Driving in the new mayor of Tijuana's caravan is not a soothing experience. As he does every Thursday, Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon, an eccentric gambling magnate whose family has long been linked to drug cartels, is spending the day shuttling between ribbon-cuttings. Hank's caravan, consisting of three unmarked late-model Ford Explorers with darkened windows, weaves through traffic at inadvisable speeds.
"El Presidente doesn't like to be late," explains Hank's videographer, using the traditional title bestowed on Mexican mayors. The cameraman and I are driving in a beat-up Nissan Sentra, struggling to keep up as we head to one of Tijuana's countless settlements or colonias, essentially suburban slums. The event is on an empty patch of dirt, a dusty soon-to-be construction site, where hundreds of residents are seated patiently in plastic chairs. When the mayor arrives -- early -- the crowd applauds loudly and waves flags proclaiming, "Our president: Jorge Hank Rhon." They enthusiastically swing their Hank flags. It is, in the grand tradition of patronage politics, not just a celebration of a highway extension, but a pep-rally for the mayor's party, in this case the PRI or Institutional Revolutionary Party.
PRI supporters have reason to let loose. When the party, which ruled Mexico for 70 years, lost the presidency in 2000 (to the conservative PAN headed by former Coca Cola exec Vicente Fox) many assumed it would shrivel away. That hasn't happened.Instead, for a party that is just getting acquainted with those niggling things called "fair elections," the PRI has shown resilience. It is even making inroads into the opposition party's traditional bases, in no place more surprising than Tijuana.
The city, and the state it's located in, Baja California, are the kind of trendsetters in Mexico, for both economics and politics, that Los Angeles and California have been in the United States. It was in Baja 16 years ago that any Mexican opposition party, in this case Fox's conservative PAN, first won a governorship. And it's in Tijuana, Baja's capital, where one can spot the vanguard -- of the PRI's comeback, and what their rule looks like once they're back in power.
The PAN controlled Baja's capital and its cities without interruption until last August, when Hank won in Tijuana. His victory in Mexico's fourth-largest city "has really raised the PRI's status," says local political consultant Jorge D'Garay. "They've conquered the only state that was run continuously by the opposition for 15 years. They're feeling pretty good, like they've won the whole country again."
Hank, who is worth an estimated $500 million, comes from PRI royalty. His father, Carlos Hank González, who died in 2001, was an old-school party boss who served top posts in government (including as mayor of Mexico City) and would have been a logical pick for president except for a law which bars children of foreign-born parents from the job. (His were from Germany.) Nicknamed El Profesor, the elder Hank started politics as a schoolteacher, worked in public service for 40 years and retired a billionaire. His famous saying: "A politician who is poor is a poor politician."
U.S. drug investigators have long suspected that the Hanks' dealings reach beyond crony capitalism. A classified report leaked in 1999 described the Hanks as "a significant criminal threat to the United States." (After objections by the Mexican government and lobbying by the Hanks, the Clinton administration carefully noted that the report was just a draft.)
Suspicion has centered on son Jorge -- the now-mayor -- who was described in the report as "ruthless, dangerous, and prone to violence." Hank moved to Tijuana in the early 1980s, where he conveniently gained the government concession to run the city's famed racetrack, Agua Caliente. Investigators believe he's used it for money laundering. "I think Hank lends himself to that type of work," says one recently retired senior DEA official, who has investigated Hank. "It's not enough to indict him in the U.S. But do I feel confident that he's guilty? Without question."
Talk of Hank's propensity for violence was fueled by the 1988 assassination of a local gossip columnist, who made a habit of hectoring Hank and nicknamed him the "abominable snowman" -- a reference to his purported taste for cocaine. Two gunmen, including Hank's chief bodyguard, eventually confessed to the columnist's murder and admitted they had hid at the racetrack after the killing. Hank, who has reportedly kept the bodyguard on his payroll, denies any connection. (Since then, the dead columnist's newspaper has run a weekly ad "signed" by him, reading, "Jorge Hank Rhon: Why did your bodyguards kill me?")
Hank is, in one sense, quite a family man; he married four times and is the father of 18 children, a few of whom he has adopted. He's also an animal lover, with a private zoo stocked with some 20,000 specimens. He also once owned an aquatic theme park near Mexico City, which featured the then-neglected Keiko, best known as the star in Free Willy. Asked during last year's campaign to name his favorite animal Hank replied, "Women."
Nominating such a candidate might seem odd, but Hank had a few distinct advantages. For one thing, he was picked by the current boss of the PRI, Roberto Madrazo, who has a near-free hand in naming party candidates. Madrazo -- the PRI's likely candidate in next year's presidential elections -- is something of an honorary Hank family member. The elder Hank earned Madrazo's enduring gratitude for helping Madrazo hold on to a governorship -- despite having "won" it in an election so widely believed to be rigged that then-Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo urged him to concede.
Picking Hank also offered the PRI a concrete benefit: money. "The family represents a great economic opportunity for the party," says Benedicto Vargas, a political analyst at Tijuana's Ibero-American University. Following the PRI's loss of the presidency in 2000, the recently independent federal elections commission fined the party nearly $100 million for, among other things, pilfering government coffers. Nearly bankrupt, the PRI received a multimillion dollar reprieve from a bank owned by the Hanks. "The Hanks have financed the PRI's campaign on a national level," says Vargas.
Hank's election campaign lavished attention on the long-neglected colonias, the outlying slums whose growth have fueled Tijuana's population explosion. Apart from the occasional visit, the effort was defined by fiestas, with music, food, and generous raffles including cars. (Local papers, though, reported that the cars never seemed to be delivered.) "The PRI was able to reconstruct its old 'alliances' for the election, rebuilding its base among the poor," says Tonatiuh Guillen, a municipal governance specialist at a local think tank. "The party is very good at selling illusions."
Mirroring a national trend, Hank's standing was boosted by PAN's recent lackluster mayors, who were considered at best do-nothings and at worst corrupt. Their poor performance resulted in cynicism and low voter turnout. When the PAN first took power in Baja in 1989, voter participation was at 80 percent. In the election for Hank, only about 30 percent showed up. Amid charges of elections violations on both sides, Hank squeezed out a 2-percent victory.
A few months later, I was invited to tag along for the day as Hank went about some of his mayoral duties . Hestepped outside city hall -- officially, the "Municipal Palace" -- to announce the delivery of the first few dozen of a hundred much-celebrated police pickup trucks. "If you want to know how much they cost, you can know that," Hank tells a crowd of gathered reporters. "If you want to know how many, you can know that too. Everything about them is open."
As it turns out, you can't know any of that. In what became Tijuana's story of the week, a local paper reported that Hank had bypassed all regulations when he bought the trucks. Rather than an open and competitive bidding process, as the law required, Hank bought the pickups on executive whim -- they were, as it turned out, used, from Las Vegas.
"Hank said how much generally they spent," says municipal expert Tonatiuh Guillen. "But it's absolutely unclear how, whom, when, the exact amount. We know nothing." (No big surprise, then, when it turned out the pickups were manuals, poorly suited for police-work.) The case of the pickups is emblematic of Hank's governing style, a sort of imperial munificence.
The administration previous to Hank's had created a web page parsing the city's budget. One of Hank's first acts in office was to shut it down. Previously, judges were chosen after a formal vetting process that included a professional panel. Under Hank, the process has been simplified: Judges are picked by the mayor's right-hand man, a politician nicknamed el Diablo.
"Mexico has a tradition of non-participation and very strong mayors," says Guillen. "But we had a little more open space before. Now it's more concentrated and more closed." (No surprise, then, that Hank declined roughly a dozen requests for an interview.) It's a blast-from-the-past kind of PRI management. Hank, says analyst Denise Dresser, represents the "worst, darkest elements of the PRI." What he also might represent is the future -- in more than Tijuana's City Hall.
Eric Umansky is a columnist for Slate.
