Drug Allegations Strike Mexico's High And Mighty Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit Drug Allegations Strike Mexico's High And Mighty 12:32 a.m. Jun 03, 1999 Eastern By Dan Trotta MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Two powerful Mexicans Wednesday became the latest high-profile politicians to have their names linked to drug investigations, joining a growing list of notables to suffer the politically damaging charge. Political analysts say it is no coincidence that recent allegations have surfaced at the outset of Mexico's 2000 presidential campaign, noting that such reports are readily believed by a public grown jaded by a series of drug-corruption scandals. ``It is so easy to paint everything as narco-politics,'' said Marcela Bobadilla of the Mexican Institute for Political Studies. ``It is worrisome for us as political analysts and as Mexicans that we're at the level where anything is believable.'' All three of the leading candidates for the ruling party's presidential nomination have fended off some kind of drug allegation. The New York Times reported Wednesday that Jose Liebano Saenz, the private secretary to Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, is the subject of a drug investigation in the United States even though an earlier Mexican probe cleared his name. The president's office reacted immediately, issuing a forceful statement saying Saenz had been found innocent by an ''exhaustive'' Mexican investigation and called the Times report an attempt to ``besmirch the honorability'' of Saenz. Saenz himself sent the New York Times a letter, saying Mexican prosecutors had investigated all the allegations. ``The falseness of all of them was proved,'' he said. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported that U.S. authorities had identified the prominent Hank family as a ''significant criminal threat to the United States'' because of drug-trafficking and money-laundering by the patriarch and two of his sons. Carlos Hank Gonzalez is a former Mexico City mayor, two-time cabinet minister and fabulously wealthy businessman who symbolizes the aging Mexican system of power and privilege within the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has governed Mexico for 70 straight years. Two of his sons, Carlos Hank Rhon and Jorge Hank Rhon, also were identified as having direct links to Mexican drug operations, according to the Post's U.S. sources. The elder Hank, believed to be 71 or 72 years old, was in a hospital and unable to respond Wednesday, hospital officials said. The Post story said the family denied any drug role. The Post story also said the shipping company TMM played a role in the family drug business, and that TMM was owned by the Hanks. But a TMM spokesman denied that Hank family had a role in the company, saying they were not even shareholders. ``I'm absolutely livid about this information. These allegations clearly have no basis,'' TMM spokesman Luis Calvillo told Reuters. ``If U.S. intelligence can make mistakes like bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade because they had the wrong information, they could have gotten the wrong information here, too.'' Mexicans long have accepted as true reports of corruption among public officials and the well-connected, if only because so many citizens have been shaken down by police officers. The public got a taste of the scope of corruption following the 1995 arrest of Raul Salinas, the brother of former President Carlos Salinas. Raul Salinas was arrested for murder but soon became the subject of a money-laundering probe. Swiss investigators who hope to confiscate $114 million that Raul Salinas stashed in Geneva and London say he took more than $500 million in bribes from drug traffickers. Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytcamer-06.04.99-01:50:12-4999