Clinton Administration Linked To        Mexican Corruption

Sexual activities aside, there's plenty of evidence of complicity in high crimes by the Clinton administration

EXCLUSIVE TO THE SPOTLIGHT

By Martin Mann

While the president's lechery and denials dominate headlines and newscasts coast to coast, the mainstream media continues to ignore a number of far more serious lies, perpetrated by Bill Clinton and his White House entourage.

Highlighting this trend, Swiss prosecutors and narcotics investigators compiled a confidential report this summer on the drug-dealing, money-laundering and allied racketeering masterminded by former Mexican President Carlos Salinas, and his family, with the aid of Wall Street banks. The year-long Swiss inquiry was triggered by the discovery that President Salinas and his brother Raul had stashed hundreds of millions of dollars of their ill-gotten loot in Swiss banks.

Americans learned the details of the secret file on Mexico's former ruling family on June 22, 1998, from The SPOTLIGHT. This populist newspaper's investigative team was first to obtain access  to the guarded, 370-page Swiss report from well-placed diplomatic sources. The Swiss findings confirmed, as first reported by The SPOTLIGHT last year, that the ruinous North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), as ratified by Congress, was the result of corrupt conspiracy between the Clinton White House and the drug-ridden Salinas regime in the early & 90s. By that time, the U.S. government had more than ample proof that the Salinas administration was little more than a well-organized crime syndicate, law enforcement sources say.

But Clinton directed Attorney General Janet Reno to suppress the reports of U.S. investigators.  She was instructed by the president to cover up all evidence incriminating the Salinas administration in order to push NAFTA through Congress without facing awkward questions about opening up the U.S. economy to a gangster regime south of the border, these sources have asserted.

TIMES FOLLOWS SUIT

On September 19, more than a month after the original SPOTLIGHT scoop, The New York Times announced on its front page that it had discovered the secret Swiss investigative report and obtained access to a partial copy of it. After interviewing more than 90 former drug traffickers, Salinas associates and other witnesses, the Swiss probers concluded that while it held the levers of power, the Salinas clan, Mexico&'s first family, used its widespread influence . . . to organize an elaborate network of protection for drug smugglers, The New York Times revealed.

"When Carlos Salinas de Gortari became president of Mexico in 1988, [his brother] Raul Salinas de Gortari assumed control over practically all drug shipments through Mexico," the Times review of the Swiss findings confirmed.

"For the family of a former president who was once celebrated as the bold architect of a new relationship between Mexico and the United States, the man who championed NAFTA and brought to power a new generation of Ivy-league educated technocrats, the report paints a devastating portrait," the Times conceded sorrowfully.

 What the story does not mention is that The New York Times had been  one of the leading celebrants of the Salinas presidency, hailing this vicious druglord as a "statesman" and a "reformer" who blazed the way for a "new era . . . in Mexico's history".  But beyond the complicity of the mainstream media in this mammoth deception operation, the Swiss report raises grave questions about the role played by the Clinton administration in covering up the crimes of the Salinas regime in order to promote NAFTA. According to The New York Times, U.S. law enforcement officials now admit key informants and the evidence they provided about the Salinas scandals were "misused or ignored" in Washington until the Swiss sought them out.

Was this the result of an illegal organized cover-up orchestrated by the White House and executed by Attorney General Reno? A congressional probe of that issue, involving lies far more damaging to the national interest than any sexual misconduct, may well link Clinton to high crimes more directly impeachable than anything in the recent Starr report.