Mexico’s New Congress Unearths Many Skeletons

Ramon Corral is chasing 600 ghosts. The freshman lawmaker launched a probe of Mexico’s congressional spending and came up with a stunning find: hundreds of legislative employees who were on the payroll until recently but had no apparent function.

Were they cronies of former lawmakers who got make-work jobs? Were they what Mexicans call “aviators”--people who glide in only to pick up their paychecks, then take off?

“We want to know what they were doing. Where are they?” the opposition deputy asked.

With the start of a new, more democratic era in Mexico, the skeletons are coming out of the closet. And nowhere is that truer than in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress, where the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, recently lost its majority for the first time in seven decades.

New deputies are finding an institution run amok. Congressional cars were being driven around town by long-retired deputies. The press office had funneled $40,000 a month to nonexistent companies. And, in the most stunning scandal, female congressional pages are charging that they were routinely offered as “sex objects” to deputies.

“Before, there was only one authority that governed: the ruling party,” said Alma Vucovich, an opposition deputy. “Now, with an independent chamber, all the problems of the old order are emerging.”

Until recently, Mexico’s Congress was largely ornamental.

The PRI-dominated legislature rubber-stamped bills sent by the all-powerful president, also a PRI member. PRI leaders in Congress doled out money to deputies, with little oversight. In a system that used corruption to ensure political stability and support, there was something for almost everyone.

“ ‘What costs money is cheap’--that was the saying. It’s cheaper than resolving things through bloodshed,” said Francisco Arroyo, a PRI deputy, referring to Mexico’s history of violent clashes between political groups.

But the opposition is now trying to create a Congress with rules. The first step is unearthing how past legislatures spent money.

That’s where Corral comes in.

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A gray-haired member of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, he is the first opposition member to head the Administration Committee, which oversees spending in the lower house.

Finding little documentation, he has become the Sherlock Holmes of Congress. Consider his attempt to find out how many cars Congress owned.

Corral received an official list of 209 automobiles. Then he learned that Mexico City’s motor vehicles department had 335 registered. Either way, many were missing.

Corral discovered that lawmakers who had left office in 1991--and whose tiny, pro-government parties were no longer even represented in Congress--were still driving their official cars.

“For six years they’ve been outside the chamber,” he said, fuming.

The deputies have agreed to return the vehicles, he said.

Then there is the problem of the phantom employees.

The last Congress had 1,582 employees on temporary contracts, which expired just before the new legislature opened in September, Corral said. Congress rehired about 900 of them, who were needed in deputies’ offices, the library and so on.

Corral has not been able to figure out what the other 600 employees did.

“We don’t know if they were ‘aviators’ or friends of people in Congress, but they received salaries,” he said.

Some of the greatest abuses appear to have taken place in the congressional press office.

According to an investigation by incoming officials, the press office paid about $44,000 a month to phantom businesses. In turn, tiny newspapers with almost no circulation received thousands of dollars’ worth of ads from these companies each month.

The new press director, Leonardo Ramirez, declined a request for an interview. But Arroyo, the PRI deputy, said that some small newspapers were routinely paid off when they threatened to print nasty stories about lawmakers.

The most shocking allegations of impunity surround the case of the congressional pages.

A corps of pretty young women clad in matching miniskirts, they have been an institution in Congress, ferrying coffee, papers and messages to the mostly male deputies.

A month ago, 12 former pages complained to Congress’ new Equality and Gender Commission that their director had offered them as “sex objects” to congressmen and staff. One former page described her ordeal to the Mexican daily Cronica, on condition of anonymity. One weekend in 1993, she was told a congressman needed secretarial help because he was writing a book, she said.

“I went to see him and I asked, ‘Where shall we begin?’

“He answered, ‘How about with a massage?’ ”

When the woman refused, the deputy complained that he had paid her director, Rebeca Montes de Oca, about $600 to “send a professional girl to spend the weekend,” the woman recalled.

The pages, who have not been identified, complained that, if they declined to have sex with the congressmen, Montes de Oca would harass them, forcing them to start work at dawn, stay late and skip lunch.

Montes de Oca has denied the pages’ accusations. But the gender commission has requested a formal investigation and demanded her suspension.

“We realized that this problem had been brought up before [in Congress], but no one ever attacked it,” said Vucovich, a gender commission member from the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD.

Arroyo, the PRI deputy who also belongs to Corral’s Administration Commission, admits that there had been financial abuses in the past.

But the opposition didn’t complain until now, he said.

“All the political parties got theirs,” closing their eyes to irregularities in order to receive money themselves, he said.

The current investigation, he said, is aimed at discrediting the PRI and helping the opposition at the polls.

But he agreed with Corral that the cavalier handling of congressional money has left a grim legacy. While some well-connected lawmakers enjoyed dozens of aides, cars and fancy lunches, many were left without the basics.

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New deputies, entering a Congress that finally has real power, have been dismayed at their lack of computers, faxes and office space.

Corral said he hopes that with the money he saves, the lower house will finally address such shortages. One of his priorities is introducing electronic voting in the lower house. Currently, each vote by the legislators can take more than an hour, he said.

Although his investigation is not concluded, the five political parties have already agreed to rein in congressional expenditures. They have limited the size of committee staffs and cut Christmas bonuses and plane tickets for deputies.

Even after the probe concludes, Corral pledges, he’ll continue sleuthing through congressional ledgers.

He plans to produce public reports three times a year on how Congress spends its money. It is part of a new world of checks and balances, he said.

“If we, as deputies, have the obligation to oversee the correct use of resources by the executive branch, the first thing we have to do is be clear and transparent about our own resources,” he said.