Possible Mole Unearthed in Fox’s Office

The Mexican government alleged Saturday that a mole had penetrated President Vicente Fox’s inner sanctum and fed information on Fox’s whereabouts and travel plans to an unnamed drug trafficking organization.

The disclosure comes as a drug war escalates in Mexico, spilling blood in the far corners of the country.

The suspect is Nahum Acosta, who has worked on the president’s travel staff since 2001 under Fox’s private secretary, Emilio Goicoechea Luna. He was arrested Thursday after leaving Los Pinos, the Mexican White House. Acosta’s alleged activities were discovered in the course of another investigation.

“We immediately saw that factors were pointing to a leak of information from the interior of the presidency, about the way in which the president moved around different parts of the country,” Atty. Gen. Rafael Macedo de la Concha told reporters Saturday in Queretaro.

Asked if the suspect’s intent was to physically harm Fox, Macedo answered: “The effort to obtain information, give it to these criminals, given the sensitivity of the information on where the president is and where he is going, where and how he is traveling, obviously it could fill many hypotheses.”

Mexico’s citizens were shaken last month by a revelation that seemed to underscore drug traffickers’ power: Criminals were in effective control of the La Palma maximum security federal prison, where some drug lords had been jailed.

Fox’s office recently acknowledged that the president’s personal security detail had been beefed up. As federal troops took over La Palma and other maximum security prisons in special sweeps last month, Fox said he was launching the “mother of all battles” against the nation’s narcotics trafficking cartels.

Alleged organized crime members have penetrated other Mexican agencies and police units. But this breach, if verified, is believed to be the first time that the president’s staff has been compromised, said Jorge Chabat, a Mexico City professor and organized crime expert.

“The questions are, who put this guy there, and what kind of information was he giving,” Chabat said, adding that the announcement is “surprising and worrisome.”

Jobs like Acosta’s typically are political appointments given to supporters and contributors, much like those in the U.S. White House.

While admitting that the suspect could have put the president’s life at risk, Macedo said that Fox’s security currently was guaranteed.

He added that several searches were underway centering in the state of Mexico, which surrounds the capital, to investigate the extent of the suspect’s contacts.

The government was mum on most details Saturday, declining to identify the criminal organization Acosta allegedly worked for or how long the leaks had been going on.

“There will be no slack given for anyone, and we will take this where we have to go,” Macedo said.

The president’s spokesmen did not return several phone calls Saturday, and Fox did not mention the possible security breach during his regular Saturday morning radio broadcast.

It was not the first time an official in a key office had been tied to criminal activity.

Former Deputy Atty. Gen. Mario Ruiz Massieu was indicted in the United States in 1999 for allegedly taking $9 million in bribes from drug traffickers while he worked in the administration of Carlos Salinas de Gortari from 1993 to 1994.

Several local delegates of the federal attorney general’s office have been implicated in drug trafficking over the last decade, and in 1996 more than 700 federal police officers were fired for alleged complicity with drug traffickers.