Merida, Mexico, July 1 (Bloomberg) -- Mexican President Vicente Fox said the U.S. commitment and presence in Latin America have been reduced since the September terrorist attacks.
He called on U.S. and European leaders to make Argentina a priority as the nation seeks to stabilize its currency and rebuild its banking system. Fox warned that ``we all are going to have problems'' if the region is ignored.
Fox made his comments in an interview last Friday in this southern Yucatan state while acting as host to a summit of Central American presidents. They are seeking to attract $4 billion in investment from international lenders, governments and private companies to improve roads and power infrastructure in southern Mexico and Central America.
``Since September 11, things have changed: the commitment, the presence of the United States in Latin American matters has been reduced,'' Fox said, seated in a white ``guayabera'' shirt typical of the Mexican south and his trademark black cowboy boots.
While he said Mexico's close trade ties to the U.S., low interest rates, and ample central bank reserves help the nation's $620 billion economy avoid the impact of regional economic declines, he said the U.S. and Europe should help stop their spread.
``The most important thing is that the problem is attended to, that there is political will that this is resolved. The worst thing is if it's ignored,'' he said. ``If the region doesn't recover, and doesn't have a better future, we are all going to have problems.''
Travels to Argentina and Brazil
Fox goes to Argentina and Brazil this week, where he said he will seek bilateral trade agreements with each country, as well as begin working on a larger agreement with their four-nation trade bloc that also includes Uruguay and Paraguay.
Argentina wants international aid to rebuild its economy and banking system after defaulting on $95 billion of bonds and devaluing. Brazil, which borrowed $10 billion from the International Monetary Fund last month, is seeking to restore investor confidence that it can make all its debt payments.
In commenting on Argentina, Fox said, ``I have invited the U.S.. the IMF and the G-7 to apply a great will so that the problems of Argentina are attend to.''
Fox, who turns 60 tomorrow, took office in late 2000 after dislodging the 71-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. He made the first state-visit to U.S. President George Bush, who called Latin America a ``fundamental commitment'' of his presidency when elected.
Using his proximity to the U.S., Fox has sought a leadership role in Latin America, calling on the U.S. and Europe to curtail agriculture subsidies, open up markets and provide financing to ensure growth in the region.
Opposition in Congress
At home, much of the euphoria following his election has receded as the country faces economic pressure from the U.S. recession and the opposition-controlled Congress blocks many of his key campaign initiatives. His public approval rating has dropped to 57 percent from about 80 when he was elected, according to Reforma newspaper.
Analysts say the former Coca-Cola executive may have raised expectations unrealistically high in Mexico, and depended too heavily on support from the U.S. to achieve the agenda he campaigned on: rooting out corruption, securing immigration rights and attracting foreign investment. He also vowed to resolve the ongoing conflict with insurgents in the south in ``15 minutes.''
``Vicente Fox is a great marketing director. But great marketing directors don't always make the best CEOs,'' said Jean Francois Prud'homme, a professor of political science who studies the presidency at the Colegio de Mexico. ``You can convince the consumers that you have a great product, but once you are running the company you also have to produce.''
Security Concerns
U.S. security concerns following the September attacks derailed his attempt to win legal status for about 3.5 million undocumented Mexican workers in the U.S. Fox has failed to win quick Congressional approval for his plans to overhaul the tax system and open up the $10 billion domestic electricity market to foreign investment.
Fox, who once warned that the nation eventually faces power shortages, appeared to play down the need for quick Congressional approval of his plans. The Supreme Court earlier this year blocked his attempt to open the industry by executive order, ruling he exceeded his presidential authority.
``We have a strong interest in this, and are negotiating it,'' he said. ``But the country's economy doesn't depend on it.''
Travel Blocked
Relations with Congress have become so unproductive that legislators used their constitutional power earlier this year to block him from traveling to Canada and the U.S., where he had planned to meet Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates. Analysts say his reform agenda is likely to be bogged down until at least July of next year, when mid-term Congressional elections are scheduled.
Electoral officials are investigating whether a private fundraising group, called Friends of Fox, illegally accepted donations from abroad during his 2000 campaign. In the interview, Fox sought to distance himself from the group, which is under court order to open its accounts to federal investigators.
``This isn't my business,'' Fox said. ``This is a matter that concerns an association made up of citizens who make their own decisions. I was the candidate of the National Action Party and my party complied with the law.''
His supporters hope Fox will be rewarded for maintaining economic stability and succeed in convincing voters that an obstinate Congress has derailed key reforms in the run up to next year's elections.
U.S. Ties
Fox's victory marked the first change in power not accompanied by devaluation in decades. The benchmark Mexbol stock index is up 1 percent this year, while Brazilian stocks have fallen 18 percent, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has lost 8 percent. Mexico's commitment to meeting its spending and inflation targets helped it secure investment grade credit ratings on its bonds.
Mexico's economy has become increasingly tied to the economic cycles of the U.S., where it sends 85 percent of its exports, or about a quarter of its total economic output. The Mexican peso has weakened about 8 percent this year on concern that the U.S recovery will be delayed. Fox said the peso declines were a normal reaction to the close ties with the U.S. economy.
``We have a freely floating peso, and it will find its level,'' Fox said. ``Mexico is in this situation with the peso at about 10 per dollar, but the Economy is working well and fundamentals are very secure. We are satisfied with the way things are.''
************ Mexico Secrets: Envelope Holds Ghosts of 70's By TIM WEINER
EXICO CITY, June 29 - A sealed envelope in the hands of President Vicente Fox holds the names of 74 former government officials who may bear responsibility for torturing and killing hundreds of leftists in Mexico.
The widows, widowers, brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers of the disappeared would very much like to know whether one of those men was also called Mr. President: Luis Echeverría, who ruled Mexico from 1970 to 1976.
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Mr. Echeverría, now 80, has answered them with three blunt words: "I'm not responsible." No one has proved otherwise. But his assertion will be tested as a special prosecutor begins a formal investigation of thousands of newly opened files from Mexico's now disbanded secret police.
Mr. Echeverría may be called to give testimony to the prosecutor in days to come. In Mexico, where no ex-president ever has been questioned under oath about his actions in office, much less prosecuted for them, it would be like Richard Nixon being compelled to tell all about Watergate under oath after leaving the White House.
But President Fox insists that everyone in Mexico is now subject to the rule of law - "and when I say everybody, I mean everybody."
Until now the violent battles fought by the Mexican government against its citizens have been a largely unwritten chapter of the cold war.
But at least 275 people, perhaps twice that number, died after they were illegally detained during a never-acknowledged "dirty war" fought by Mexico's government from the late 1960's into the early 1980's, according to the government's own human rights commission.
The commission privately examined the secret police files and interviewed hundreds of witnesses and former officials before turning over the sealed list of those it held responsible to Mr. Fox.
The violence rose and crested in the years from 1968, when Mr. Echeverría was interior secretary, the nation's most powerful internal security officer, through his six years as president. In retirement, Mr. Echeverría remains a living emblem of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, which ran Mexico from 1929 to 2000.
During the cold war, the government and the party - there was no difference between the two - made a public show of sympathy to Castro's Cuba and harbored leftists fleeing repression in other Latin American nations.
At home it was another story.
The government used every power from wiretaps to torture for gathering information on its opponents. It co-opted and controlled dissent as best it could and, failing that, crushed it. It inflicted what it deemed an acceptable level of violence, including extrajudicial death sentences.
It manipulated the media to keep a great deal of what it was doing out of the newspapers and off the air.
The case of El Quemado, for example, remains untold. In 1972 in that little village in the state of Guerrero, Mr. Echeverría's security forces seized 95 men accused of sheltering rebels. The men disappeared into the labyrinth of the state, according to their survivors.
Many tales of torture surfaced before the human rights commission. One witness, who was not identified by the commission, described how six secret police agents had kidnapped her husband, raped her, forced her to watch as they inflicted electric shocks on her 14-month-old daughter, and taunted her all the while, saying, "You'll beg us to kill you."
As it grapples with stories like that one, Mexico is also struggling to decide how to subject former government officials to the law.
It will fall to the newly appointed special prosecutor, Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, to determine whether and how to prosecute the disappearances and deaths. He is believed to be ready to call Mr. Echeverría to testify in private about what happened 30 years ago in the heart of Mexico City on June 10, 1971.
That day, roughly 8,000 student protesters marched on the city's central square. A secret police unit called the Falcons attacked the marchers, and 29 people are believed to have died at their hands - some that day, some after interrogation and torture.
Afterward, President Echeverría refused to admit that anyone had been killed. No one ever was charged in the deaths.
His government described its domestic opponents as terrorists, and many were indeed dedicated to the violent overthrow of the state. Many others, hindsight suggests, were idealists caught up in the romance of the student revolts that swept the world in 1968.
In the last two decades, in 24 nations, new regimes have tried to hold old ones accountable for political crimes with so-called truth commissions.
South Africa granted amnesty to killers and torturers of the apartheid era who confessed in public. Guatemala concluded that military and civilian rulers were responsible for nearly 200,000 deaths during four decades of repression. Yugoslavia began four months ago to investigate the last decade's war crimes in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
But very few countries have charged their past presidents with crimes. Most notably, Chile chose not to prosecute Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the country's military dictator from 1973 to 1990.
Under intense pressure from the PRI, Mr. Fox did not establish a truth commission. The former ruling party, which still holds a plurality in the Mexican Congress, publicly warned the president against mounting a witch hunt for political gain.
Mr. Fox chose instead to leave the prosecution to the prosecutors. But Mexican law may raise insurmountable obstacles to a trial of government officials from the 1970's, among them a 30-year statute of limitations for the severest charges, like murder.
Beyond the law stands a tradition of impunity. Yet the law seems to hold no bar to Mr. Echeverría's testifying in civil or criminal proceedings.
The idea has captured some people's imaginations.
One commentator, Luis Eduardo Villarreal Ríos, argued in a recent syndicated newspaper column that Mr. Echeverría's "political ability to evade history's judgment" and his "twisted versions of his involvement in the crimes" of the government could not be left unquestioned.
Another tool for investigators is Mexico's new freedom of information act, which took effect this month. It prohibits the government from withholding any official document describing "grave violations" of human rights or "crimes against humanity."
That new openness might help eliminate disappearances, which are not entirely a thing of the past in Mexico. In a new report, Amnesty International lists four people as having disappeared while in federal or state police custody since Mr. Fox took office in December 2000.
One way or another, whether through trials or through trial-and-error searches of the archives, it seems likely that a reckoning is at hand.
"Under no circumstances are we going to cover up for the people who committed these crimes," Mr. Fox said last week at a ceremony at Mexico's national archives, on the occasion making the the police files open to government investigators and the families of the disappeared.
"We are not looking for ghosts," he said. "We are looking for the truth."
One hard truth is that those who fell afoul of Mexico's secret police often paid with their lives.
Among them was Edmundo del Campo. On June 10, 1971, he died at the hands of the Falcons. His brother, Jesús Martín del Campo, now 54, also was among the marchers on that day when the Falcons, a secret police unit, attacked protesters in Mexico City.
Jesús served as a member of Congress from 1994 to 2000 and is now Mexico City's deputy treasurer. This month, on the 31st anniversary of the killings, he filed suit against Mr. Echeverría, calling him the intellectual author of the Falcon killings.
"In Mexico, ex-presidents live like the absolute monarchs of yesteryear, as if they were omnipotent," Mr. del Campo said in an interview. "Yet they are flesh and blood. In his day Echeverría was all-powerful. But now he, like anyone else, should have to stand before authority."
Under Mr. Echeverría, the security forces responsible for the disappearances included senior army officers and members of the now disbanded Federal Security Directorate.
In later years leadership also came from officials of Mexico's equivalent of the C.I.A., which is called the Center for Investigations and National Security, or Cisen for short. It was Cisen, which remains part of the Interior Ministry, that held the secret archives.
Other secret files, held by the United States, may shed light on the Echeverría era. The few American documents declassified to date strongly suggest that Washington was well aware of what went on in those years.
In 1973, M. J. Ortwein, the United States consul in Guadalajara, sent one such cable to his superiors at the State Department. It bluntly described Mr. Echeverría's standing orders to Mexico's security forces.
"The orders are to take drastic measures," the cable said. "All of the authorities that are working now against the terrorists are authorized to skirt the legal process."