Time was when no Mexican cop would have dreamed of breathing such a story. But now it’s open season on Garcia–and on the Salinas family’s ties. The drug lord is on the FBI’s most-wanted list. Raul Salinas is in jail in Mexico City, charged with ordering the murder of his former brother-in-law. (In a fax forwarded to NEWSWEEK by his attorney, he denied having ever had any contact with Garcia, adding: “I simply do not know him.”) Mexico’s former anti-narcotics chief awaits extradition from Newark, N.J.; $10 million was found in his Texas bank account. A Mexico City daily has reported on phone conversations between Salinas’s former chief of staff and a woman accused of laundering money for Garcia. In all, an aura of impunity for the country’s big shots has been ruptured, and that’s largely the doing of President Ernesto Zedillo, who took office in December as the peso went into free fall. He has singled out the drug trade as Mexico’s most pressing problem, diverting attention from the economic crisis and answering U.S. critics of his country’s notorious criminal-justice system. The public allegations of narco-corruption under Salinas add up to an unprecedented outpouring of self-recrimination. “The world can see now what kind of cesspool we’re wading in here,” says an official in the office of Attorney General Antonio Lozano.
Money cemented an unlikely alliance between the ex-president’s brother and the drug kingpin, say Mexican and U.S. investigators. Salinas was a child of Mexico’s privileged elite; Garcia, a former milkman and car thief from Matamoros, was a violence-prone Saranist. By 1988, when Carlos Salinas was nominated by the ruling party to run for president, Garcia already was using his vast cocaine money to buy up cattle ranches,farms, trucking companies and horses. According to one well-placed U.S. investigator, Garcia dipped into his till to fund a campaign of intimidation and wiretapping that Rail Salinas allegedly conducted in the run-up to Carlos Salinas’s fraud-tainted election. Raul and Garcia may have had more in common than it appeared. “They could beth be courteous and articulate businessmen one moment and ruthless monsters the next,” says this source.
Garcia’s drug empire, known as the Gulf Cartel, flourished during the Salinas years. He could receive Colombian cocaine in hollowed-out jets like Boeing 727s, say U.S. officials. Meanwhile, Raul Salinas was meeting with one of Garcia’s top men at a cartel-owned restaurant in the northern town of Saltillo, law-enforcement sources say. Eduardo Valle, a Mexican agent who quit last year, declaring Mexico a “narcode-mocracy,” says he could have arrested Gar-cia if his appeals to the president’s office for army backup hadn’t been refused. Valle says a federal police commander threatened him when he complained. “He told me, ‘Stay out of this: if Raul is partying with Garcia Abrego, how the hell are you ever going to arrest Garcia Abrego?’”
‘White hot’: Garcia’s money-laundering operations long went unchallenged as well. And when federal agents finally arrested Garcia’s brother Humberto last year on charges of hiding more than $1 billion in drug profits, he was released after two days. Intense pressure from Washington brought his rearrest three weeks later. Still, nobody doubts that many drug-fueled businesses continue to thrive under official cover, presenting risks to investors who might be reassured by the involvement of government officials. “It’s become impossible for U.S. companies to know whether or not they’re holding hands with the Devil down there,” says former assistant U.S. attorney Christopher Milner of Dallas, who has set up an investigative firm to root out such ties. “This has to have a white-hot spotlight thrown on it now,” says U.S. Ambassador James Jones.
But Zedillo so far seems more effective at maintaining a long Mexican tradition of demonizing one’s predecessor than at denting the $30 billion Mexican drug trade. His government has finally set out to strengthen the country’s weak money-laundering laws, and last month he announced he would deploy the air force against the drug lords. But in Washington, anti-drug experts aren’t sold. “We’re interested in results, not words, and we haven’t seen any results yet,” said one official, noting that Mexican police recently fumbled a U.S. tip that a cocaine-filled jetliner was headed for the state of Sonora. A real crackdown will require moving mountains – of money.
