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Politician's Disappearance Rivets Mexico
 Tracy Wilkinson - Los Angeles Times
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May 20, 2010
Mexico City — The bloodied SUV was discovered, abandoned in the middle of the night and doors askew, at the gates of his sprawling ranch.
Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, Mexico's brash-mouthed, cigar-chomping political powerbroker, had vanished.
In a country inured to killings and kidnappings, the mysterious disappearance of Fernandez de Cevallos in Saturday's wee hours has riveted and horrified Mexicans — especially the ruling class. It has dominated headlines, talk shows, conversation on buses.
"If this could happen to him," everyone seems to be saying, "then no one is safe."
Rumors and guesses about what actually happened fly like dust ahead of a rainstorm. If he was kidnapped, this is the highest-profile abduction in many years.
He has been reported dead and reported alive (receiving treatment in a hospital). No body has been found. No ransom demand has been announced. His family issued a statement begging his presumed captors to get in touch: The family was ready to negotiate.
Fernandez de Cevallos, 69, is one of the pillars of the ruling National Action Party, or PAN, of President Felipe Calderon, who swiftly ordered a team of government public security agencies to find the missing politician. In helicopters and with sniffer dogs, police are scouring the countryside of bean fields and alfalfa around the ranch in Queretaro, about two hours northwest of Mexico City.
Adding to the mystery, Fernandez de Cevallos seems to have gone off to his fate quietly. Investigators have found no evidence of a shootout where his abandoned vehicle was discovered, only a small amount of blood that they confirmed was the same type as the politician's. The blood stained a pair of scissors that relatives said Fernandez de Cevallos used to trim his trademark bushy gray beard.
Fernandez de Cevallos was more feared than beloved, and if he was the victim of kidnapping, as the evidence suggests, the list of suspects is a long one.
Drug traffickers who have been targeting police and local officials for the last two years may have decided to send a chilling message to Calderon's government. Until now, figures of Fernandez de Cevallos' stature have been largely untouched. But with the drug war-related death toll soaring beyond 23,000 since the president took office in December 2006, traffickers have gained the upper hand in some parts of Mexico and act with increasing brazenness.
Kidnapping rings active across the country sometimes operate in cahoots with drug gangs, and sometimes on their own purely for profit.
Speculation has also drifted to leftist guerrilla movements that in the past were responsible for notorious, politically motivated abductions. The most active of such groups, the Popular Revolutionary Army, issued a statement distancing itself from the disappearance and saying it "felt the pain" of Fernandez de Cevallos' family.
Fernandez de Cevallos has numerous political and professional enemies. He is a controversial figure, a hard-charging politician who mentored the pragmatic, deal-making wing of the PAN. He was the conservative party's presidential candidate in 1994, inexplicably dropping out of active campaigning in the final weeks before the vote. He lost amid speculation that he deliberately threw the race. |
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