Ireland has no extradition treaty with Mexico. After fleeing Mexico, Salinas ended up living in Ireland, and recently got permission from the Special Branch to stay longer. Salinas has associated with senior politicians of various parties and says he admires Charles Haughey.
So why is the government protecting him? Over 1,000 penniless refugees applied for political asylum here: Only two got it. Why is the current FG/LAB/DL government letting this particular guy stay in the country?
Is it because he bribed the Special Branch detectives who reviewed his case? Surely not...
Everybody in Mexico knows that the Salinas family and other politicians were in the hard drug trade. Do the authorities not know this?
Carlos Salinas and his family actively helped massive shipments of heroin and cocaine. Carlos was President of Mexico and abused his power to help the drugs trade - his other crimes include robbery, bribery, murder.
There are continous reports tying the ruling party to the drugs trade: the head of the anti-drugs task force was arrested recently for taking massive payoffs from the country's richest narcotrafficker.
In Mexico, ALL politicians are like this. The same party has been in power for seventy years! They do it by bribing large amounts of people to vote for them, organised vote fraud and by keeping the media firmly under control.
An Irish guy who recently came back from Mexico says:
"It's like the Mafia over there. There's all these powerful families and they share the Presidency out among each other.
Farmers get a grant every few years, about $300 which is a lot in Mexico. They collect their check the day after the election, so the RPI can check they voted the right way. They have ten people on every polling booth in Mexico - that's about 100,000 people. They are called votecatchers and they get paid only if they bring in at least 100 votes. They like to choose an artist or a sportshero as candidates. Somebody populist."
"One artist was offered the Mayorship of a town if he could come up with £1 million a week. The only way to do that is through the drugs trade."
But the point is that Carlos Salinas is a crook, a thief and a major cog in the international drugs trade. Everybody in Mexico knows this. His brother Raul was head of a food programme for the poor, which he robbed.
So the Irish government must also know. It is an outrage that Special Branch detectives have allowed him to stay.
Mexicans are collecting signatures to get Salinas back from Ireland to face trial, and the Irish Mexico Group are collecting signatures here to get him expelled to Mexico. (The IMG is at the Latin America Solidarity Centre, 5 Merrion Row, Dublin 2. Fax/telephone (01) 6760435: email mark_c@oocities.com....)
The friendly treatment Irish politicians have given their corrupt colleague is very suspicious. And it's scary. What if he decides to start importing cocaine into Ireland? They are harbouring someone they know is a major international hard drugs dealer. WHY?
