this administration, [the bonus] was on the side. You never paid taxes [on it],” Valenzuela said. In addition to taxing the bonuses, he added, the government now insists that many federal departments pay them not from a discretionary fund but from money saved out of each department’s budget throughout the year.

“The way the government was before,” he said, “it was a different country.”

But the critics say the core of their complaint is the secrecy surrounding the bonuses, and they have vowed to continue their protests until the payments are either eliminated or made public.

“The problem with the bonuses is they are a compensation that is completely discretionary,” said Helena Hofbauer, a Civic Alliance official who has been investigating the bonus system. “There are no laws that govern what compensation will be given for what job, or what is the limit.

“We’re not at all against [senior officials] being paid well. . . . But it shouldn’t be discretionary. It should be subject to very clear laws. And we, as citizens, have a right to know the amount of their [real] salary, since it comes from public funds.”

The alliance, she said, plans to petition the capital’s City Council and other legislative bodies to force disclosure of the bonuses.

Meanwhile, fueled by heightened public interest, the national media have resorted to quoting unidentified or unofficial sources to report such year-end bonuses as $235,000 in all for Zedillo’s Cabinet and $140,000 for the presiding judge of Mexico’s Supreme Court.

In the absence of official figures, the best information to date has come in testimony from Ruiz Massieu.

The former deputy attorney general, who won the extradition case that the Mexican government filed against him last year, is under house arrest in New Jersey, awaiting the outcome of a lawsuit he filed to block U.S. efforts to deport him.

It was at one of his many hearings in Newark last year that Ruiz Massieu testified about the $150,000 bonus he received from Salinas in 1994.

In a separate deposition filed in Houston federal court, where he is fighting U.S. Justice Department efforts to seize $9 million that investigators found in his Texas bank accounts, Ruiz Massieu said the bonuses ran into the tens of millions of dollars--an assertion that would bolster his argument that the $9 million came from legitimate sources.

For example, when Ruiz Massieu’s slain brother, Francisco Ruiz Massieu, headed Mexico’s National Housing Institute, he said, Salinas gave him $1 million a year in bonuses. And similar bonuses, he said, were awarded to all top appointed officials each year.

“It is really the way,” he said, “in which Mexico pays its officials.”