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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | March 2008 
Calderon Agenda Dealt Pair of Setbacks
 Dudley Althaus - Houston Chronicle
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| | Mexico's President Felipe Calderon, right, listens to Iceland's President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson during the welcoming ceremony at the presidential residence of Los Pinos on Tuesday in Mexico City. (Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP) | | |
Mexico City — President Felipe Calderon's law and order image took a one-two punch Tuesday when the U.S. government criticized his country's human rights record and Mexico's Congress prepared to convene a corruption investigation of a key Cabinet official.
Calderon has made the war against Mexico's drug cartels and the push to open the country's energy industry to privatization the dual centerpieces of his 15-month old administration. Now, both may be imperiled by new accusations of corruption.
A new human rights survey by the U.S. State Department reported widespread "corruption and impunity" within Mexico's local, state and federal governments, most of it related to the fight against the cartels.
At the same time, the lower chamber of the Mexican Congress prepared to launch an investigation of Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mouriño, accused by the political opposition steering government contracts to his family's petroleum businesses.
Calderon's crackdown on the drug gangs — he has deployed more than 20,000 soldiers and paramilitary federal police to the interior — has failed to curtail the violence, which last year claimed about 2,500 lives, or to stanch the flow of narcotics into the United States.
Human rights groups, to which the State Department has now added its voice, have complained that the military-led campaign has resulted in significant abuses while proving largely impotent against endemic graft.
"Corruption continued to be a problem, as many police were involved in kidnapping, extortion or providing protection for, or acting directly on behalf of, organized crime and drug traffickers," said the report, part of a roundup of global human rights conditions. "Impunity was pervasive to an extent that victims often refused to file complaints."
Calderon appointed Mouriño, a longtime ally and confidant, to head the Interior Ministry in January. In his new job — the second most important in the government — Mouriño was widely expected to spearhead a drive to change energy laws to allow private investment in the government's oil and electricity monopolies. Now that drive seems threatened by growing pressure for a corruption investigation into Mouriño's business dealings.
The accusations against Mouriño, made by leading leftist politician Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, stem from his signing various Pemex contracts on behalf of his family's trucking company while serving in Congress and the federal Energy Ministry between 2000 and 2004.
Lopez Obrador, who narrowly lost the presidency to Calderon in 2006, has charged that Mouriño's involvement in the contracts suggests the sort of corruption that the leftist said would prevail should the Congress allow private investment in Pemex. Mouriño has denied the accusations.
The energy reforms face fierce opposition from Lopez Obrador's leftist party and wavering support from the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. After resisting pressure for days, the PRI's delegation in the lower chamber of Congress voted Tuesday to support an investigation into Mouriño's business dealings.
Mouriño, 36, a naturalized Mexican citizen whose immigrant Spanish father grew wealthy from business ties to Pemex in the southeastern state of Campeche, has been negotiating with different groups in Congress in preparation for Calderon's launch of his energy reform proposals.
Promises to cooperate
Mouriño said he has done nothing unethical or illegal and has promised to cooperate with a government investigation. He insisted he will not resign.
But some analysts said that even if Mouriño keeps his job and is cleared of the accusations, his ability to navigate Mexico's bloodsport politics has been severely wounded.
"What's certain is the scandal is a political disaster for the government," analayst Leo Zuckerman wrote Tuesday in Excelsior, a Mexico City daily. "The contracts of a family company are the perfect proof for the Mexican left's stance against the energy reform and the president."
"After a full year in decline, the left at last has found the weak flank of the Calderon government," Zuckerman wrote.
dudley.althaus(at)chron.com |
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