President Clinton's big breakthrough in the Mexican business-class speaking circuit came in December 2002, when he hauled in $175,000 for speaking at an event sponsored by Value Grupo Financiero out of Monterrey.
Grupo Financeiro is a major Mexican financial services company, with operations in Monterrey, Mexico City, Guadalajara, Chihuahua and Morelia. It provides securities trading and asset-management services. (In plain English, they are in the business of making money off of other people's money.)
The company's chairman, Benitez Gomez, is a player in Mexico's banking industry, having held previous executive or director posts with Banco Regional de Monterrey and Banco Agricola Industrial del Norte.
So, it appears President Clinton was in the door.
The following year, in October 2003, he pocketed another $150,000 as a speaking fee for Banco de Mexico in Mexico City — the nation's central bank, similar to the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank. The governor (or chairman) of the bank is Guillermo Ortiz Martinez, who served as Secretary of Communications and Transportation and later Secretary of Finance and Public Credit under Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo.
In 1998, Zedillo appointed Ortiz governor of Banco de Mexico. Ortiz was, upon the recommendation of Zedillo's successor, Vicente Fox, named to another six-year term as the bank's governor in 2004, after receiving a majority vote of approval from the Mexican Congress.
While Zedillo was president, his country's financial system melted down during the infamous "peso crisis" of 1994 and President Clinton authorized a $50 billion loan to Mexico to help bail out Zedillo, the Mexican business class, and U.S. investors who had a stake in the nation's high finances. (The bailout did nothing for the poor, or even many middle class folks and small businesses in Mexico, many of whom lost everything overnight as the crisis struck — a massive devaluation of the peso caused, in part, by lax bank lending policies. (Sound familiar?)
Zedillo took office in 1994 at the same time the free-trade mega-pact NAFTA took effect. He also was president during the Acteal massacre, which journalist Al Giordano described in a prior report for Narco News:
Eleven years ago, on December 22, 1997, paramilitary troops in earshot of a federal military base massacred 45 unarmed civilians - mostly women and children - as they prayed in a Church in the Mexican town of Acteal. The gunmen - every major human rights and media organization now agrees - sliced open the bellies of the pregnant women and shot the 45 Tzotzil-speaking farmers and their children at point blank range. The victims were members of a pacifist Catholic organization known as Las Abejas ("The Bees").
Bill Clinton was the president of the United States, Madeleine Albright his Secretary of State, and the Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere was Jeffrey Davidow, a State Department lifer with the dubious record of having been political officer at the US Embassy in Chile during the September 1973 US-backed coup d'etat there.
For more than a week prior to the massacre, non-governmental organizations in Chiapas, Mexico, had warned the US State Department of the impending atrocity. But the deal had already been struck with the Mexican regime that in exchange for its acquiescence to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the US would turn a blind eye to all matters of human rights in Mexican territory.
Zedillo landed on his feet after leaving office in late 2000, however, and eventually scored a cushy job in the states, as a professor of economics at Yale University, where he oversees the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. (An example of you screw up, you teach others how to do the same.)
In some people's minds, the $150,000 President Clinton took home after his 2003 speaking engagement for the Banco de Mexico might be tainted in a little blood, but then it is what it is.
~ more... ~
No comments:
Post a Comment