Tape Pins Secret Fortune on Former President Salinas

Mexico’s biggest corruption scandal has engulfed former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari for the first time, with the reported allegation that he is the true owner of a secret fortune siphoned in part from government accounts.

The charge was made by a man, reportedly Salinas’ older brother, Raul Salinas de Gortari, in a taped telephone conversation broadcast Tuesday night by a Mexican television station.

The older Salinas has been a symbol of flagrant corruption since 1995, when authorities discovered more than $100 million stashed in his European bank accounts. Carlos Salinas, who ruled from 1988 to 1994, has said repeatedly that he knew nothing of the wealth stockpiled by his brother while the older Salinas was working as a midlevel civil servant.

The stunning twist in the country’s long and sometimes violent political soap opera dominated Mexican front pages and news shows Wednesday. Carlos Salinas charged that the taped conversation was a dirty trick by the government in retaliation for his new book assailing President Ernesto Zedillo. Analysts agreed that the tape appeared to be part of an unprecedented public war within the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

Nonetheless, they said, the tape could be the nail in the coffin for the reputation of Salinas, once hailed as a bold economic reformer and key U.S. ally.

“It is the end for him. This goes to the key word in this modern world of communications--’credibility,’ ” said Sergio Aguayo, a political scientist with Colegio de Mexico. “He just lost whatever credibility he had left.”

Opposition politicians demanded Wednesday that authorities investigate the former president, who has been planning to return soon to Mexico after five years of self-imposed exile. Aides to Vicente Fox, the first opposition politician to win the presidency in more than seven decades of PRI rule, pledged to probe the matter after he takes office Dec. 1.

Meanwhile, the Mexican attorney general’s office said it was investigating the authenticity of the tape, since it appeared related to cases against the former president’s brother. Raul Salinas is on trial for illegal enrichment and is serving a 27-year sentence after a 1999 murder conviction.

Mexicans were outraged to learn in 1995 of Raul Salinas’ $114-million fortune hidden in Europe. The discovery, coming just as Mexico was sliding into its deepest economic crisis of modern times, battered the reputation of Carlos Salinas.

Raul Salinas has maintained that the money was an investment fund he organized with several businesspeople. But for years, Mexicans have speculated that the money came from kickbacks.

Swiss authorities confiscated the fortune in 1998, charging that it came from drug traffickers helped by Raul Salinas. The Swiss Supreme Court annulled that decision last year on technical grounds, and the case is now working its way through that country’s court system.

Carlos Salinas has always maintained that he didn’t know about his brother’s fortune. In an interview Saturday during a book-promotion tour in Mexico, the former president roundly condemned his brother.

The bombshell came three nights later. In what appeared to be a secretly recorded conversation, a man identified by the television network as Raul Salinas complains to a woman identified as Salinas’ sister, Adriana, about the interview with the former president.

“I think it’s very stupid on his part to say that he’s going to demand a precise clarification [of the funds], and I’m going to give it to him, Adriana,” the man identified as Raul says, according to the tape played by Mexico’s dominant television network, Televisa.

Threatening to go public with the information, he says: “I’m going to clarify everything--where the money came from, who was the intermediary, what it was for, where it came from and where it went. . . . I’m going to say what funds came from the public treasury, so that they’re returned.”

The woman identified as Adriana begins to argue with the man. But, increasingly furious, he declares:

“Carlos shows gigantic cowardice. . . . The money is his. And then he says he doesn’t know anything about it.”

On Wednesday, Carlos Salinas said the tape appeared to be fabricated. But then he seemed to contradict himself.

“This shows nothing more than the constant harassment of my family, whose conversations are secretly recorded,” the former president told reporters in Spain in comments televised in Mexico.

He added that it was “suspicious” that the taped conversation was provided to the media just after he had visited Mexico to present his 1,393-page book, which accuses Zedillo of responsibility for the devaluation of the peso in December 1994 and the ensuing economic crisis.

A Zedillo spokesman, David Najera, declined to comment on charges that the government had provided the tape to Televisa. A spokesman for the television network, Leonardo Kourchenko, said: “The tape is completely authentic and was given by a source. I can’t go any further.”

Mexicans have been mesmerized by the escalating feud between Salinas and his handpicked successor. The fight began when Zedillo’s government jailed Raul Salinas in 1995 in the killing of his former brother-in-law, Francisco Ruiz Massieu, a senior PRI figure. The case broke a tradition of impunity for former presidents and their families.