Thread: Los amigos de Bush;disturbing ties of some of Bush advisors

Here's a very revealing expose on Bush's ties to Mexico. It's a long piece so please visit the link http://www.elandar.com/bush/amigos.html for the balance of the article and some additional information.

LOS AMIGOS DE BUSH
The disturbing ties of some of George W. Bush’s Latino advisors

More on Bush-Amigos links in PBS Frontline interview with Gary Jacobs(See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... acobs.html

“Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres.
Tell me who you side with and I will tell you who you are.”
— “George W. Bush for President” web site

by Julie Reynolds
Research assistance by Victor Almazán and Ana Leonor Rojo

Those who say that George W. Bush has scant knowledge of foreign affairs don’t understand his family’s relationship with Mexico.

If one event could be said to make that relationship visible, it had to be the state dinner given eleven years ago by President Bush for Mexico’s president, Carlos Salinas. It was an elegant yet boisterous gala, where the biggest movers and shakers in Texas and Mexico congregated and celebrated. This group was to become W’s Mexican legacy, a gift of ties and connections passed on from the father to his son.

What was not visible was that the group included two men with numerous links to drug cartel figures. These men helped George W. Bush win the Latino vote in Texas. Which raises a few questions: How did these guys get into the Bush circle? What else do they do for him? And, to rephrase a famous query, what did the presidential candidate know and when did he know it?

A glance around the fourteen tables at the 1989 dinner showed that pains were taken to arrange them so that no one appeared more important than the others. There was a smattering of celebrities — Anthony Quinn, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Barbara Walters and Larry King. Bush’s son Jeb and his Mexican wife Columba joined the soirée, too.

The Mexican president had spent a long day with President Bush signing trade pacts, the precursors of NAFTA. Salinas brought his so-called Dream Team: his commerce secretary, finance minister, and his personal Machiavelli, Jose Córdoba. It would later be astounding to see, as the decade unfolded, how many of that administration’s proud men and women fell shamefully from grace — some exiled, some imprisoned and some assassinated.

No one knew it then, but many at that banquet would survive to one day help young W beat a path back to the White House. There were loyal “Bushfellas” who were old friends of the family: Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher Sr., General Colin Powell, and George Bush Senior’s ever-present friend, Secretary of State James Baker. Gary Jacobs, whose Texas bank was about to be bought by the son of Mexico’s billionaire-politico Carlos Hank González, was also a guest. Tony Garza, then a young judge, is now a Bush cabinet contender. Today, all are advisors or contributors to W’s campaign.

Hidden among the glitterati were two relative unknowns. They were, however, familiar to the group at hand. They were the loyal “Amigos de Bush” from San Antonio: criminal defense lawyer Roy Barrera Jr. and car dealer Ernesto Ancira Jr. In contrast to the Salinas group, the ties of Barrera and Ancira to drug cartels would remain unnoticed for another decade. Their ties to George W. would grow stronger.

In the Name of the Father

George Bush Sr. began his family’s relationship with Mexico in the 1960s, when his Zapata Offshore Oil Company was partner in a border-region oil company called Perforaciones Marinas del Golfo (Permargo), with Jorge Díaz Serrano.

In 1988, the financial newspaper Barron’s reported that the two Jorges — Bush and Díaz Serrano — used prestanombres (“name-lenders”) to hide Bush’s investment in Permargo from the Mexican government, skirting Mexican foreign-ownership laws. Barron’s also accused the Securities and Exchange Commission of destroying related documents after Bush became vice president in 1981.

Bush Sr. met Carlos Salinas’s father, Raúl Salinas Lozano, back when the latter was Mexico’s commerce secretary. The families’ friendship has continued through the years. Raúl Salinas, the president’s brother, has told investigators that Jeb and Columba Bush joined him three times for vacations at his hacienda Las Mendocinas. It was the same estate where he reportedly hosted an infamous 1990 party for the cream of Mexico’s drug cartels, which Jeb and Columba did not attend.

Twelve years ago presidents-elect Carlos Salinas de Gortari and George Bush Sr. met in Texas in a meeting that was called “The Spirit of Houston.”

“That meeting shaped the relationship between both countries for years to come,” Antonio Ocarranza, former Zedillo aide and president of the consulting firm Public Strategies Inc.(PSI) office in Mexico City told the Dallas Morning News. PSI is owned by several generous George W. Bush supporters, including Bush pioneer Roger Wallace.

Today, as governor of Texas, George W. Bush has assumed the role his father once had as president. He meets regularly with Mexican officials, from President Zedillo to Secretary of Energy Luis Téllez, to discuss joint energy pacts and trade issues.

“I’ve had foreign policy as the governor of Texas, and that is with Mexico,” George W. Bush said during the New Hampshire primary.

While he is in public shaking hands, Bush’s friend Ernesto Ancira works backstage in the international energy sector. Which comes naturally: Ancira’s family and their partners practically own the energy business in Mexico. The Bushes, of course, know everyone in the oil business in the US. It’s a nice match, the Bushes and the Anciras.

Let me make one thing clear: there is no evidence that Ernesto himself runs afoul of the law. Ancira is, rather, a point man in what Mexican journalist Juan Ruiz Healy calls “El Grupo Texano de George W. Bush.” He happens to have quite a few friends who are connected with drug cartels. In addition, there are some disturbing links between Ernesto’s group of friends in San Antonio and the assassination of Mexican politician José Francisco Ruíz Massieu. Since Ernesto has been a friend and a helper to the man who may be president, I believe they are connections worth exploring.

“ERNESTO IS VERY FRIENDLY, very fun-loving,” a real estate agent told me as we cruised Ernie Ancira’s turf, “The Dominion,” a securely-gated San Antonio development where a number of Mexico’s elite have invested in million-dollar homes.

Ernie, she said, loves to barbecue. Has money. Likes to socialize.

Ernie — auto dealer Ernesto Ancira, Jr. — is one of San Antonio’s most popular and respected business leaders. Every year, he’s in the lists of top Latino entrepreneurs. Last April, his Ancira Enterprises Inc. made the number two slot — with $575 million in revenue — in Hispanic magazine’s list of the fastest-growing Latino companies.

“My mother was paranoid about her kids’ success,” he once said. “It’s like there was a tremendous hurry to accomplish.”

Truly a binational man, Ernesto Ancira Jr., was born in San Antonio in 1944, but spent his formative years close to his industrialist cousins in Mexico, who are in-laws of the Salinas family. In the 1960s he rose to become the top assistant to his mentor, Claudio X. González, one of the country’s most powerful businessmen. González later became President Salinas’s foreign investment advisor.

Ancira’s family in Mexico has long been part of the power elite. The Ancira name is prominent in the city of Monterrey; that northern commercial center’s most elegant old hotel bears the name of Hotel Ancira.

But in the 1970s, the Ancira family ran into problems back in Texas. Ernie’s father was implicated in a money laundering scandal at his company, San Antonio Foreign Exchange. The elder Ancira moved back to Mexico, but there he was named by US authorities as a participant in an $8 million tax fraud scheme.

Ernie Junior, however, chose to return to Texas and prosper. In San Antonio, he hooked up with an ex-FBI agent and former city manager, Ralph Winton, and in 1972 they started a used car business together. Within a scant six years, Ancira bought out his partner, and Ancira Winton Chevrolet was earning $150 million and growing.

Ernesto became a civic leader and a Republican heavyweight. He chaired the Alamo Bowl and still heads the Southwestern Bell PGA Golf Tournament. He was LULAC’s 1987 Empresario of the Year, and he received a MALDEF Corporate Responsibility Award the same year.

And he met the Bushes. He co-chaired “Adelante con Bush” when George Senior ran for president, and along the way, he befriended George W. He is one of the folks George W. Bush’s people call his “100 closest friends,” a group that kicked off W’s presidential campaign last year with $1000 donations.

Ancira learned to schmooze with politicians big and small, sometimes annoying local Republicans when he supported an occasional Democrat. He paid for a 1994 trip for Congressman Henry Bonilla to meet Mexican officials in Ciudad Victoria. Twice he bestowed travel gifts on Bush’s Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher, Sr. He reportedly piloted his Cessna to host airborne meetings so that Mosbacher and his Mexican counterpart, Jaime Serra, could privately discuss NAFTA. Young Ernie was a millionaire, a friend of the Bushes, and he was literally flying high. His family — movers and shakers all — would have expected no less.

Early Cartel Connections

As he developed business and political contacts, Ernesto Ancira also cultivated friendships with men connected to Mexican drug cartels. One of the first was financier Guillermo Ávila.

As early as 1987, Ávila was part of an Ernesto Ancira troika, a flashy threesome-about-town starring Ancira, Ávila and developer Gustavo García. The three were often seen together in San Antonio in the late 1980s, until Ávila and his partners were busted for drug money laundering.

Ernesto wrote to the US Attorney in the case and said that Ávila was a “responsible individual” who had a “positive impact on our community.” Their kids even went to the same private school.

But Ávila and his partners had transferred $500,000 of supposed drug money — provided by a law enforcement sting — in and out of accounts in the US, Mexico, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands. In addition, Ávila owned an El Paso house that was raided in connection with the seizure of 21 tons of cocaine from his brother-in-law’s Sylmar, California warehouse, an all-time international record. The Juarez cartel’s Carlos Tapia Anchondo was living in Ávila’s home, and the drugs belonged to one of the cartel’s top men, Rafael Muñoz Talavera.

When he entered the courtroom, Ávila winked at friends and family. But when the prosecutors played tapes of the defendants accepting “dirty” money, the party was over.

Ávila was found guilty of conspiracy to launder monetary instruments on behalf of drug traffickers. Incredibly, he served a little over a year in prison. Afterward, he was banished from the US and moved to San Luis Potosí. The boss, Rafael Muñoz Talavera, was gunned down on a Juarez street in 1998.

Ávila got off easy. He could credit his astute attorney, Roy Barrera Sr., whose son and partner Roy Jr. was a guest of the Bushes at the White House dinner. “Little Roy” is now a top-notch trial lawyer and a close Bush advisor.

Though Roy Senior is a Democrat, Little Roy is a staunch Republican who has been in the trenches with W and Ernesto Ancira ever since they all campaigned for President Bush in the late 1980s, under the banner of “Adelante con Bush.”

It was during those campaign years that George Junior bonded with many of his Latino allies in the state and made the friends he would later lean on when his political ambitions got into gear. By and large, the Latino alliances Bush touts so loudly these days are not social workers or school teachers, and they are certainly not working-class. Like most in W’s circle, they are Texas heavy-hitters who got rich from their astute blending of business and politics.

(see link for balance of article)

What's new with this scumbag Bush family.

Thanks so much for this article MopheadBlue. Although it's a little dated, it clears up some questions regarding the Mexican connections to Bush.
I was really intrigued with the money laundering and offshore banking info.
I wonder if the White House has put a lid on DEA investigations of the caliber that would affect such people since W took office.