Mexico’s Salinas Is Back, Leaving Many to Wonder

Ex-presidents of Mexico are used to disappearing. Custom has it that they serve their single, six-year term of office and remain out of public view, letting other people rule the country.

That, however, is not the case with former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who in recent months has gradually reappeared before a public that largely vilifies him. Salinas, who left Mexico for six years during the 1990s, is back on the front pages and leading the nightly news, smiling faintly -- some would say wickedly -- as he attacks enemies old and new.

His reappearance may be partly an attempt to rehabilitate his image. The ex-president has been dogged by accusations that he stole the 1988 presidential election in a massive fraud, and that he spirited millions of dollars of pilfered government money and bribes out of the country. Authorities have seized vast sums from his brother’s Swiss bank account and are seeking to prosecute him.

But others suspect that Salinas may also be trying to play kingmaker ahead of next year’s presidential election.

In recent weeks, Salinas has attended a funeral and a baptism alongside old political allies, and he visited some of the poor neighborhoods where his government built public works projects. On Sept. 15, he was greeted with boos when he attended the inauguration of a governor.

Last week, he recorded a rare television interview.

“He’s back and he’s enjoying himself,” Denise Dresser, a columnist for the newspaper Reforma, wrote Monday. “An ex-president who wants to fight for his past and for his future.... The one who built the facade of a new country and left it in ruins.... The one who cannot be named. The one who cannot be forgiven.”

In the TV interview broadcast Sunday, Salinas portrayed himself as a victim. “I’m being used to create a smoke screen, so that the big issues will be ignored,” he said. This month Mexicans also learned that there is at least some truth behind one of the many theories surrounding Salinas: that contrary to tradition, he has continued to make deals at the highest levels of politics.

The revelations came courtesy of Elba Esther Gordillo, the most powerful woman in Mexican politics and the former secretary-general of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled Mexico for 71 years and is known here by the initials PRI. Salinas, who won the presidency under the PRI banner, is still a party member.

Gordillo is fighting to hold on to her influence in the PRI in the face of a challenge from Roberto Madrazo, a leading contender for its presidential nomination. Revelations of links between Madrazo and Salinas could damage the former’s candidacy.

On Sept. 14, Gordillo said in a television interview that both she and Madrazo attended a 2003 breakfast meeting at a mansion Salinas owns in Mexico City to discuss a fiscal reform bill proposed by President Vicente Fox, the first presidential candidate to defeat the PRI. The bill, which was defeated in Congress, included a proposed tax increase on food and medicine.

“I arrived late, because of the traffic, and when I got there they were all standing up from the table, saying everything was done,” Gordillo said. “That’s how they did the fiscal reform.”

Also present, Gordillo said, was Treasury Secretary Francisco “Paco” Gil Diaz. This revelation caused an outcry. Why, people wondered, would a Cabinet minister in Fox’s government attend a private meeting with leaders of a rival party? And why would he set foot in the home of Salinas?

At first, Fox denied the meeting had occurred. But when Gordillo persisted, Gil later said he met Madrazo, although he declined to comment on whether it was at Salinas’ home.

Salinas has also kept mum on the issue. “I don’t reveal the content of my private conversations,” he said in the television interview.

Despite the tradition that Mexican ex-presidents distance themselves from politics, it has long been an open secret among insiders here that Salinas retains much of his old influence, especially on economic issues.

Many business leaders admire Salinas because he achieved with ease what has proved difficult for the current administration: important economic reforms. Among other things, Salinas saw through the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the privatization of many government enterprises.

“What’s new is not that Salinas is engaging in politics,” said Jesus Silva-Herzog Marquez, a political analyst and professor. “It’s that he’s become visible while doing it.”

Another reason Salinas may be taking an interest in the presidential race is that the front-runner, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City, has promised that if elected he would file corruption charges against the ex-president.

“He is a cynical cretin who ruined the country,” Lopez Obrador told reporters this week.

Some observers have speculated that Salinas may run for the Senate so he can earn congressional immunity from such a prosecution. Salinas denied that in his TV interview.

Lopez Obrador is a member of the Democratic Revolution Party, the leftist grouping whose 1988 presidential candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, is widely believed to have been cheated out of an election victory over Salinas. It was Lopez Obrador who gave Salinas the nickname “el innombrable,” the one who cannot be named.

Last week, former President Miguel de la Madrid, a member of the PRI who preceded Salinas in office, acknowledged in a television interview that Salinas had in fact finished second to Cardenas in that election.

De la Madrid later retracted the statement, saying he had been misunderstood.

On Tuesday, Salinas’ aides said he was not available for comment. He left the country on Sunday, they said. They would not say where he went or when he would return.