In and out, and in again … Carlos Ahumada

(El Universal photo: Valente Rojas)

He’s scum and probably deserves whatever happens to him, but I can’t help thinking that maybe Carlos Ahumada is a patsy for… Carlos Salinas? Vicente Fox? The “establishment”? El Junque (a shadowy pro-clerical far rich right-wing clique)? The FBI or Las Vegas Casino owners? (“Video-gate”, which was the starting point for the Ahumada follies, probably involved the FBI misusing the U.S. PATRIOT Act.  How’s that for international intrigue?).

He’s at the center of one too many plots and intrigues to be the power behind the scenes. The guy was way over-extended … besides his construction business, he owned a futbol team, properties in places he shouldn’t have (like National Parks) and had just launched, to great fanfare, a new (and very good) national newspaper.

Not quite all Mexicans dislike rich arrogant assholes (which Ahumada was), but a rich, arrogant, ARGENTINE asshole is unredeemable. Who better for a fall guy?

AP under-reports:

MEXICO CITY, Mexico (AP) — A construction mogul at the center of a bribery scandal that tainted the image of Mexico City’s leftist government was detained immediately upon his release from three years in prison early Tuesday.

Television footage showed Carlos Ahumada leaving a Mexico City prison with his arms around his wife and children, only to be seized by city agents a few feet from the prison’s entrance, thrown into a waiting car and driven away as he and his family screamed in protest.

Ahumada’s lawyer Enrique Ostos said he didn’t know why his client had been detained after being acquitted of charges that had kept him in prison for about three years. Ostos protested the arrest and said Ahumada had signs of being beaten.

“I can’t say whether he is a political prisoner,” he told Televisa network.

City officials were not immediately available for comment.

The Argentine-born Ahumada filmed himself giving suitcases stuffed with dollars to several political allies of then-Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, whose leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party still controls the Mexican capital.

He alleged the officials were extorting money from him in exchange for city contracts. The videos, shown on national television, brought political disgrace to several of the most prominent activists in Mexico’s main leftist party.

One of them, borough president Carlos Imaz, was later convicted of a campaign finance violation over Ahumada’s funds.

Ahumada’s long-standing personal relationship with former Mayor Rosario Robles — a rival of Lopez Obrador within Democratic Revolution — led to her ouster from the party.

Ahumada is at the center of so many scandals, intrigues and frauds I don’t haven any clue what exactly the changes might be this go around. When the bribery scheme fell apart, he fled to Havana (and stayed in ex-President Carlos Salinas’ villa there), which made Lopez Obradór’s claims that the whole scandal was a set-up all that more believable.

Especially when Ahumada confessed it was true.

He’s claimed “human rights abuses” before — semi-comically when it was about to come out that he’d ratted out Vicente Fox and other anti-Lopez Obradór plotters and he staged an “assassination attempt” against his own wife. Why she puts up with a guy who admitted to boning the fomer DF Jefa, Rosario Robles, for fun and profit (well… profit anyway), is a mystery to me.

What a peach of a guy.