Released : Tuesday, February 05, 2008 2:20 PM
Miami, Feb 5 (EFE).- Former Mexican Foreign Secretary Jorge Castañeda
denied he was an agent for Cuba's intelligence service for at least
three years starting in 1979, as reported earlier by the Mexico City
daily El Universal.
"The report is completely false," the 54-year-old Castañeda said in
statements published here Tuesday by El Nuevo Herald, the
Spanish-language sister publication of The Miami Herald.
El Universal, which based its report on information obtained from
Mexico's General Archives of the Nation, said Castañeda, who was a
communist in his youth, broke in 1984 with Cuba's DGI intelligence
agency and labeled the leaders in Havana "stupid."
In the article, titled "De traidor a la patria a canciller" (From
Traitor to the Fatherland to Foreign Minister), El Universal noted that
during his 2000-2003 tenure as foreign minister under conservative
President Vicente Fox, tensions rose in Mexico's relations with Cuba to
the point that Fidel Castro said Castañeda was dedicated "to engaging in
intrigue and conspiring" against the island.
Citing what it said were documents prepared between 1979 and 1985 by the
now-defunct DFS spy agency, the daily revealed that Castañeda pressured
his father, then-Foreign Secretary Jorge Castañeda y Alvarez de la Rosa,
in a "haughty, demanding, denigrating" way to make foreign policy
decisions beneficial to Cuba.
"I worked with my father as a link and contact with the Latin American
left, with the full knowledge of him and of President (Jose) Lopez
Portillo, always defending the interests of Mexico and, moreover, since
then, against the Cuban vision for the region," Jorge Castañeda told El
Nuevo Herald.
The recruitment of the younger Castañeda as a spy was carried out by
Jorge Luis Joa Campos, who was in charge of Cuban intelligence
operations in Mexico at that time, after he was "put to the test for
several months," El Universal said.
Castañeda's job was to pass on information and intervene "to solve the
problems of political exiles" from El Salvador, Guatemala and Chile who
had arrived in Mexico, according to the documents.
The documents on which the investigative report was based, contained in
a 215-page file, were signed by the then-director of the DFS, Miguel
Nazar Haro.
El Universal said 37 pages had been removed from the public version of
the file because they contained personal and confidential information.
Castañeda told the Miami daily he was surprised that El Universal relied
on the documents from the DFS, "one of the most discredited institutions
in the recent history of Mexico."
"There is a strange coincidence in the timing of the publication of the
old documents with the public hearing of the Inter-American Commission
on Human Rights, where the Mexican state will be tried for the first
time for violating the rights of a Mexican," Castañeda told El Nuevo Herald.
Castañeda was referring to Friday's scheduled hearing on the complaint
he brought before the Organization of American States about an August
2005 ruling by Mexico's Supreme Court that barred him from making an
independent bid for the presidency in the 2006 elections. EFE
emi/hv
Copyright 2008 EFE News Services (U.S.) Inc.
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