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 Editorials | Issues | July 2007 
Mexican Drug Case Raises Official Questions
 Karin Brulliard - Washington Post
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 |  | Tons! Tons of drugs passed through the ports. Who gave the permits? In all this, the government is guilty.
- Juan Perez |  | | Mexico City - The newspapers fly off the stands at Juan Perez's kiosk on bustling Avenida Juarez - especially those splashed with headlines about the riches of Zhenli Ye Gon, an importer accused of drug trafficking in a case that Mexican and U.S. authorities have hailed as a blow to the methamphetamine trade.
But to Perez, who has hawked news on this street for 60 years, the true defendant is the Mexican government.
"Tons! Tons of drugs passed through the ports. Who gave the permits?" asked Perez, a spry 75, jabbing his finger into the warm midafternoon air as taxis whizzed by his stand. "In all this, the government is guilty."
Dubbed "El Chino" - the Chinese man - by Mexican media, the man whose arrest at a Wheaton, Md., restaurant last week thrust him into the center of the U.S. drug war has for months been the notorious protagonist of what analysts here call the country's biggest political scandal in recent years.
Questions are swirling about government complicity in Ye Gon's alleged trade, not to mention his recent claim that much of the $205 million found in his Mexico City mansion was a "slush fund" he was forced to safeguard for Mexico's ruling National Action Party.
President Felipe Calderon has called Ye Gon's version of the story a "cuento Chino," a phrase that literally translates to "Chinese story" but means "tall tale."
The Mexican press has dissected every hint of fraud. Television channels have replayed footage of then-President Vicente Fox handing a citizenship certificate to Ye Gon in a 2003 ceremony. After government officials said Ye Gon used fake permits to import huge shipments of chemicals that can be used to make the street drug methamphetamine, newspapers churned out articles about shifty customs agents.
Mexican authorities, meanwhile, steadily restate their case against Ye Gon, who is jailed on charges of violating U.S. drug laws; Mexico plans to ask for his extradition, which U.S. court sources say could take years.
Investigators are examining Ye Gon's links to drug cartels and possible collusion by government officials, who will face charges if implicated, a spokesman for the Mexican attorney general's office said. Ye Gon's U.S. lawyers say their client would not get a fair trial in Mexico; government officials accuse them of concocting a story.
Seven decades of one-party rule under the Institutional Revolutionary Party fostered an ethos of fraud and untouchability. When Fox's National Action Party ended the reign in 2000, he declared a battle against corruption. But accusations have continued - Fox's wife, for instance, was accused of using her husband's power to secure major government contracts for her adult children from a previous marriage. When Calderon won the presidency last year by a razor-thin margin, millions of street demonstrators accused him of stealing the election.
Ye Gon, a native of Shanghai, was a stranger to the Mexican public before March. He immigrated in 1990 and for a time imported Chinese trinkets, officials said. In 2000, he began importing Chinese pseudoephedrine, a cold medicine ingredient that can be used to make methamphetamine, ostensibly to sell it to drug manufacturers. The government says he lost his permit in 2005, when Mexico cracked down on a growing meth market.
But officials received an anonymous tip in early 2006 that Ye Gon was dealing pseudoephedrine to Mexico's drug underworld, and "Operation Dragon" was launched with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. On Dec. 5, a ship arrived for him in a southwest Mexican port carrying 19.7 tons of a substance listed on shipping manifests as a chemical that does not exist, Mexican and U.S. authorities say. Laboratory tests revealed it was a derivative of pseudoephedrine, authorities said.
That led to a raid on Ye Gon's home in March. Authorities found six Mercedes-Benzes and two other cars; a small collection of firearms that included an AK-47 assault rifle; and duffel bags, wheeled suitcases and metal lockers bursting with $205 million.
A raid on Ye Gon's two Mexico City warehouses revealed boxes filled with purses and fake Christmas trees, and 12 bags containing pseudoephedrine, while a search of his factory outside the capital turned up traces of meth and pseudoephedrine, Mexican officials said.
Ye Gon, who had fled the country, was charged with drug trafficking, money laundering and weapons possession. |
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