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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | October 2007 
Mexican Politicians Engage in Mud-Slinging
 Hector Tobar - Los Angeles Times
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 |  | Mr. Manlio Fabio Beltrones should focus on his duties as a senator, rather that trying to jump-start his presidential aspirations.
- Vicente Fox |  | |
Mexico City - The long battle of words between former Mexican President Vicente Fox and his legion of detractors took an unusually personal turn Friday, with Fox saying one of his critics was involved in drug trafficking.
The critic, a leading senator in Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (known as the PRI in Spanish), had linked Fox's family to the death of 21 Pemex workers in the aftermath of an oil rig accident this week in the Gulf of Mexico.
Fox and his family's finances have come under scrutiny, in part thanks to a September spread in the Mexico City magazine Quien that brought Fox's comfortable and apparently luxurious post-presidential life to the public eye.
Many Mexicans suspect that Fox, like presidents past, grew rich during a six-year term as president that ended in 2006.
On Thursday, Sen. Manlio Fabio Beltrones called for an investigation into Tuesday's accident at the Pemex offshore oil rig, saying that Fox's wife "appeared to be linked" to the company responsible for supplying lifeboats that sank after the accident.
The company, Oceanografia, had failed to test the lifeboats, Beltrones said. His office had received evidence linking the company to "the businesses of the family of Mrs. (Marta) Sahagun," Fox's wife and the former first lady.
The oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico collapsed during a storm. Many of the victims drowned when their rafts were swamped by the high seas.
Angered by the suggestion that he, his wife and his stepsons might be somehow responsible for the tragedy, Fox shot back in an angry news release to the Mexican media.
"Mr. Manlio Fabio Beltrones should focus on his duties as a senator, rather that trying to jump-start his presidential aspirations," Fox said. Mexico's next presidential election is in 2010.
"Manlio Fabio Beltrones has a record with the DEA related to drug trafficking," Fox continued, referring to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. "Mexico doesn't deserve this political spectacle."
A DEA official in Washington declined to comment on Fox's statement.
In 1997, Beltrones, then governor of the northern state of Sonora, was the subject of a New York Times article that said American officials believed he was an associate of one of the world's biggest drug dealers.
The accusation, denied by Beltrones, came three years before Fox and his National Action Party won the presidency. Beltrones was never charged.
In his own news release Friday, Beltrones accused Fox of "recycling old slanders."
"Ten years ago, in an investigation (I) requested, the attorney general's office found these accusations fraudulent and unsubstantiated," Beltrones said.
Fox's finances are being investigated by a congressional commission. He has called the commission "illegal." |
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