"A Dublinesque atmosphere, with rain and cold" was conjured up in Mexico City recently at an unusual book launch. It was intended to be an inclement day for the battered reputation of the former president, "Don Carlos" Salinas de Gortari, as an unmerciful satire of him was unveiled by a left-wing maverick and former congressman.
But last week, Carlos Salinas hit back, not at his many political critics, but at Mexico's judicial authorities. They have been trying since early 1995 to make murder and embezzlement charges against his incarcerated brother, Raul, stick. Following a visit to the Mexican embassy in Dublin last Monday to give evidence for the first time "as a witness" in the case, Salinas accused the attorney general's office of abuses in the investigation "that degrade the rule of law". He complained of "repugnant and aggressive" methods and claimed his own voluntary statements to the judge had been twisted by investigators.
Unreliable witnesses, some of them criminals, some of them anonymous, some of them with forced statements or statements resulting from bribery, had been recruited by the authorities, Salinas alleged. Even his brother's lawyers had been intimidated, he added.
Last August, when I first met Carlos Salinas, he expressed concern that his brother would not get a fair trial. Now he has finally thrown the book at the Mexican legal system. In turn, his attack has brought condemnation from the political left and right. A wellknown commentator, Carlos Monsivais, said last week that Salinas has been the victim of his own self-deceit.
The other book, published by the prestigious house of Grijalbo, is a thinly disguised fiction - claiming to be the memoirs of Carlos Salinas. Salinas told me shortly before the launch of Mem- oirs of a Modern Leader that it was "a fake". And indeed it is. The author, Marco Rascon, has adopted the style of the Harvardeducated Salinas in a satire which has greatly exercised Mexico's newspaper-reading and political elite.
Rascon includes astral charts suggesting they are needed to understand what really happened during the Salinas presidency, and particularly during Mexico's "year of living dangerously", as the writer Carlos Fuentes has called 1994. During it, Salinas left the presidency - and later Mexico, following his brother's arrest - eventually making Ireland his family base for the past 18 months.
Rascon says the Signs of the Zodiac, particularly Salinas's sign, Aries, are more interesting than the police reports and that the investigators need to be astrologers and chamanes (medicine men) to get to the bottom of the whole saga. The statement from Salinas last week suggested that the former president may be reading the book. He referred to the attorney's "artificial proofs" using witches and chamanes - a reference to the use of a witch's services to find a buried body - which turned out to have been planted on Raul's ranch.
The Rascon paperback also contains fictional letters from Carlos Salinas to Raul in prison. Raul Salinas is in fact charged with illegally acquiring up to $2 million while in a state job the former president gave him, as well as the 1994 murder of the general secretary of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). These charges followed another 1994 scandal, the murder of Salinas's chosen successor.
A "letter to his publisher" extols the virtues of Salinas's privatisation policies, his "social liberalism", and his negotiation of a would-be First World Mexico into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), with the old gringo enemy and Canada.
The Salinas presidency was followed by a currency collapse. It left all - except a new super class of billionaires, created under his rule - struggling to make ends meet in the face of inflation as high as 200 per cent.
The letter to the publisher, the last chapter, is signed by "Governor" Salinas, and is written in a country that has become another US state.on is here playing on a Salinas statement that he would like to return to Mexico sometime.
A feeling persists that Carlos Salinas is in fact still somehow ruling Mexico, as President Ernesto Zedillo continues Salinas's neo-liberal economic policies, the most radical Mexico has seen since the left-wing presidency of Lazaro Cardenas in the 1930s. In an interview, Rascon played on this too. Even Salinas's old desk, which he had ordered cut down to suit his shortish stature, and his personal staff in the presidency building of Los Pinos, are still in place where he left them, Rascon said.
Commentators see Salinas's return as president as being about as likely as that of Mikhail Gorbachev to the Kremlin. But some say darkly that "the system" will know when to allow him back.
The cover has a quotation from the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, which translates: "My stature has nothing to do with the size of my vision." After last July's landmark elections, "dinosaur" figures within the PRI took to blaming Salinas's "vision" for the party's unprecedented loss of control of the congress and the mayoralty of Mexico City. They have even tried to expel him from the party in disgrace.
Meanwhile, the former president tells me he is "making notes" of things that happened during his six-year term and maybe he will write his own memoirs. But first I'm waiting for his reaction when he finishes reading this clever if scurrilous work.