A Scion of Mexico Fights Corruption, and Becomes a Target of Government Azam Ahmed - The New York Times
go to original August 30, 2017

Activists and journalists protested in Mexico City in June after a report that smartphones had been infected with spyware sold to the government to fight criminals and terrorists (Miguel Tovar/LatinContent)

Update: Mexico’s President Denies Bid to Quiet Prominent Critic González (The New York Times)

Mr. Claudio X. González Sr., 83, is one of Mexico’s most venerated — and wealthiest — figures in the business world, the chairman of Kimberly-Clark de Mexico for decades. And his son, 54, is a rarity in such elite circles, considering the family fortune. Mexico’s rich are often criticized for their indifference to social causes and their tendency to bend to the will of the government.

But Mr. González Jr. has leveraged his privilege, pressuring his peers to take on social issues. He started a nonprofit, Mexicans First, to promote public education in Mexico, which is among the worst of all members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the research and policy organization of the world’s richest countries.

Nearly two years ago, he co-founded the anticorruption group, focusing on investigative journalism, research and legal action. The group hired some of Mexico’s most prominent journalists, giving them license to pursue whatever targets they saw fit, an unusual freedom in a media landscape dependent on hundreds of millions of dollars in government advertising.

Their stories include an investigation into land grabs by a state governor in beach towns like Tulum, the revelation that government-favored companies were leaked information to help them bid on public contracts, and an investigation detailing how a friend of the president’s had collected more than $650 million from the government by gaming public contracts to provide electricity meters for the country.

Mr. González Jr. has been unsparingly vocal himself. At a conference at Ibero-American University in Mexico City on Feb. 1, he criticized the president personally, telling a panel, “If there were such a thing as a hall of infamy, Peña Nieto would be in the top 10.”

A few weeks later, on Feb. 27, the tax authorities announced nine audits related to five organizations that were either founded or run by Mr. González Jr. in the last 20 years. Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity was not among them. Its audit came later.

People close to Mr. González Jr. say that he was aghast and asked an economist to calculate the odds of even five audits randomly occurring on the same day against firms he was affiliated with. The answer he got back: 1 in 200 quadrillions, or a 0.0000000000000000000000000204 percent chance.

The government says it is prohibited from discussing individual cases, but it noted that the tax authorities had started a series of audits of nonprofits — to prevent money laundering through donations. The initiative was announced less than two weeks after Mr. González Jr. and his organizations received their audits.

To those involved in the groups, the audits were an obvious scare tactic, an overt way to threaten their activities. But even before that, in the summer of 2016, someone using government software had secretly tried to hack into and take over Mr. González Jr.’s cellphone.

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