Casinos for Chiapas - Mexico eyes gambling industry

Guillermo Rossell de la Lama isn't the most convincing flag-bearer for Mexico's impoverished indigenous population. Once a heavy hitter in the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), which has ruled the nation for six decades, Rossell served years ago as federal tourism secretary and governor of the state of Hidalgo. Among his close friends, he boasts, is President Ernesto Zedillo, whose government is trying to stamp out two guerrilla armies in Mexico's predominantly Mayan southern states.

But Rossell, an architect by training, knows a business opportunity when he sees one. His Mexico City-based firm, Corporacion de Planificacion, could make out big in the casino industry. This is why he hooked up with American Indian Movement activist Bill Means, a Lakota, originally from the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota and a veteran of the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation.

Means wants to build casinos that would fund Mexican indigenous development. In November, he flew Rossell and two of his associates to a Native American casino in Minnesota for a banquet. But Rossell almost blew it in his keynote speech: The fair-skinned former governor thought he was charming the Native Americans in the audience by comparing them to "my Indians in Hidalgo."

A quick-thinking translator named Hector Garcia Islas sanitized Rossell's telling choice of words for non-Spanish speakers. Garcia formerly headed up the Minnesota coalition that promoted the North American Free Trade Agreement. It was also Garcia, as president of the Minneapolis consulting firm Mex-US CAN, who first introduced Means to Rossell in Mexico City this past summer.

These are some of the characters in a bizarre and disturbing plot. How it will unfold depends on whether the Mexican legislature drops the nation's sixty-year-old casino ban (a move expected as early as this year), whether a rumpled PRI jefe like Rossell can cut a reliable deal with one of the world's most corrupt regimes, and whether Means and his partners can actually deliver the casino spoils to the people who need help.

Just the idea of Mexican casinos worries Winona LaDuke, whose White Earth Chippewa reservation in northwestern Minnesota has been wracked by casino-related criminal convictions.

"I tend to think someone like Bill Means has pretty good judgment and a lot of experience," says LaDuke, who won 600,000 votes as Ralph Nader's vice-presidential running mate on the Green Party ticket in November. "On the other hand, this is a dangerous proposal for a country that has so much struggle between the haves and the have-nots."

Ever since an indigenous rebel army surfaced in Chiapas on January 1, 1994, North American and European lefties have flocked to the southernmost Mexican state bearing aid. The Zapatista National Liberation Army has welcomed the medicine, school supplies, tools, vehicles, and food. But such solidarity doesn't go far in a nation where sixteen million people suffer from what even the Mexican government calls "extreme poverty."

When the rebellion started, the Chiapas infant-mortality rate--sixty-six deaths per 1,000 babies--was twice the national average, while a third of adult deaths in the state resulted from curable infectious diseases. The state's 30 percent illiteracy rate was Mexico's highest. More than half the Chiapas schools did not provide education beyond the third grade. The average salary was one-third the national average, and 54 percent of the population was malnourished.

This devastating poverty persists amid abundant natural resources. Pemex, the state-owned oil company, extracts almost 100,000 barrels of petroleum from Chiapas every year. The state produces a quarter of the meat consumed by Mexicans and more than half the nation's hydroelectricity. Yet only 10 percent of the indigenous people of Chiapas can afford to eat meat regularly and most homes do not have electricity. The conditions have remained dreadful as the government has dragged out negotiations with the Zapatistas.

Means and his two Native American partners say casinos can make a difference. In October, they registered a limited-liability company called Calumet International with the state of Minnesota. Calumet is preparing a formal proposal to Mexico's federal government, says one of the partners, William Gilbert of Springfield, Missouri. "We realized people would criticize us for dealing with the PRI, but who else do you deal with in Mexico?"

Means and his partners hope to develop the resorts in major tourist areas such as Cancun, Acapulco, and Baja California, then divert 50 percent of the earnings to a foundation that would fund specific indigenous development projects. Calumet has already raised "hundreds of millions of dollars" for the resorts, says Gilbert, a Lakota originally from the Rosebud Sioux reservation in South Dakota. "But I can't say from whom."

Gilbert isn't just blowing smoke. He and the third Calumet International partner, Louis Wayne Boyd of Mission, South Dakota, raised a bundle to transform a Kickapoo Tribe bingo hall in Horton Kansas, into the state's first casino. The facility, called the Golden Eagle, opened last May