Clinton's Mexican Narco-Pals
The untold story behind
February's Yucatan summit redefines the enemy in the war on drugs
By Al Giordano
MAY 17, 1999: If the facts of the story were made of cocaine
powder, the entire White House press corps would have sneezed; the news was
right under their noses. Any one of them could have written:
MÉRIDA, MEXICO, FEBRUARY 15,
1999: U.S. President William Clinton met today with Mexican President Ernesto
Zedillo to negotiate better cooperation between their nations in the fight
against drugs. Incredibly, the anti-narcotics summit was hosted by powerful
Mexican banker Roberto Hernández Ramírez, a man publicly accused of trafficking
cocaine and laundering illicit drug money....
But that story wasn't reported
in the States, despite a controversy over Hernández's alleged involvement in
the drug trade that's raged on the Yucatán peninsula for two years.
The heart-shaped
box appeared on Air Force One. It was Valentine's Day 1999, and the Comeback
Kid was getting out of Dodge. Bill Clinton had, just two days prior, escaped
vanquishment by the U.S. Senate in Washington, DC. The presidential jet roared
out of the February chill toward the tropical city of Mérida.
Clinton, in a
video image broadcast across the globe that evening, stepped into the press
cabin of the plane wielding a big pink heart-shaped box and doled out valentine
chocolates to the reporters and photographers covering this trip. And to
underscore with levity that the subject would now be changed -- from
impeachment and Monica to "drugs" -- the White House press handlers
regaled the journalists with bottles of hemp beer. The marijuana in the brew's
recipe was reportedly non-intoxicating. Still, they were high, on laughter if
not impunity, on Air Force One.
Awaiting the
presidential entourage in Mérida was the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Jeffrey
Davidow. In the weeks before, while most of the White House staff was busy
steering the president through domestic political crisis, Davidow had been in
Mexico, laying the groundwork for the presidential visit. Davidow is no novice.
He cut his diplomatic teeth at the U.S. embassy in Santiago, Chile, from 1971
to '73, the period when the U.S. and General Augusto Pinochet were plotting to
destabilize the elected government of president Salvador Allende. By the time
Air Force One landed in Mérida, everything on the ground was under control.
The city's central
streets were deserted. Nine square blocks had been sealed by Mexican state and
federal police. Hundreds of U.S. Secret Service agents had blanketed the region
days in advance. They peered through their sunglasses from rooftops. Their
network of cell phones fell like a web over the ancient Mayan capital. The city's
annual Carnaval -- with its wild nightly parades, when seemingly every one of
Mérida's 750,000 residents emerges onto the streets and dances in plumed
costumes to Caribbean rhythms -- had been disappeared for the evening. The Dry
Law was imposed.
Mérida on a normal
day or night is an unusually tranquil city. Not even the police are armed. The
response of the citizenry to the evening's invasion-of-state was to ignore the
presidential summit almost completely. In the previous night's parades,
throughout the city not a single banner was hung; nothing to welcome or to
protest the arrival of Clinton and Zedillo. About 300 people did show up in
City Square to cheer the gringos' arrival. They were supporters of Mexico's
ruling political party who had received tickets to pass through the police
lines, or they were folk dancers hired to provide a festive view from the
second-floor dining hall where the dignitaries would nosh.
Davidow was in the
first mini-bus to arrive at Mérida's City Square from the airport. Behind him
came the presidents and their wives, cabinet members, congressional supporters,
and the international working press. A few pool photographers and reporters
would be escorted inside a historic building to snap some photos of the
dignitaries and scribble reports over dinner. The rest of the journalists were
herded by bus to five-star hotels to enjoy an early exemption from the Dry Law.
The luxury-hotel district, too, was sealed off by police and the Secret
Service.
Upstairs in the
Hotel Fiesta Americana, the suites were equipped with phone and computer jacks
for the visiting press. Pool reports of the diplomatic dinner and schedules of
tomorrow's itinerary were ready and waiting. The two presidents would be flown
by helicopter the next morning, February 15, a short distance to the
Temozon Sur plantation -- the luxurious refurbished ranch owned by Roberto
Hernández Ramírez, president-owner of BANAMEX (the National Bank of Mexico
before Hernández bought it from the government a decade ago).Forbes magazine lists
Hernández as number 289 among the wealthiest men on earth.
President Zedillo
had been staying at the Hernández estate since February 12, though
Hernández himself was not present at the summit meeting. That two presidents
would enjoy the hospitality of a powerful businessman would not, by itself,
raise many eyebrows.
But had just one
of the White House correspondents holed up in the Fiesta Americana, the Hyatt,
or the Holiday Inn wandered downtown or even downstairs to a newsstand, the
official history of the summit might have been very different. Even a reporter
who did not read Spanish might have comprehended the banner headline in the
Mérida daily Por
Esto!: ROBERTO HERNÁNDEZ RAMÎREZ: NARCOTRAFICANTE. (Part I, Part II, Part III.)
That same
Valentine's Day, Por Esto! published the
first installment of a three-part series about the banker, his rise to wealth
and power, his political clout, and his alleged involvement with drugs and drug
money. The series -- including 350 column-inches of text documented by 45 photographs
(31 in color), plus three maps tracing the route of Colombian cocaine through
the banker's properties -- ran over three consecutive days.
According to the
newspaper and its sources, coastal marshlands purchased by Hernández in the
late '80s and early '90s were the port of entry for massive volumes of cocaine
delivered in small Colombian speedboats. From there, tons of the drug were
loaded onto small planes and flown north from Hernández's private airfield.
Hernández, the newspaper charged, was hiding behind empty
"eco-tourism" resorts to wash drug profits.
The series was a
journalistic tour de force, the culmination of a 26-month investigation into
the 43 kilometers of beachfront property owned by Hernández -- a region known
by the locals as the "Coca Triangle."
The newspaper went
even further: it filed federal criminal complaints against Hernández for drug
trafficking, for the robbery of national archeological treasures (his
properties include the ancient Mayan ruins of Chac Mool and others), and for
the environmental destruction caused by the cocaine-trafficking operations to
the Sian Ka'an nature preserve.
Not a word about
this controversy would appear in the U.S. news media before or after the
Clinton-Zedillo summit. One could search the Internet, Lexis-Nexis, the major
dailies, the wire services, the entire English-speaking world; the story was
neither published, promoted, criticized, nor rebutted.
And yet the story
has raged in Yucatán and the eastern Yucatán coastal state of Quintana Roo,
where the property in question is located, since December 16, 1996, when a
fishermen's cooperative blew the whistle on Hernández's cocaine port and
airfield to Por Esto! and pointed the
newspaper to the evidence. Por Esto! published the
fishermen's accounts of threats and harassment by Hernández, who, they said,
wanted to drive them off their lands to eliminate witnesses to his
drug-smuggling operation. Hernández returned fire in 1997, filing charges of
trespassing and defamation against reporter Renán Castro Madera, regional
editor Santos Gabriel Us Aké, and editor and publisher Mario Menéndez
Rodríguez. Public opinion has not favored Hernández's complaints. Since 1996,
more than 100 town councils, unions, and civic organizations throughout the
Yucatán Peninsula have passed resolutions supporting the newspaper in its fight
to expose the man they call a narco-banker.
The story got new
legs on March 28, when the powerful governor of Quintana Roo, Mario
Villanueva Madrid, disappeared during his last week of office, fleeing from
drug-trafficking charges. An often crude but always media-savvy politician,
Villanueva has issued videotaped communiqués and even bought newspaper ads from
his hidden locations claiming that the prosecution against him is an act of
political vengeance. The now ex-governor of the Caribbean state that's home to
the world-class Cancún tourist resorts is not going down quietly. He may drag
others down with him, including Clinton's pal Roberto Hernández Ramírez.
"I have a lot
of information," Villanueva told the Mexican national daily Reforma on March 23,
a few days before his disappearance. "A lot. It can involve more people.
In the event that this is not resolved I will make it known."
The story is
migrating north, and there's not a border patrol that can stop it.
Until now,
international media accounts of rampant drug-war corruption on Mexico's Yucatán
Peninsula have for the most part been managed and controlled by official U.S.
and Mexican sources. The investigation and prosecution of Villanueva -- a joint
venture of the U.S. and Mexican governments and, now, the 176 nations of the
international police agency Interpol that have joined the manhunt -- was
supposed to reinforce the party line that narco-corruption at the highest
levels will no longer be tolerated.
But the takedown
of Villanueva -- surely a crook, deeply involved in protecting the illicit drug
trade and in other criminal and anti-democratic ventures -- merely diverts
attention from the wheel of institutionalized corruption in which he was a cog.
By profiting from drug traffic, Villanueva was simply enjoying the fruits that
all governors of the ruling party have been granted for decades. The same
institutions that chase him today protected him for almost six years in office.
Villanueva's mysterious escape, and his promise to spill the secrets of the
Mexican narco-state, have already begun to shake the comfy worlds of powerful
people -- among them BANAMEX owner Hernández and his presidential houseguests.
Hernández blamed
Villanueva, at the time Quintana Roo's governor, for Por Esto!'s 1996 reports about his alleged drug crimes. The
banker addressed the problem the way most public-relations disasters are
managed in Mexico. "Hernández complained to President Zedillo,"
reported the Mexico City daily El Universal on April 5,
"who at his turn had spoken with Villanueva, but the attacks did not
cease."
This was the first
time El Universal or any national
newspaper had mentioned Hernández in connection with narco-news. And even then,
it was included almost as an aside in a colorful profile, by writer Mario Lara
Klahr, on governor-turned-fugitive Villanueva. The spin of the profile was that
the governor and Hernández were at war because Villanueva was
"interested" in the bank owner's coastal properties.
That same day, El Universal, one of Mexico's two major establishment broadsheets,
published an almost full-page interview with Hernández about the banking
industry -- a puff piece complete with flattering photo portraits. The daily
did not ask Hernández about the drug charges or, even generically, about the
Mexican banking industry's current drug-money-laundering crisis -- even though,
just five days before, three major Mexican banks (including BANAMEX's top
competitor, Bancomer) had pled guilty in U.S. federal court to hiding hundreds
of millions of dollars for the giant cocaine cartels.
Lara's piece,
meanwhile, also included the unsubstantiated supposition that Villanueva was an
owner of Por Esto! In fact,
Villanueva's government had harassed and threatened Por Esto! repeatedly --
withholding payment for government advertising, failing to provide police
response to a payroll robbery at the newspaper's Cancún offices, and excluding
the paper's reporters and photographers from official functions.
Por Esto! is published by
Mario Menéndez Rodríguez, a well-known and combative veteran journalist whose
political activism dates back to Mexico City's 1968 student movement. Menéndez
publishes dailies in both Mérida and Cancún and has been imprisoned several times
for his anti-government reports.
"The governor
of Quintana Roo is not an owner of Por Esto! That's
ridiculous," says Menéndez. "Look at the printing machinery we use.
It's always breaking. The people of this region know how I live and how this
newspaper works. If El Universal has some
documentation or proof that he has anything to do with this newspaper, I
challenge them to show it. Of course, I am preparing a response."
(A week after the El Universal story, the
national magazine Proceso reported that
Hernández himself had orchestrated the leak of documents upon which Mexico's
national press had based the report.)
On April 12, Por Esto! resumed publishing
the results of its investigations into Hernández's affairs, vowing: "Loyal
to the truth, Por Esto!will not fold in
the fight. . . . The federal executive branch is the major
accomplice of the drug barons in Mexico."
The accompanying
story linked a BANAMEX legal-department director -- the Republic's former first
assistant attorney general, who was fired, according to Por Esto!, for his illegal activities related to drug
trafficking -- to three known drug traffickers, one a witness under the
protection of U.S. anti-drug prosecutors, and charged that the U.S. government
has "wide and deep knowledge" of Hernández's drug-trafficking
activities. The newspaper also identified the state delegate of the Mexican
federal prosecutor's office as a former BANAMEX employee and reported that the
Mexican armed forces responsible for drug enforcement on the peninsula have
received orders not to enter Hernández's coastal properties, which, according
to Por Esto!, are still being
used as a major cocaine-trafficking port.
That Menéndez
continues with the investigation is no surprise. What is new is that, for
the first time, other journalists are taking on the story.
Carlos Ramírez,
editor of the feisty national political magazine La Crisis, publishes a daily column in both El Universal and Por Esto! In an April 6
column analyzing the Villanueva case, he blamed the ex-governor's fall from
grace on his antagonism with Hernández, "the all-powerful owner of
BANAMEX," over tourist-development sites in and around Cancún.
"Villanueva
lost due to the weight of the power relations of BANAMEX," Ramírez wrote,
going on to describe a strong personal and social relationship between
BANAMEX's Hernández and Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, who, Ramírez
reported, has vacationed at the banker's Cancún haciendas and at a
Hernández-owned Caribbean island that's been linked to the late Colombian
narco-trafficker Pablo Escobar Gaviria.
The April 11
edition of Proceso, the most
respected newsweekly in Mexico, ended the Mexican national media's long
reluctance to repeatPor Esto!'s drug-trafficking charges against
Hernández. Under the headline WITH THE FLIGHT OF VILLANUEVA, ROBERTO HERNANDEZ
ESCAPES AN ENEMY, Proceso recounted a
private September 1998 meeting between then-governor Villanueva and journalists
during which Villanueva confided, "Behind this smear campaign that has
been unleashed against me I see the hand of Roberto Hernández." The piece
went on to describe Por Esto!'s campaign to
portray Hernández as a drug trafficker, relaying the paper's reports that
almost 30 percent of the nearly 30 tons of cocaine intercepted by the
Mexican prosecutor general's agents had been seized on property owned by the
BANAMEX chief. It noted Hernández's 1997 suits against the paper and reported
that, the previous week, Quintana Roo judge Marco Antonio Traconis Varguez had
issued arrest warrants against three of the paper's journalists.
The gamble taken
by the White House and the U.S. Embassy in Mexico -- that the drug story on
Clinton's host would never get out -- has already been lost.
Jorge Madrazo
Cuéllar, Prosecutor General of the Republic -- Mexico's equivalent of the
attorney general -- is understandably nervous about Villanueva's escape and its
mounting consequences for his own job. Opposition leaders have already called
Madrazo before the federal House of Deputies to answer charges that he intentionally
let Villanueva slip away. (At that meeting, Madrazo divulged that many of his
former prosecutors and officers have gone to work as cocaine traffickers -- an
admission by the chief federal prosecutor that his office has functioned as a
narco-school.)
The defendant
ex-governor remains at large -- and looms large -- buying full-page ads in
national dailies and issuing video communiqués that may soon begin to implicate
his nemesis Hernández directly in the narco-trade.
And so in a
bizarre act of prosecution-by-publicity, the prosecutor general is defending
his behavior by taking out ads of his own.
The opening
advertisement for the prosecution, published on April 9 in all of Mexico's
major national newspapers, enumerated five major denials that were surreal in
their capacity to suggest the opposite of their intent. The ad stated:
· that the drug charges against Villanueva were
not politically motivated;
· that no United States agency had pressured
Mexican prosecutors to jail Villanueva;
· that the Villanueva prosecution was unrelated
to the fifth anniversary of the homicide of 1994 presidential candidate Luis
Donaldo Colosio and was not an attempt to divert public attention from that
case;
· that the Villanueva prosecution was not
motivated by "personal obsession by the Prosecutor General of the
Republic";
· that the
Villanueva investigation had nothing to do with Roberto Hernández Ramírez's
legal action against Por Esto!
All of the above are plausible
in their inverse; the case could be motivated by a confluence of political
factors. If we heed the journalistic principle "follow the money,"
the weightiest of them -- reaching to the White House in Washington -- involves
presidential pal Hernández and his vast power as the BANAMEX owner.
Por Esto! reported the
story, and the result was that three of its journalists are today being
persecuted with live arrest warrants. But the escape of Governor Villanueva has
forced Mexico's national press to accept that there is indeed a story here.
Whether U.S. media organizations that cover Mexico will do their job remains to
be seen. But when Bill Clinton agreed to hold his anti-drug summit with the
Mexican president on Hernández's plantation, he inadvertently invited their
scrutiny. The invitation came with the heart-shaped box.
Copyright © 1999 by Al Giordano
Al Giordano is a former political reporter for the Boston Phoenix. He
can be reached atagiordano99@hotmail.com.
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