Mexican president expresses confidence in interior secretary who quit ruling party

Mexico leader trusts Cabinet member who left party

MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Felipe Calderon expressed confidence in his interior minister Tuesday despite the official’s sudden decision to quit the ruling party.

Interior Secretary Fernando Gomez Mont, the point man in the government’s bloody war against brutal drug cartels, split with the conservative National Action Party after clashing with its leaders over their decision to form an alliance with Mexico’s main leftist party to win local elections.

The decision was a blow to the party on top of flagging support due to drug gang violence and an economic downturn, and it prompted speculation that Gomez Mont may step down from his Cabinet post.

But Calderon insisted he trusts Gomez Mont and is “very respectful of the internal life of parties, including the National Action Party.”

“Fernando Gomez Mont’s reasons must have been very powerful. I don’t judge them,” Calderon said in comments released by his office. “He’s a loyal man. He’s an interior secretary who fulfills his mandate … and he has all my confidence.”

Gomez Mont announced his decision last week in a letter to the ruling party, known as the PAN. In newspaper interviews published Tuesday, he confirmed that he quit over the PAN’s decision to ally itself with the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, in two gubernatorial races this summer.

The PAN and the PRD clashed bitterly over the disputed 2006 elections that Calderon narrowly won against Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

But the two parties are teaming up in the hopes of unseating two state governors from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for 71 years under a system of coercion and corruption that critics deemed a quasi-dictatorship.

Gomez Mont has called the alliance an antidemocratic maneuver that sacrifices ideological conviction for bald political interests.

In interviews with the Reforma and Excelsior newspapers, Gomez Mont also acknowledged that he had promised the PRI last year that he would try to persuade the PAN not to make alliances with the PRD. The promise came in exchange for the PRI’s support in Congress for fiscal reforms.

“The fact that I couldn’t live up to the commitments I made … was one of the reasons I made the decision to resign from the party,” he said.

The PRI lost the presidency for the first time in 2000 to Vicente Fox of the PAN, a stunning defeat that many Mexicans considered the birth of true democracy in their country.

But the PRI has undergone a resurgence in recent years, gaining seats in the 2009 legislative elections amid widespread discontent over recession and the drug war.