Pubdate: Fri, 29 Nov 2002 Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA) Copyright: 2002 San Jose Mercury News Contact: http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/390 Author: Tim Weiner, New York Times MEXICO TRYING TO TRACK SOURCE OF HUGE ACCOUNT Ex-President's Brother Calls Funds Legitimate MEXICO CITY - More than $100 million is sitting frozen in a Swiss bank account once controlled by Ra=FAl Salinas de Gortari, the brother of a former president of Mexico. Now, after seven years, the source of those millions may become clear. Wednesday, Swiss officials gave Mexico's government thousands of pages of files from a long but unresolved money-laundering investigation of the Salinas account. No one -- not the Swiss, nor the Mexicans, nor American officials -- has ever figured out the origin of the money. The Swiss suspect it came from cocaine deals in which Ra=FAl Salinas offered drug kingpins high-level protection for their shipments. Investigators in the Mexican government think it may have flowed from a secret slush fund traditionally controlled by presidents of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ran Mexico from 1929 until 2000. The answer is crucial for the former governing party, which is already trying to extinguish smoldering suspicions that it skimmed tens of millions from the state-run oil company, Pemex, to finance its failed 2000 presidential campaign. If the money trail can indeed be traced back from Switzerland to the party's headquarters, rather than a cocaine stash, party leaders may have a harder time trying to refurbish their tainted image. They are striving to regain power from President Vicente Fox, the first outsider to defeat them. Ra=FAl Salinas has been in a maximum-security prison since 1995, serving a 27-year sentence for ordering the slaying of his brother-in-law, who was the Institutional Revolutionary Party's secretary-general. His brother, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, president from 1988 to 1994, lives in self-imposed exile in Ireland. Ra=FAl Salinas has always maintained that the money came from legitimate business deals, in which Mexican businessmen and investors entrusted him with their funds. ``I have suffered the consequences of manufactured evidence, bought-and-paid-for testimony, and the conspiracy of Mexican authorities,'' he said in a letter from prison this week. The Swiss -- whose banking laws had long shielded billions stolen by regimes or dictators including the Nazis, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines -- began during the 1990s to cooperate with international investigations. In the Salinas case, the money trail has been traced from a numbered account in Zurich through an elaborate labyrinth. The $103 million in Switzerland was held in the name of a Cayman Islands shell corporation, Trocca Ltd., secretly controlled by Salinas. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek