Case Against Salinas’ Brother Disintegrating

The jailed brother of disgraced former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari was one step closer to freedom after prosecutors revealed their failure to back up charges of illegal enrichment, his lawyer said Friday.

Raul Salinas de Gortari, the older brother and confidant of Carlos Salinas, was arrested in 1995 on charges of masterminding a political murder, causing a major scandal that eventually forced the former president into self-imposed exile.

Carlos Salinas, who was president from 1988 until 1994 and was hailed as one of Mexico’s greatest leaders until a guerrilla uprising, political assassinations and an economic crisis ruined his last year in office, now lives in Ireland.

After arresting Raul Salinas in connection with the murder, prosecutors hit him with a host of other charges, including fraud and money laundering, upon discovering he had stashed tens of millions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts.

But after three years, none of those charges have been proved in court, leaving Salinas and his lawyers increasingly hopeful that he could be freed by the end of the year. He is in a maximum-security prison near Mexico City.

“He is optimistic; he feels that he should win the homicide case,” said defense lawyer Raul Cardenas, who represents Salinas on the illegal enrichment charges. “Once the homicide case is favorably resolved, all that will be left will be the illegal enrichment case.”

That case was severely undermined, Cardenas said, when a deputy attorney general told reporters Thursday that prosecutors so far had no case to present against Salinas.

The office of Mexico’s attorney general is investigating whether Salinas profited illegally during his tenure at a government food subsidy agency called Conasupo.

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Deputy Attorney General Everardo Moreno told reporters that the probe “has not shown any responsibility” on Salinas’ part, but Moreno later emphasized on a radio program that the case was still open.

Separate from that, a special prosecutor continues to investigate Salinas for illegal enrichment and murder.

Prosecutors at first claimed to have mountains of evidence that Salinas ordered the 1994 slaying of Francisco Ruiz Massieu, then the second-ranking official in the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.

So far the case seems to be built around the confessions of the gunman, who after being caught implicated a close associate of Salinas as the one who hired him to kill Ruiz Massieu.

But that person, former congressman Manuel Munoz Rocha, has been missing since shortly after the murder.

Moreover, the government has suffered a series of setbacks in the illegal enrichment case.

Both Swiss authorities and the Mexican Supreme Court have ruled that the Mexican government must prove that Salinas’ millions were illegally obtained.

Prosecutors had been trying to force Salinas to provide proof that he piled up his fortune legally.

“Individuals don’t have to prove they are innocent,” Cardenas said.

“That would be a shifting of the burden of proof.”