Mexico’s top Cabinet secretary dies in crash

E. EDUARDO CASTILLO

Asso­ci­ated Press

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The country’s top Cab­i­net sec­re­tary, Fran­cisco Blake Mora, a key fig­ure in Mexico’s bat­tle with drug car­tels, died Fri­day in a heli­copter crash that Pres­i­dent Felipe Calderon said was prob­a­bly an accident.

Blake Mora, 45, was the sec­ond inte­rior min­is­ter, the No. 2 post in the gov­ern­ment, to die in an air crash dur­ing Calderon’s administration.

Despite some ten­den­cies to sus­pect a hit on the top offi­cials lead­ing Calderon’s offen­sive against orga­nized crime, the crash that killed Blake Mora and seven oth­ers may have had to do with bad weather. A Lear­jet that slammed into a Mex­ico City street in 2008, killing for­mer inte­rior sec­re­tary Juan Camilo Mourino and 15 oth­ers, was blamed on pilot error.

One of Blake Mora’s last post­ings on his Twit­ter account com­mem­o­rated the loss of Mourino. “Today we remem­ber Juan Camilo Mourino three years after his death, a per­son who was work­ing to build a bet­ter Mex­ico,” he tweeted on Nov. 4.

Blake Mora’s death, while a blow to the gov­ern­ment, is not likely to change pol­icy or day-to-day operations.

Calderon, vis­i­bly emo­tional over the loss, said the Super Puma heli­copter was fly­ing in fog when it went down in a remote area south­east of Mex­ico City. Still, he said all pos­si­ble causes were under inves­ti­ga­tion. He said the pilot had suf­fi­cient expertise.

“Mex­ico has lost a great patriot … and I lost a dear friend,” said Calderon, who strug­gled to main­tain com­po­sure at one point dur­ing an address to the coun­try. “He was not only an exem­plary min­is­ter, he was an exem­plary Mexican.”

Pres­i­dent Barack Obama called Calderon to offer his condolences.

Calderon appeared to try to quell any sug­ges­tions of sab­o­tage, say­ing Blake Mora’s heli­copter “was always under guard” in the hangar of Mexico’s equiv­a­lent of the Secret Ser­vice and that it had recently under­gone maintenance.

Author­i­ties said the under­sec­re­tary for human rights, Felipe Zamora, was among the seven oth­ers killed, includ­ing the pilot.

Calderon appointed Blake Mora as inte­rior sec­re­tary in July 2010. That put him in charge of coor­di­nat­ing domes­tic poli­cies includ­ing secu­rity, human rights, migra­tion and the president’s rela­tion with the leg­is­la­ture and oppo­si­tion parties.

Blake Mora was trav­el­ing to a pros­e­cu­tors’ meet­ing in the neigh­bor­ing state of More­los when the heli­copter went down in a moun­tain­ous area of Chalco in the state of Mex­ico on the bor­der with Mex­ico City.

“In the morn­ing, there was a whole lot of fog,” said home­maker Marisol Pala­cios, who lives on the lower slopes of the hill where the crash occurred.

She said she didn’t hear the crash and wasn’t aware any­thing had hap­pened until heli­copters car­ry­ing res­cue teams arrived. Video of the wreck­age sug­gested the heli­copter plowed into the hill­side and broke in half, but did not explode or burn.

Blake Mora started his polit­i­cal career in the mid-1990s as an offi­cial in his native Tijuana and served as a fed­eral con­gress­man through the 2000s, as well as inte­rior sec­re­tary of Baja California.

As Calderon’s point man in the government’s war against orga­nized crime, he fre­quently trav­eled to the country’s most dan­ger­ous places for meet­ings with besieged state and local secu­rity officials.

He was an embod­i­ment of the Mex­i­can government’s get-tough atti­tude, pub­licly pledg­ing to bring the fight to the traf­fick­ers instead of back­ing down.

“Orga­nized crime, in its des­per­a­tion, resorts to com­mit­ting atroc­i­ties that we can’t and shouldn’t tol­er­ate as a gov­ern­ment and as a soci­ety,” he said.

He also over­saw response to dis­as­ters, such as flood­ing and the mas­sive oil pipeline explo­sion that laid waste to parts of the cen­tral city of San Mar­tin Texmelu­can last year, killing at least 28 people.

He led the cre­ation of a new national iden­tity card for youths under 18, with mod­ern fea­tures includ­ing dig­i­tal­ized fin­ger­prints and iris images, to pre­vent crim­i­nals from using false IDs.

Blake Mora’s funeral was sched­uled for Saturday.

Calderon can­celed many of his appear­ances, includ­ing a trip to the Asia-Pacific Eco­nomic Coop­er­a­tion meet­ing of world lead­ers in Hawaii next week.

“Polls have been show­ing that inse­cu­rity now tops poverty as the No. 1 con­cern among Mex­i­cans, and my sense is an acci­dent like this or an event like this … is going to increase the senses of uncer­tainty and inse­cu­rity,” said George W. Grayson, a Mex­ico expert at the Col­lege of William and Mary in Williams­burg, Virginia.

Sus­pi­cions com­monly swirl around the deaths of promi­nent peo­ple in Mex­ico. It was hard for many to believe that two inte­rior sec­re­taries could die in air acci­dents in the same administration.

“This is very unfor­tu­nate,” said Sinaloa Con­gress­man Manuel Clouthier, whose own father, a pop­u­lar politi­cian in Calderon’s National Action Party, died in a still-unexplained high­way acci­dent in 1989. “There are many coin­ci­dences because now we have two inte­rior min­is­ters (lost) in one pres­i­den­tial term … who knows if we’ll ever really know what happened.”

In the crash that killed Mourino, the jet smashed into rush-hour traf­fic in a posh Mex­ico City busi­ness dis­trict, killing all nine on board and seven on the ground. Mex­i­can inves­ti­ga­tors blamed the Lear­jet 45 crash on the tur­bu­lence from a larger plane fly­ing ahead.

The inves­ti­ga­tion found that the pilots were slow to fol­low the con­trol tower’s instruc­tions to reduce speed and appeared to be nearly one nau­ti­cal mile too close behind a Boe­ing 767–300 on the same flight path to Mex­ico City’s inter­na­tional airport.

Also killed in the crash was for­mer anti-drug pros­e­cu­tor Jose Luis San­ti­ago Vas­con­ce­los, who had been the tar­get of at least one pre­vi­ous assas­si­na­tion plot.

The Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment pro­vided a detailed account of the crash aimed at quelling wide­spread rumors that the plane was brought down by pow­er­ful and increas­ingly vio­lent drug cartels.

In 2005, a heli­copter crash blamed on poor weather con­di­tions killed Mexico’s top police offi­cial, pub­lic safety sec­re­tary Ramon Mar­tin Huerta, who was head of fed­eral police, and seven other people.

Posted by AP News on Nov 11 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.