Obituary

Carlos Hank Gonzalez

Powerbroker behind Mexico's ruling elite

Carlos Hank Gonzalez, who has died aged 73 of a heart attack after a prolonged fight against cancer, was one of Mexico's richest tycoons and most durable powerbrokers. His influence pervaded several decades of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary party's marathon regime.

He was known as the "chief dinosaur", the description used for the old-guard PRI political operators who controlled the systems of patronage and corruption that kept the party in power for 71 years, until it lost last year's landmark elections.

Hank Gonzalez was also a businessman, and once famously said that "a politician who is poor, is a poor politician," thus summing up the philosophy behind his particular gift for intertwining commercial enterprise and public office. It was a combination that built him a power bastion, protected by indebted friends in key places, and capable of weathering countless allegations of dirty dealings, including links to Mexico's drug cartels.

Hank Gonzalez himself was blocked from standing for the presidency by a constitutional requirement for both parents to be Mexican - his father was a German officer who emigrated to Latin Ameria after the first world war. But he still turned himself into a ubiquitous political godfather who watched presidents come and go, leaving office to fade into obscurity while he remained as influential as ever.

That was before the PRI machinery began to degenerate under pressure to democratise in the 1990s, and association with Hank Gonzalez became as much a liability as an advantage. His name symbolised the corruption and ruthlessness of the system that modernisers were trying to leave behind, and secret United States files associated him with narcotics trafficking.

But he never faced legal action over any allegations, and, seemingly unconcerned, brushed them off as "the price of success".

Hank Gonzalez was an expert at that. For two decades, his influence pervaded the periodic succession battles for the presidency and the appointment of national party leaders. Except for a six-year period in the 1980s, he held public office continuously between 1955 and 1994, as governor of his native state of Mexico, as mayor of Mexico City, and in several cabinet positions.

He formally stepped down from politics in May 1994. "The dinosaur is going," he said, although he added six months later, "I am retiring from public office but not from politics, which is a virus in my blood."

Despite the stains on his reputation, and even after the PRI was ousted from the Mexican presidency last year by Vicente Fox, Hank Gonzalez was still viewed as a force to be reckoned with. As recently as the week before his death, the media speculated on his role in the post-defeat power struggles within the PRI, and credited him with significant sway in the Fox government's impending decision over the location of the capital's new international airport.

After his death, newspapers reported cabinet splits over how the govern ment should react to the departure of a tainted figure whose sons, nevertheless, now control one of Mexico's most important business empires.

Born in Santiago Tianguistenco, Hank Gonzalez began his life in poverty. The myth says he worked as a child cobbler before being taken under the wing of a Jesuit priest. He later studied to become a rural schoolteacher before setting up a sweet factory in 1949, by which time he was already a rising star in the local PRI structure.

As his political career developed, so did his businesses, handily adapted to the contracts associated with his numerous political posts and the network of friendships and loyalties he cultivated with famous generosity. His business empire eventually included interests in bank- ing, property, transport, truck building, an airline, mobile phones, luxury cars and generators; in 1993, it was estimated by Forbes magazine to be worth $1.3bn.

Following Hank Gonzalez's death, banner headlines proclaimed the end of an era in Mexico, though inside page articles pointed to signs that a Hank Gonzalez protégé is currently winning the battle to control the PRI recovery efforts.

The veteran political analyst Miguel Angel Granados Chapa wrote: "Blessed with intelligence, charm and ruthless ambition, Hank Gonzalez was the perfect symbiosis of money and power ... [he] has died, but what he represented throughout his life lives on."

President Fox limited himself to a message of condolence to the surviving family, which consists of Hank Gonzalez's wife Maria Guadalupe Rhon Garcia, and their four children, Carlos, Jorge, Ivone and Marisela.

Carlos Hank Gonzalez, businessman and politician, born August 28 1927; died August 11 2001

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