Priest tied to Mexican Midas: whereabouts of both men remains unknown

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 24, 1995 by John (American tribal leader) Ross

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico - As Mexico's economy shipwrecks on the shoals of peso devaluation, massive capital flight and enormous trade deficits, business insiders here look back nostalgically to the boom years of Carlos Salinas de Gortari's just-concluded presidency.

During the Salinas era (1988-94), 24 Mexican billionaires were created - the largest number of superrich outside the United States, Japan and Germany, according to Forbes magazine's 1994 listings.

One of the movers and shakers once poised to make the Forbes rankings this year was 38-year-old Carlos Cabal Peniche, the King Midas of Mexico's tropical Southeast. Before a swift downfall, Cabal had attributed his phenomenal business success in part to a French-born priest. Parleying a string of family-owned department stores into a shrimp and banana empire, Cabal's meteoric rise paralleled Salinas' reign.

His Del Monte Fresh Produce swallowed up small producers around the Caribbean. Eventually the young tycoon bid for U.S. Del Monte canned-food conglomerate, which produces 15 percent of the world's canned foods. Encourage by the government, Cabal bought one recently privatized bank and joined it to another. At its zenith, the Cabal empire included more than 1,000 separate enterprises and $2 billion in assets.

Insiders attributed Cabal's success to a variety of reasons: his friendship with Salinas and Secretary of Agriculture Carlos Hank Gonzalez; alleged business partnerships with the son of Salinas' predecessor, Miguel de la Madrid; an opportune $80 million loan from the now-discredited Bank of International Credit and Commerce.

Some saw darker origins of Cabal's fortune - drug-running and money-laundering. "Who knows where the money came from?" says a former accountant for Cabal's Pragma brokerage house in Mexico City. "One day the numbers would be red. The next, they'd be black. Who was going to ask?"

When questioned, Cabal ascribed his amazing climb to his spiritual adviser, the French-born Marist priest, Fr. Jacques Charveriat.

Fifty-three-year-old "Padre Jacques," as he is called here in Villahermosa, the hub of Cabal's dealings, is reportedly a highborn cleric from a wine-producing family in Lyons, France, who came to Mexico City in his mid-20s to study business administration at the Autonomous University there.

At age 29, Charveriat, who became a great favorite of Mexico City Cardinal Ernesto Corripio Ahumada, according to church sources, was awarded two intriguing parishes - one in the hard-scrabble eastern slums of the city and the other in Polanco, the swank and cosmopolitan Fifth Avenue of the Mexican capital. Moving in such circles allowed Charveriat to put the wealth of his upscale parishioners to work for his more impoverished constituents.

Appealing to then-Mexico City regent (unelected mayor) Carlos Hank Gonzalez, later secretary of agriculture and a Cabal business associate, Charveriat won potable water for slum dwellers in the Chiquihuitin Hill colony. He persuaded jewel-encrusted matrons to become "godmothers' ("madrinas") to starving priests. In 1983, Charveriat set up the Agere Foundation to aid sick and infirm clerics and even built Casa de Sacerdote, a retreat in Oaxaca.

Charveriat advised many of Mexico's most prominent businessmen on spiritual matters. Alejo Peralta, a billionaire who made the Forbes list and whose interests range from cellular phones to baseball teams, even set Charveriat up with a chapel inside a Mexico state production plant.

But Cabal, whom the priest came to know in the early part of the Salinas years, went Peralta one better. He provided Charveriat with offices in the Banco Cremi-Union's national headquarters overlooking the Angel of Independence on Mexico City's bustling Paseo de la Reforma. Chauffeured limousines and chartered airplanes were placed at his command as he traveled the globe with Cabal, who, according to Proceso magazine, considered that the priest had extrasensory powers.

Traveling together around the Caribbean, the United States and Europe, Charveriat wag said to have divined the price to be paid for the Union part of the bank deal, sat in on negotiations in New York when Cabal snapped up the El Camino Hotel chain, and was dispatched to Panama and Colombia to make takeover offers to big banana producers.

In Villahermosa, some called Charveriat a myth. He was regularly seen on the front page of local dailies, dousing Cabal's banks and hotels with holy water at inaugurations of the new facilities. He served as human resources director for Cabal's enterprises, including his flagship San Carlos plantation where labor trouble was endemic. And Charveriat held weekly sessions with the directors of Cabal's far-flung holdings to "take moral stock."

"Father Jacques smells of spirituality," his Marist provincial Agapito Sanchez told Proceso. "He is a man of great rectitude," Villahermosa Bishop Florencio Ochoa Olivera told this reporter. Through the Agere Foundation, Charveriat channeled funds to aid poor Tabasco-based priests. Tabasco, it should be pointed out, has not always been congenial to the Catholic church. Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory tells of the fierce persecution of the clergy by Tabasco's "red" governor in the 1920s.