The color of money: a fragrant saga of Mexico's Greens.

• Author: Brown, Jack
• Position: Thinking Politically

At the California Green Party convention in San Diego a few years back, a wild-haired hippie stood up and gave us one of those Hope-Beyond-Our-Shores speeches of which Greens are so fond. He had just been down to Mexico, where he had sat for a long afternoon with Jorge Gonzalez Torres, the founding patriarch of Mexico's Greens.

Gonzalez had regaled our interlocutor with tales of the power of his Green Ecologist Party, with its five senators, handful of deputies, and recent shared victory as a very junior but very important partner in the presidential election campaign.

I remember rolling my eyes and saying in a stage whisper to the people around me that the Mexican Greens are not a real Green Party, just a family of reactionary thieves with an environmentalist veneer.

The now retired patriarch's son Jorge Emilio Gonzalez has confirmed that judgment. In an obscenity-laden meeting recorded on a buttonhole camera, Gonzalez is seen discussing a multimillion dollar hotel and port project in Cancun with a pair of well known Mexican developers, then extracting a promise of a two-million dollar bribe if he can use his senatorial influence to get the project approved.

At first, he told local newspapers that the video was a fabrication. Then he said that the bribe was a smear job orchestrated by his former allies in the executive branch, and that he was merely playing along to "see how far it would go." If it had gone as far as an approved project and a two million dollar deposit in his bank accounts, would Gonzalez now be offering those same bank accounts to public scrutiny? In fact, the bank accounts of Gonzalez and other party leaders, many of them family members, are already well padded with legally obtained public funds.

The main business of the Mexican Greens, along with a half dozen smaller parties, is ladling generous sums of public money into their own bowls. In 2002, for example, the Greens picked up about 18 million dollars in public financing. Considering that Mexico is a developing country with a population about a third that of the US, this is quite a staggering sum. The money was supposedly spent on campaigning, but the Federal Election Institute is reexamining the spending and the party's internal rules in light of Monday's revelations.

In their brief history as a major minor party, the Mexican Greens have pursued national alliances with two of the three big parties--the National Action Party, the conservative, Catholic, pro-business...