Killing of ex-president's brother still a Mexico mystery

MEXICO CITY -- It has been a year since the brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari was found suffocated, but the state and federal authorities have yet to untangle the motives for his killing, much less arrest his killers and their accomplices.

The investigation has taken several surprising turns. Two elite federal agents have been arrested on charges of trying to extort money from the brother, Enrique Salinas de Gortari, yet they have not been tied to his killing. Two other agents have gone into hiding after being named as suspects in the extortion plot.

Salinas' lawyer and another close friend have been arrested; investigators say they failed to mention that two days after the killing, they tried to collect $2.9 million that Salinas had arranged to borrow from a friend, perhaps to pay off blackmailers.

Salinas' companion has fled to the United States after learning that investigators wanted to talk to her a second time because of discrepancies in her account. To top it off, the federal government has seized control of the extortion investigation from Mexico because it involves members of the Federal Investigation Agency, Mexico's equivalent of the FBI.

But so far, despite interviewing 229 witnesses and conducting more than 70 studies of forensic evidence, the Mexico state prosecutor, Alfonso Navarrete Prida, has not been able to lay his hands on Salina's killers. Nor has the federal internal affairs investigator, Ismael Gonzalez Verra, reported any progress in solving the crime. The investigation appears to be stalled.

The Salinas inquiry is fast becoming a study in how high-profile crimes often go unsolved by the law enforcement authorities in Mexico, where investigative techniques are behind the times, the police are often involved in crimes, and indictments and trials are kept secret.

That a major case goes unsolved is not unusual here. It happens so often that criminologists say most Mexicans have come to expect little from the authorities.

"Our apparatus has collapsed in terms of credibility," said Ernesto Lopez Portillo of the Institute for Security and Democracy in Mexico City, which studies criminal justice issues. "When investigations get bogged down, the society simply has no way to understand what's happening. The institutions react to the scandal, and as time goes on, interest wanes and there is no public accounting. This case is no different."

Carlos Salinas led Mexico from 1988 to 1994 and remains a power broker in the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the authoritarian and corrupt machine that ran Mexico for 70 years before being defeated in the 2000 elections. He is widely reviled for the economic collapse he set in motion at the end of his term.

Enrique Salinas, an engineer who never entered politics but became wealthy during his brother's term, was found dead on Dec. 6 of last year, inside a car he had borrowed from his companion, Hilda Deneken, state investigators say. He had been beaten and had a plastic bag over his head. The cause of death was asphyxiation. He was 52.

A security camera in the upper-class suburban Mexico City neighborhood where his body was found recorded an armored black Jeep Cherokee leaving the scene with at least two people inside. The camera did not record the plate number, nor were the people recognizable.

At the time, the French police were looking for Enrique Salinas in connection with several questionable financial transactions between him and another brother, Raul, in the 1990s, in which large amounts of money were laundered through real estate deals. Raul Salinas still faces charges here stemming from the discovery of millions of unexplained dollars found in his Swiss bank accounts.

Relying on testimony from Salinas' adult children and other family members, Navarrete, the state prosecutor, has charged that federal agents were trying to use the Interpol request from France to extort $2.9 million from Salinas. He said he believed that one of the extortionists had roughed up Salinas to scare him and that he died during the torture.

The two federal agents in custody photographed Salinas' house, visited him and called him on the telephone, state investigators say. Family members told state investigators that the federal agents had demanded money.

After the killing, federal agents, tipped off by the local police, got to the crime scene before the state police, ostensibly to confirm the victim's identity. Later that day, a federal agent sent a document to Interpol saying Salinas was not in Mexico, which was true only in a spiritual sense, state investigators said.

Still, Navarrete has never been able to tie the two federal agents he has in jail to the killing itself, and now he says the inquiry has been taken out of his hands by the federal internal affairs prosecutor.

He maintains that the two higher-ranking agents who are on the run -- Eleazar Ruben Munoz Valdez and Nahzm Garcma Ortiz -- can identify the killers. So, too, he says, can Deneken, who is believed to be in the United States. All three knew whom Salinas went to meet the night of his death, Navarrete said.

"All of them are key pieces to find out the intellectual authors of the extortion against Enrique Salinas and, with that, to be able to identify the killers," he said recently.

A spokesman for the federal attorney general's office, Jose Luis Manjarrez, said he could not comment on the internal affairs investigation.

There are other intriguing pieces to the puzzle. Eight months before he died, Salinas bought a life insurance policy that would pay his three children from a previous marriage $4 million if he were to die during a kidnapping or extortion attempt, investigators say.

And a week before the killing, a news magazine published details of Salinas' personal fortune, showing he was a multimillionaire as late as 1998, when he divorced Adriana Lagarde, the mother of his children.

Three days before his death, Salinas visited a businessman in Monterrey, Mexico, and reached an agreement to borrow $2.9 million. A close friend, Jose Ricardo Hernandez, and his lawyer, Mariano de JesusJeszs Flores, accompanied him on the trip, investigators say.

Two days after the killing, the friend and the lawyer returned to Monterrey and tried unsuccessfully to collect the money from the businessman, investigators say. The lawyer's cell phone records show numerous calls to the Federal Investigation Agency in the days leading up to the killing, they say.

The day before his death, Salinas told Deneken that he had to go to a meeting that afternoon, state investigators say. He also asked to borrow her car, her telephone and some blue clothing, they say, but Deneken mentioned none of that to investigators.

According to witnesses, Deneken then accompanied Salinas as he left through a rear alleyway, apparently to avoid detection, then slipped out onto the street where her car was parked, investigators say. She gave him the keys and her telephone. He drove away at 1 p.m.

He was found dead the next morning. An unsigned note on his body said that someone had been harassing him since 1995 and that his children "have had to confront great risk to their security, both physical and emotional."

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