Ex-Mexico City Mayor Targeted

In a battle that highlights increasing demands here for accountability in politics, four city lawmakers filed a complaint Monday urging prosecutors to investigate possible irregularities during former Mexico City Mayor Rosario Robles’ recently completed term.

It was the latest twist in a battle that began in April when Robles brought a libel suit against the newspaper Reforma over a report suggesting that her administration had failed to provide receipts for about $600 million in expenses.

Reforma, Mexico’s most influential newspaper, responded to the lawsuit by unleashing an investigative team, which reported in a series of articles last month that Robles’ administration had overspent on publicity by millions of dollars. Robles in turn accused the newspaper of working for right-wing interests that want to discredit her leftist party’s management of this city of 9 million people.

On Monday, four opposition deputies in the city’s congress submitted a 14-page report to prosecutors detailing those and other allegations against the Robles government that they said merit judicial scrutiny.

Whoever wins, the fight reveals a new political landscape in Mexico where political, public and media demands for accountability are overtaking the impunity of the past.

“This is a new ingredient in Mexican political life,” said political scientist Jean Francois Prud’homme of the Colegio de Mexico. “More and more, democracy will have to be accompanied by checks and balances and accountability.”

Robles took over as interim mayor for the leftist Democratic Revolution Party in September 1999, when elected Mayor Cuauhtemoc Cardenas stepped down to run for the presidency. Cardenas ran third.

Robles, a university professor, turned out to be more popular in running the city than Cardenas was, building a loyal following until her term ended in December. She was held up as a future national leader for the moribund left.

In April, Reforma quoted a city auditor’s report as saying the city government had not provided receipts for about $600 million last year, representing about 10% of the city budget.

Robles filed a libel suit, prompting outcries from the media. The paper’s subsequent investigative reports included charges that she vastly overpaid the video company hired to film her daily activities.

In an event last week that was half news conference, half party rally, Robles said she was the victim of a campaign to discredit her and the political left. She said Cardenas had introduced unprecedented levels of transparency in public administration and that every contract signed by her team was strictly within the law.

Robles was out of the city Monday and unavailable for direct comment. But she told a television interviewer who asked her if she feared going to jail: “Please! Your question makes me laugh. . . . No legal proceeding has been initiated against me, neither criminal nor administrative. This is a pure paper war.”

She said last week that President Vicente Fox’s right-wing National Action Party, or PAN, “cannot forgive that we have governed with honor and dignity. Nor can they forgive that I am a woman.”

The legislators who brought Monday’s complaint, led by the PAN’s Walter Widmer Lopez, contend that Robles spent about $70 million on public relations when the budget allowed $28 million.

For instance, Widmer said in an interview, Robles’ aides had signed a contract for videotaping her activities for $5.5 million, without obtaining the required approval of a budget subcommittee until three weeks after the deal was signed.

“This is not a political matter, this is a question of legality,” Widmer said. “It is a very weak defense for her to say this is an attack against women. It shows her lack of arguments.”