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Dishing the Dirt. Not until after the former President and his friends ducked off to Europe for a long holiday, and Ruiz Cortines swung into action, did anybody in Mexico talk publicly about the deals of the Alemán regime. Then the dirt began to be dished out, and tales that had been repeated for years in guarded whispers around the political cafes were trumpeted across the capital from public rostrums. With a Ruiz Cortines adviser sitting beside him, General Francisco Aguilar of the government party, speaking at a Mexico City meeting, charged that Alemán and his friends had drained the country of some $800 million, and laid away about $450 million of it in banks in the U.S., Canada, Switzerland and Cuba. In an action that would have been unthinkable a few years before, General Leon Ossorio plastered the walls of Mexico City with a broadside blasting the Alemánistas and professing to list their misdeeds in detail.
The general alleged that:
¶ One Alemán cabinet minister owned part of a bank, a sugar mill, several Mexico City skyscrapers and four mansions (one containing a $58,000 Italian marble fountain, the gift of a favored contractor).
¶ Another resourceful minister set up his own companies to contract with his department, and was soon able to set his mistress up in an Insurgentes Avenue lingerie business.
¶ Letting building and equipment contracts to the highest briber, a third minister made an $8,000,000 fortune.
¶ Another Alemán crony took $40 million out of the treasury through his manipulation of the Foreign Trade Bank.
¶ An official of the federal district—"the man of a hundred mistresses"—contrived by such devices as landscaping streets with flowers, at 1,000 pesos a blossom, to acquire mansions, yachts, $200,000 airplanes, and "dresses to cover the sinful bodies of his lady friends."
The Good Earth. Like many other Latin American politicos, the Alemánistas had a deep fondness for real estate, especially when it was improved with an air-conditioned ranch house, watered by government irrigation pipes, and bounded on two or three sides by newly paved roads. It got to be a standing joke in Mexico City that when the President was out on one of his frequent tours, no matter in what part of the country he happened to be, the newspaper accounts always concluded with the phrase, ''the President then retired to his nearby ranch." Some of these country seats came to Alemán as gifts. His Lower California ranch is a 3,000-acre affair with 40,000 almond, olive and prune trees, air-conditioned house, bar, and the kidney-shaped swimming pool common to castles in those latitudes. The ranch was paid for by a number of 50,000-peso contributions from local ranchers and merchants who hoped that a presidential residence in their midst might bring irrigation works to the area. The hope, as matters turned out, was fully justified. In the development of the rich Pacific resort of Acapulco, Alemán's fondness for the land made him partner in several properties along the route of the new Alemán-planned superhighway to the capital.