Mexico Agency Focus of U.S. Drug Probe

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Justice Department is investigating allegations that some of Mexico’s top business and political power brokers used a Mexican government agency for criminal enterprises that included laundering drug profits and other illicit money through the agency’s U.S. bank accounts and contracts, sources familiar with the probe said.

A focus of the investigation is whether Raul Salinas de Gortari, older brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, used the agency--a federal food program known as Conasupo--to shield cocaine shipments into the United States and to launder drug money for the Gulf cartel through the agency’s U.S. bank accounts and purchasing contracts, the sources said.

Raul Salinas was a high-ranking official at the food agency for part of his brother’s six-year administration and is now in prison pending trial on charges of murder and illegal enrichment.

The investigation does not mark the first time that Mexican officials have been targeted by corruption probes. But the new allegations involving Conasupo suggest the possibility that the machinery of an entire governmental agency was put at the disposal of drug dealers.

“There was an infrastructure within Mexico that includes Colombian and Mexican narcotics traffickers and high-level government officials acting in concert, and that’s what we’re going after,” a source familiar with the investigation said.

The investigation, which began about 18 months ago and has rapidly expanded in the last three months, is being conducted jointly by the FBI, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the Treasury Department and is being overseen by the Justice Department.

Stanley Arkin, one of Raul Salinas’ New York attorneys, described allegations that his client used his government agency for trafficking drugs and money laundering as “self-interested, lying baloney.”