An attorney who has defended bankers and businessmen in some of Mexico’s highest-profile cases rose to the powerful post of interior secretary on Monday after a mysterious plane crash killed the government’s No. 2 leader.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon said he chose Fernando Gomez-Mont because the former lawmaker can build support in congress for security reforms fortifying his fight against the nation’s powerful drug cartels.
Mexico’s interior secretary is the most powerful political figure after the president, the equivalent of a vice president and domestic security chief combined.
Gomez-Mont pledged to oversee an efficient and strong security Cabinet to confront increasingly violent drug cartels.
“We are committed to getting rid of the violence that is happening across the country,” he told reporters.
In his first news conference as interior secretary, Gomez-Mont brushed off repeated questions about his past.
As a defense lawyer, his clients included Carlos Cabal Peniche, a prominent banker who was charged with defrauding his banks of US$700 million, money laundering and tax evasion, and Rogelio Montemayor, the former head of Mexico’s state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos who was accused of diverting millions of dollars to a presidential campaign.
Gomez-Mont told reporters on Monday that he has cut all ties to his professional life and sees no conflict of interest as interior secretary.
“I am not a man with ulterior motives,” Gomez-Mont said.
Calderon asked Gomez-Mont to work with political leaders on ways to prevent organized crime from influencing next year’s midterm congressional elections. Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora has said that drug gangs have been kidnapping, intimidating and threatening candidates in several states.
Gomez-Mont also must rebuild the Interior Department following last week’s crash of a Learjet that killed several officials, including former Interior Secretary Juan Camilo Mourino.
Mourino, 37, was one of Calderon’s closest confidants and the administration’s key negotiator with political parties. He oversaw the president’s war on drugs and helped usher a major judicial reform through congress.
Gomez-Mont is a member of the executive committee of Calderon’s National Action Party, but said he had not yet decided whether he would leave that post. As a federal lawmaker in the 1990s, he pushed for electoral reforms that helped end 71 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party with the election of former president Vicente Fox in 2000.
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