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 Editorials | July 2005 
Mexico's Past and Future Meet at Corruption Palace
 Lorraine Orlandi - Reuters
Zihuatanejo, Mexico - A replica of the Greek Parthenon stands decaying on a cliff above a Mexican Pacific resort, a gaudy monument to graft and brutality that neighbors long ago dubbed the Palace of Corruption.
It was built as a vacation retreat by the late Arturo Durazo, "El Negro," a notorious Mexico City police chief who got rich on official misdeeds during a heyday of corruption in the 1970s. Legend says he murdered a couple of house guests in the Parthenon's lagoon-sized pool, now half filled with slimy, green water.
The caretaker fears the ghost of El Negro himself haunts the deserted grounds. He prefers to hang his hammock outside the towering front gate, keeping watch from a distance.
"Definitely, that Parthenon is a monument to corruption," said Zihuatanejo Mayor Amador Campos. "However, it is a beautiful place worth a lot of money that can be rescued as a cultural center or theater for the people."
Guerrero state has claimed the property, and now townspeople hope to turn it into a community treasure.
If the Parthenon is a product of an authoritarian past, then its eventual fate may reflect hopes for Mexico's future as it struggles toward full democracy.
Since President Vicente Fox won historic elections in 2000 to end the 71-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, change has come - but slowly - to this and other corners of Mexico long run like private fiefdoms.
In Guerrero, a longtime PRI bastion, the party was ousted from the governorship this year and has lost dozens of local offices, a sign people are taking power into their own hands.
"People learned that you could beat the PRI. Here there were people who would assure you that the PRI could not be defeated," said Campos, a member of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, elected mayor two years ago.
Still, autocratic vestiges remain, breeding corruption, rights abuse and political cronyism, much as in Durazo's day.
"An old regime cannot be dismantled in two months," Guerrero Gov. Zeferino Torreblanca of the PRD warned after taking office in April.
CHIEFTAINS RULE
In Guerrero, long a hotbed of activism and insurgency, people are used to facing iron-fisted crackdowns. Here, as in other poor, violent states like Oaxaca and Chiapas, political bosses have used the army, police and courts to protect private interests against those fighting for change.
Torreblanca's election victory made history, but already he is accused of caving into pressure from Guerrero's old guard.
"The new governor, although he won with a people's mandate and it was an anti-PRI vote, has decided to govern like the PRI," said Juan Angulo, editor of Guerrero newspaper El Sur.
"Key posts remain in the hands of the PRI, above all in the area of security where the people had most hoped for change."
Torreblanca kept on a deputy state prosecutor widely blamed for human rights abuses in the past and cited by rights watchdogs in two states, among other PRI names in the cabinet.
Torreblanca's defenders say he wants to maintain stability by offering the PRI an olive branch. Angulo and rights leaders say it is a sign the entrenched chieftains still hold sway.
"The traditional power groups feel that with Zeferino's cabinet there will be no change, they feel protected," Angulo said. Recent events may bear out that claim.
In May nine student protesters were arrested, beaten and held for bus theft before the charges were withdrawn.
Days earlier, two sons of an environmental activist died in an ambush that international rights groups called a targeted attack by powerful interests linked to the PRI. Other farmers fighting logging say they are persecuted by authorities.
POLITICAL ROT
Durazo, whose opulent taste once was described as "early Nero," ran the Mexico City police force as his personal Mafia, acquired a string of race horses and reputedly had his enemies killed at will. He was convicted of racketeering and other charges and died in 2000.
The Parthenon's decadence still stuns, although it is softened by dusk and time. Murals fade on the walls and the sea shimmers below. Broken statues of Greek gods stand forlorn.
Many see Durazo as just one symptom of political rot. His boyhood friend, Jose Lopez Portillo, became president and rode an oil boom that fed some of the most blatant graft, nepotism and excess ever seen in Mexico. Economic crisis ensued, and a disgraced Lopez Portillo died last year.
Even militant leftists give the conservative Fox credit for chipping away at abuse and impunity and letting in some light. But change at the grass roots is subtle, at best.
Amid frustration with Fox's failure to win radical reform, PRD faithful like Mayor Campos see their best chance yet to take the presidency next year, with leftist Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador leading opinion polls in the race.
El Sur's Angulo warns change cannot come soon enough to Guerrero, a state racked by cycles of uprising and repression.
"Without fundamental change there could be social upheaval," he said. "If people see that so much struggle has achieved nothing and things are the same or worse than before, it may make way for other kinds of struggle." |
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