WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 (UPI) -- (This is the second of two articles.)
At that time, Gertz worked for President Echeverría's top cop, and it was suspected that the artifacts might have been intended for the president himself, who is known to have a personal collection. The museum owner, Miguel Malo, died from a bullet to the head after he refused to hand over the collection to Gertz. The incident was ruled a suicide by the police. The details were documented at the time by Malo‚s widow, who filed a report with the local police station, and several articles in the few independent media outlets (those not subject to Echeverría's censorship) at the time.
Fredo Arias-King, an aide to Vicente Fox who handled the international relations of the campaign, was familiar with the incident in 1972 since Malo had been a friend of his family, which also hails from San Miguel.
"When president-elect Fox made the announcement [appointing Gertz] sometime in October of 2000, I had some of his closest associates, who were after all my friends and former campaign colleagues, show him those yellowing newspaper clippings from 1972 about the incident involving Gertz and the museum owner," Arias-King told UPI.
"Those articles clearly link Gertz to both Echeverría and the failed extortion attempt that ended in Malo's suicide. But Fox ignored them and went ahead with the appointment anyway. Fox reportedly answered "That was 30 years ago, surely he's changed by now."
Undaunted, Arias-King later approached Martha Sahagún, a key Fox aide who later married the president, as well as Ramón Muñoz, another Fox top aide, individually to discuss the problem. According to Arias-King, upon seeing the articles, both tacitly and reluctantly admitted that there was some kind of a political arrangement behind Gertz‚s appointment, but both stressed that it was "temporary." Sahagún added that she was "attempting to reverse it," while Muñoz mentioned that "we put as his second in command (at the SSP) someone who has nothing to do with him," and who presumably would keep an eye on him.
Arias-King mentions that that was the last time he could speak to both of his former campaign colleagues. "After those two meetings, I became a sort of persona non grata at the Mexican Kremlin." When he ran into by-then first lady Sahagún at an event in late 2001 and attempted to bring up the matter of Gertz once again, Sahagún signaled to her bodyguard, who 'politely but firmly pushed me away from her,' recalls Arias-King.
Arias-King recently published an article titled "Mexico's Wasted Chance" for the Washington-based journal The National Interest where he puts the Gertz incident in a broader context of a proclivity to appoint Echeverría people by Fox. Other officials associated with Echeverría that Fox appointed to high office were the ambassador to Washington (Echeverría‚s former personal secretary), the national security advisor Adolfo Aguilar Zinser (who headed the "Third World University," a pet project of the former president) and a raft of other officials placed at key posts throughout the federal government.
Just six weeks after Gertz settled in his SSP office, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, formerly a lieutenant of the Guadalajara cartel, escaped from a maximum-security prison. He is still at large and heading his own cartel. Gertz lasted about four years at the helm of the SSP before being replaced with a PAN official, who shortly thereafter died in a helicopter crash.
Both Zavala and Arias-King say they did not come forward sooner with this information because people by then seemed to have lost interest in these stories from the transition, as Fox was already widely seen as a disappointment, and because it may have been used by Fox's opponents against the PAN and its new presidential candidate. Both say they still are sympathetic to the PAN and even helped the campaign of the new President Felipe Calderón, who happens to have also widely criticized Fox for his proclivity for "gratuitously placing PRI officials at the helm and getting nothing in return," as the candidate said before a business convention late last year.
Calderón has instead vowed that he, in an allusion against Fox, prefers "temporary inexperience to permanent sabotage," quoting former Czechoslovak President Václav Havel's dictum. Calderón won with a narrow margin the July election against a leftist candidate who had promised "real change" and accused Fox of "selling out" to the previous regime.
Fox may have understood that the PRI was divided into two camps, one headed by Salinas and his allies, the other by Echeverría. Since his opponent Labastida was more in the Salinas camp, perhaps Fox calculated that reaching out to Echeverría -- in the realpolitik style of a 'Nixon in China" -- could bring him needed information, political cover or even personal security. However, unlike with Nixon and Mao, it is unknown what Fox presumably negotiated with Echeverría, if anything, or what the content of those conversations were. Fox's term has now ended, but the historians are already beginning work.
Since Echeverría's power is said to derive from the federal police and intelligence agencies, it perhaps is no coincidence that he may have negotiated for his ally Gertz to head the Public Security Secretariat. Members of the previous regime also surrounded the president at his office and controlled access to him and the presidential agenda. Fox may have allowed this to assuage elements of the previous regime, maybe even Echeverría, about his intentions.
It is commonly believed that to reach high offices, Mexican political hopefuls need to make "agreements" with powerful underground elements, whereby rules of the game are arrived at and areas of activity delineated. Sudden rashes of contract killings of police officers or politicians are seen in the media as a breakdown of these "agreements" or this "balance." Sometimes, what seems like a police crackdown on a drug cartel can merely reflect a war between rival cartels.
The new president-elect, Calderón, may not be immune to this law in Mexican politics. Shortly before he took office, he appeared at a public rally alongside Gertz.
