Accused Narco Banker to Host Bush-Calderón Meeting in Yucatán

By Al Giordano
Special to The Narco News Bulletin

March 11, 2007

Eight years ago, an “anti-drug” summit was held between US President Bill Clinton and his Mexican counterpart Ernesto Zedillo on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. The February 1999 meeting took place at a hacienda in the town of Temozón Sur, near kilometer 148 of the Mérida-Campeche highway, a posh estate owned by Roberto Hernández Ramírez, then owner of Banamex, the National Bank of Mexico.

Hernández had been accused – publicly and via a criminal complaint – by the daily newspaper Por Esto! of trafficking tons of Colombian cocaine through his Caribbean coasta properties on that peninsula since 1997. The newspaper published photos of the drug, the smuggling boats, the Colombian garbage strewn upon the shores, the airfield and small airplanes that, witnesses testified, brought the cocaine north to the United States, with confirmation from sources as diverse as local fishermen and high officials of the Mexican Armed Forces.

I covered that presidential summit eight years ago, investigated the charges for three months, and published the first of many reports that May (see “Clinton and His Mexican Narco-Pals,” Boston Phoenix, May 17, 1999). Follow-up reports and translations of Por Esto!’s investigations appeared on Narco News after we began publishing in April 2000. By July of that year, Narco News, the Por Esto! publisher Mario Menéndez Rodríguez and I found ourselves as defendants in the New York Supreme Court from a lawsuit filed by Banamex. The bank had hired the mega-lobbying and law firm Akin Gump, of Washington DC, to harass us with that nuisance suit. More than a year of our lives was dominated by the painstaking presentation of all the evidence to the Court. In December 2001, the New York Supreme Court delivered a thunderous blow to Banamex (by then part of Citigroup, the world’s wealthiest financial institution): it dismissed Banamex’s case, and established, for the first time, First Amendment protections for Internet journalists in the United States.

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