Casinos for Chiapas.

• Author: Mitchell, Chip
• Position: 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...