Guest Column
Random Readings: A hard look at the PAN
- Random Readings: A hard look at the PAN
- By Kelly Arthur Garret
- The Herald Mexico-El Universal
- October 9, 2006
Once in power, a party tends to subordinate its ideals to the more pressing task of staying in power. By corollary, that party will flirt with the fine line between hardball politics and illegality, occasionally crossing it. Prize-winning journalist José Reveles’ investigative report in book form contends that the National Action Party (PAN) — which has ruled Mexico for six years and plans to continue ruling for six more — is no exception to these axioms.
That should surprise no sufficiently cynical observer. But the PAN has been at least partly successful in claiming an exemption to the immutable laws of politics via its self-definition as the purest of the parties. Reveles’s title, “The PAN’s Dirty Hands” is a conscious reversal of the “Clean Hands” campaign theme that helped the PAN win the biggest bloc of legislators as well as the presidency in the July 2 election.
That’s not all that helped them win it, according to Reveles. Several chapters review the now-familiar irregularities that tainted the Felipe Calderón campaign, from the president’s orchestrated media strategy on behalf of his party’s candidate (“Vicente Spots,” Reveles calls him) to the e-mail blitz smearing the PAN’s chief rival and run out of federal government offices.
But the bulk of the text is dedicated to an even more serious allegation. Reveles seeks to show that the PAN not only took advantage of its incumbency to manipulate social development funds to maximize votes (a Mexican, if not worldwide, tradition), but actually diverted to its campaign coffers 55 million pesos in federal assistance money meant to provide housing to the poorest of the poor.
If true — and if prosecuted and proven — that would put prominent PAN officials in jail.
To make his case, Reveles uses the time-honored tools of the investigative journalist’s trade — documents, testimony, interviews, leaks, direct observation and chutzpah. But his most potent weapon was a whistleblower, a tell-all insider with the spy novel name of Arnulfo Montes Cuen. Reveles will probably be the first to acknowledge that “Las manos sucias del PAN” is as much Montes Cuen’s work as his.
Montes Cuen was a priísta of the old school before falling out with the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, and going freelance. An expert in the dissemination of social development funds, Montes Cuen was eventually contracted by the PAN to help the Fox administration, which was ideologically opposed to “populism” and “government handouts,” navigate its way through the unfamiliar territory of government assistance programs.
Montes Cuen understood that part of his job description was to find political advantage for the PAN in the doling out of so much money. But when he was specifically ordered in early 2006 to arrange for the deposit of housing assistance money approved by the Social Development Secretariat to the private bank accounts of two PAN functionaries, he balked, resigned, and sought to go public.
This is where the story becomes all too familiar. Montes Cuen’s whistle-blowing did indeed lead to an arrest — his own. He was detained and flown to Sonora, where he was jailed for several days before released on bail. In the meantime, the book relates, the fund diversion was carried off in his absence with a slight modification. The 55 million pesos ended up in the account of an organization called Huehuetépetl Comunitaria, A.C.
The unique characteristic of Huehuetépetl Comunitaria, according to Reveles, is that it didn’t exist. “The organization that received the 55 million pesos is a simple facade, a phantom organization,” writes Reveles. Reporters checked out the given address, an apartment in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City, and found it empty. Neighbors said the place was only used on occasion by young people performing curative ceremonies with incense, bones and hibachi-like portable ovens called anafres.
The sordid affair, Reveles demonstrates over 145 pages, naming names and listing documents, led to one thing: “The money ended up in the pockets of various (PAN) politicians, to be used for election campaigns, with some crumbs distributed in kind as construction materials among the extremely impoverished.”
A CALL TO LEGAL ACTION
So what are we to make of all this? The book, written in Spanish and unlikely ever to be translated, is clearly a call to legal action. But how good are the chances that any action will be taken? And should action be taken? In other words, how credible is this exposé?
Reveles has a few things going in his favor. One is his own reputation. A founding staffer with the critical newsweekly Proceso, Reveles is a 62-year-old reporter for El Financiero and the winner of the 2001 National Journalism Prize. His book is a well-documented and serious piece of reporting that can be disputed but not ignored.
Another is the thoughtful prologue written by Lorenzo Meyer, who along with Enrique Krauze is the most prestigious of Mexican historians. Meyer would not lend his name to a frivolous pursuit, so his very presence on the pages lends a cachet to the endeavor.
Meyer’s prologue lauds Reveles’s investigative journalism skills and speculates on why such reporting is still rare in Mexico. One reason, he posits, is crass economics. Most editors and publishers aren’t enamored of the idea of a reporter spending months and plenty of money poking around for information that may or may not lead to a story.
Another reason can be traced back to the rein of Porfirio Díaz on before and after the turn of the 20th century. (It’s worth mentioning here that Meyer traces most things back to the Porfiriato or earlier; that’s what historians do.)
From Díaz through the PRI years, the dissent that investigative journalism inevitably implies wasn’t exactly encouraged over the last century.
I would add a third discouragement to the kind of investigative reporting that Reveles engages in: It often doesn’t seem to do much good. “The PAN’s Dirty Hands” may turn out to be another case in point. It was originally released in June, just before the vote, and promptly vanished from the public consciousness. This was a time, you’ll remember, that charges of lax ethics were flying in all direction (remember the cuñado incómodo?), and Reveles’s work may have been lost in the fog, or dismissed as just one more partisan attack.
Perhaps because of that, Reveles, Montes Cuen and some Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) activists staged a relaunch press conference at the end of September, as though the book were hot off the press. The press conference took place at the Legislative Palace of San Lázaro, creating the curious circumstance of an investigative reporter and whistleblower accusing PAN politicians of using public funds to finance their campaigns, while several of the accused, newly elected, were working in their offices a few hundred feet away.
If nothing else, this book will serve as a sort of touchstone for the kind of antagonistic politics that promises to reign for at least the next three years. The 2006 election and its aftermath exposed gaping wounds in the body politic that nobody seems particularly interested in healing. Whatever your ideological leanings, and whether you buy Reveles’s argument or not, the problem is not going to go away any time soon. How well we get through this stretch of bad weather, and whether any good can come of it, will probably depend more on journalists like Reveles than on the politicians in the thick of the storm.
kelly.garrett@eluniversal.com.mx
The Herald Mexico-El Universal article at: http://www2.eluniversal.com.mx/pls/impreso/noticia.html?id_nota=35212&tabla=articulos
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