The Raul Salinas Case: Rule of Law or Rule of Politics?

WASHINGTON —  Two forces are incontrovertibly opposed in the verdict that condemns presidential brother Raul Salinas de Gortari to 50 years of prison for the 1994 murder of Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, former secretary general of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The first is the questioned integrity of the judicial process that reached that verdict. The second is the evident immorality of Raul Salinas. There is no small irony in the fact that this dilemma confronts a president, Ernesto Zedillo, whose inaugural pledge was to establish the rule of law. He did so with the ghosts of Ruiz Massieu and murdered PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio looking over his shoulder and the clamor of a Mexican people yearning for justice ringing in his ears.

Few truly want to grapple with this moral dilemma. After all, how better to demonstrate the independence of the judicial system than by convicting the brother of one of the most powerful presidents in modern Mexican history, Carlos Salinas? The guilty verdict issued against Raul Salinas would seem to lend much needed credibility to a failing justice system. Indeed, many major U.S. newspapers lauded the sentence as a vindication of Zedillo’s commitment and as a message that no one is above the law.

But such glowing approval is curiously absent among some respected voices in Mexico. Elected officials of Mexico’s three major parties were quick to profit politically by loudly proclaiming support for the decision, but the more disinterested voices of editorial comment have been harsh. “The Sentence Is Suspect” was the headline of Proceso magazine, a weekly journal second to none in its critical stance of the Salinas brothers. “The assassination of Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu is not proven,” pronounced Carlos Monsivais, a commentator of the left. “Better a guilty man free than an innocent man deprived of his liberty,” wrote the Ruiz Massieu daughter and family, in what is probably the most damning questioning of the verdict.

Indeed, the case has been marked by spectacular irregularities. The star witness for the prosecution, Fernando Rodriguez, changed his story often during the course of his 10-plus depositions, only accusing Raul Salinas of masterminding the murder after he allegedly received a payment from the attorney general’s office of $500,000, was moved to a less onerous prison and had his confiscated automobile returned to his wife. If that were not enough, blatant efforts by the prosecutor to coach his star witness were caught on videotape for all the world to see. Yet, virtually every major witness in the case had a sudden change of heart at around the same time that Rodriguez did, creating the impression of witness tampering on a grand scale. These suspicions undermine Judge Ricardo Ojeda Bohorquez’s argument that the confluence of hearsay testimony and circumstantial evidence compensates for the lack of direct proof of Salinas’ tie to the murder.

Clearly, there were noble people working on the prosecutor’s team who believed in the historic stature of their cause. But the hard truth is that, if you just erase the name of Raul Salinas, the treatment he received is not much different from that experienced by average citizens in the dark recesses of Mexico’s criminal-justice system, chronicled by human rights groups. In the mind of a U.S. judge and jury, the gross irregularities in the investigation would have led to dismissal for witness tampering, and the fundamental weakness of a case built on hearsay and circumstantial evidence probably would have led to an acquittal.

Finally, it is hard to escape the impression that the case has been deliberately politicized. In the fashion typical of high-profile cases elsewhere, both the prosecution and the defense have engaged in a media battle of leaks and interviews. The battle has continued right up to the end, with a new tape favorable to the prosecution mysteriously showing up in the hands of the New York Times one week before the verdict. With similar timing, a rare jailhouse interview was granted to Time magazine, in which the gunman asserts Raul Salinas’ involvement, shamelessly contradicting statements he had made to the Mexican press in 1997. The waters were muddied further when the gunman made the bizarre claim that he was trained for the assassination by former U.S. and Mexican military officers in the United States and that he was a direct witness to the involvement of Raul Salinas, former President Salinas’ chief of staff, two former governors, one billionaire and others.

At times, the Mexican government seemed to be hostage to the political pressures it helped create. One senior Mexican official acknowledges, with a look of evident relief, that government contingency planning had focused on managing the fallout from acquittal. Pity the poor judge who carried the political weight of this decision on his shoulders. So charged is the political atmosphere surrounding the case that Ojeda felt compelled to deny the existence of political pressure. “I don’t believe that the judge was pressured by President Zedillo,” commented one former Cabinet officer, “but you can imagine the personal pressure that the judge must have felt. He would never have been able to walk the streets had he exonerated Raul Salinas!”

Inevitably, the historically minded will suspect that Zedillo was simply following in the hallowed footsteps of his predecessors by jailing Raul Salinas. Every Mexican president of the last 30 years has entered office afflicted with financial chaos and charges of corruption. Most have appeased the wrath of the Mexican people by throwing a senior member of the previous administration to the lions. The only difference in the Salinas case is one of degree: The price of appeasement has increased to the level of a presidential brother.

Unfortunately, all these factors reinforce the impression of political influence in the course and outcome of the case. It is a through-the-looking-glass definition of independence that lauds the court for demonstrating its independence of a president who is out of office and safely in exile but does not demonstrate its independence from the powers currently in power. It hardly counts as an act of political courage to indict the brother of the most unpopular politician of the hour. It would have taken far more courage to exonerate him, given the irregularities of the case. How paradoxical that, under the well-intentioned administration of a president committed to the rule of law, Mexico may have tried to establish the rule of law by violating it.

Raul Salinas, with his obscenely huge Swiss bank accounts, is a symbol of the influence peddling and outright thievery that Mexicans have long suspected in their high officials. It is for this reason that those longing for change are willing to overlook the weakness of the case and the abuses of the investigation as a mere technicality on the road to achieving a higher moral goal. Raul Salinas is a guilty man, the reasoning goes, so it matters not whether he was guilty of the exact crime for which he was convicted.

But this reasoning is deeply flawed and sets dangerous precedents for the rule of law in Mexico. The moral choice is bleak, but crystal clear. You can either stand on principle and defend the integrity and morality of the legal process, possibly exonerating an immoral man in doing so, or you can once again slide down the slippery slope of discretionary justice. The U.S. court system faces this dilemma all the time when criminals are let off on technicalities, but it is this same devotion to due process that makes the U.S. justice system so solid. Mexicans, as an emotional response to years of impunity, fear that the guilty might go free much more than they fear the dangers for the innocent of a contaminated judicial process.

The Raul Salinas case contains lessons for the upcoming, annual debate over drug certification. Both Mexico and the United States have fallen into the habit of accusing highly visible politicians of dubious charges that are rarely proved, but litter the landscape with destroyed reputations. This has two pernicious consequences. First, the criminal-justice system becomes vulnerable to prosecution by politically inspired, cross-border rumormongering. Second, and most important, precious government resources and attention are distracted while obvious criminals go free. How strange that, just as the Raul Salinas verdict captured the headlines, the Mexican attorney general’s office announced that it would not extradite to the United States drug trafficker Oscar Malherbe. It is time to get down to the business of catching traffickers. The rule of law would be better served by depoliticizing the criminal-justice system, both in Mexico and in the United States.*