Group’s Anti-Corruption Crusade in Mexican Town Mirrors a Movement

ZIHUATANEJO, Mexico — Political corruption was hardly a new phenomenon in this sleepy Pacific Coast town when Salvador Castro and dozens of other local professionals decided last year to do something about it.

For half a century, the retired literature professor said, he had lived with it: the local officials skimming money from the city coffers; the high-level political leaders making big profits by selling their land to the federal government for tourism projects.

But there was something about last year’s municipal budget that convinced Castro and his colleagues that the time for change had come.

Millions of dollars had been allotted to basic development projects that had inflated budgets or were never built, the group insisted, citing city and state documents that the citizen activists amassed during months of research. The money was meant for projects--water mains, bridges, clinics and wells--that the town desperately needs.

So, emboldened by President Ernesto Zedillo’s call for an end to official corruption, Castro’s group formed a local civic association.

They traveled to Mexico City and handed the documents over to federal investigators, who are now reportedly probing Zihuatanejo’s finances and its former mayor along with dozens of other local officials in other towns in separate inquiries nationwide.

No criminal charges have been filed against the former mayor, and The Times could not independently confirm the civic association’s allegations. The federal comptroller’s office refused to confirm or deny the pending investigation, citing the agency’s policy in such matters.

But Castro said federal auditors notified his group that they have found serious irregularities in former Mayor Armando Federico Gonzalez’s use of public funds and that their investigation is continuing.

Zihuatanejo, said Castro and his self-described apolitical group, is a microcosm of how local corruption--sanctioned by a one-party system in many of Mexico’s towns and villages--has plagued the country through the years.

As key midterm elections approach, the 6-month-old Municipal Civic Assn. of Zihuatanejo illustrates a new phenomenon in Mexico: a rising grass-roots movement against corruption that has made graft, embezzlement and bribery a central campaign issue in the July 6 polls. The elections will decide whether Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, retains its seven-decade hold on the nation’s Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress.

At the national level, each week of the election campaign has brought new allegations of multimillion-dollar corruption among the family of Mexico’s former president and senior federal, state and local officials. Responding to the allegations, the PRI’s national president asserted that such misconduct is a thing of the past in the ruling party. Although most of the national allegations dwarf the complaints of the small citizens group in Zihuatanejo, the association is taking a stand.

“What has happened here may not seem big by comparison to corruption at the national level, but it is very big for us,” said association Vice President Rafael Sosa Vega, who owns two shoe stores in town.

“It’s big because it affects every area of our society. It affects the way our town has developed, which affects our family incomes. And it causes a further disintegration of our family values,” he said. “So what we are trying to do is raise the consciousness of the people, to create a moral capacity among the people to fight this corruption right here at home.”

Already, the association’s crusade against Gonzalez, who could not be reached for comment, appears to have affected the local congressional race.

When Gonzalez’s three-year mayoral term ended--his second in the past two decades--local PRI officials considered him a leading candidate for the party’s congressional nomination here, PRI sources said.

Then, in February, Castro’s group took its documents and petitions demanding that Gonzalez be investigated to Zedillo’s office and to the office of federal comptrollers in Mexico City.

A month later, PRI sources said, the party chose another candidate--a state official with less charisma and name recognition than Gonzalez. Local PRI leader Jorge Luis Perez Lopez, however, said the former mayor is working in a key position in the party’s congressional campaign.

“Of course corruption is an important issue for the people in this campaign,” Perez said, echoing the party’s new official hard line against corruption. “The people want to see an honest government.”

Gonzalez’s personal assistant, Juan Chavelas, insisted that the former mayor is innocent. All the allegations against Gonzalez are false, Chavelas said. He charged that Castro’s group has little public support and is aligned with the conservative opposition National Action Party, or PAN, a charge that Castro denies. And Chavelas asserted that an audit of Zihuatanejo’s accounts by the PRI-controlled state legislature earlier this year found no irregularities.

But Maria de la Luz, the leading opposition candidate for the local congressional seat from the left-leaning Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, said: “Corruption definitely has come up [as a campaign issue] and as a problem for local development here.”

As an example, she cited what Castro’s group singled out as the most upsetting of 17 major public works projects that the group questions: a $3-million project to bring clean drinking water to the old section of Zihuatanejo.

“It was a phantom project, pure and simple,” Castro said. “And all the money is gone.”

There is no evidence that the project was ever begun, although the former mayor’s aides assert that the money was spent on studies and early contract work laying the groundwork for building.

When asked about corruption, local officials point to previous federal governments that enriched one side of town while ignoring the other.

The skewed development of still largely impoverished Zihuatanejo compared with the glittering stretch of luxury hotels, modern roads and swank nightclubs of the new Ixtapa resort area nearby is the most graphic result of what local officials say was corruption at the highest levels of previous Mexican governments.

Arturo Vargas Najera, Zihuatanejo’s director of urban planning, said the decision to develop Ixtapa--which is within the municipality that includes Zihuatanejo but several miles outside its centuries-old center--was made under the federal administration of former Mexican President Luis Echeverria Alvarez, who Najera and other local officials assert owned large tracts of land in the area targeted for massive tourism development.

“The phenomenon of corruption,” Najera said, sighing, “has become generalized throughout all of Mexico.

“What happened is, all the federal resources and development has gone into the Ixtapa side, and the people who flooded here to work in the new tourist resorts came to the Zihuatanejo side to live. They invaded land on this side, built shanties and put an enormous strain on City Hall’s few resources.”

The result, said local PRI leader Perez, is that “Ixtapa is Europe. Zihuatanejo is the Third World.”

Both Perez and Najera insisted that local corruption is not to blame for the sharp contrast in Zihuatanejo’s development. But Castro’s group--along with foreign and local business owners in town, opposition politicians and many residents interviewed randomly in the street--sharply disagreed.

“In general, companies that have wanted to come and invest here, when they see the level of corruption, they don’t want anything to do with Zihuatanejo,” PRD candidate De la Luz said.

Leigh Roth, a Berkeley resident who handles vacation rentals in Zihuatanejo, said that tourism has been booming in town for several years but that corruption--and the low credibility of local officials--has deterred developers and left Zihuatanejo with too few accommodations to meet demand, let alone grow.

“There’s a terrible problem with a lack of accommodations,” she said, noting that Zihuatanejo has two elegant, high-priced resorts mixed in with “a bunch of crumbling hotels,” while Ixtapa has nearly a dozen modern resorts.

“Very few are building because of the credibility problem here,” she said.

Roth is suing the owners of one of the few hotels under construction in town for allegedly violating a host of city codes in a project that was approved by Gonzalez’s government.

The new hotel has insufficient waste-treatment facilities and blocks the view of several dozen beachfront properties, her lawsuit asserts. Officials under the town’s new mayor said they are trying to resolve the dispute.

Castro and Sosa, who said their civic association was created specifically to stop corruption and encourage future development, said they sense that the local government that took office Dec. 1 is committed to ending corrupt practices.

“Corruption here and in Mexico in general is being erased little by little,” Sosa said. “But we believe that we need radical changes. We are a peaceful, social movement. We are not revolutionaries. And we are completely apolitical. All that concerns us is the . . . people.”

Already, however, Castro and Sosa said they feel that the group--by its very existence--has won a small victory.

“There’s a real phenomenon taking place in towns like this: The political awakening of the people,” Sosa said. “Before, the people said: ‘OK. Politicians steal. They rob from here. They rob from there. But we can still eat.’

“Now there’s a new feeling that the great resources of our town, of our country, should be shared more equally. There’s a feeling that the city’s money is the people’s money. The people are waking up. But it is, of course, only the beginning.”