Advertisement

Mexico Seizes Suspected Drug Trafficking Kingpin

Share
From Times Wire Services

The reputed kingpin of drug trafficking in Mexico, Ernesto Fonseca, has been captured by Mexican police, authorities said Tuesday.

A spokesman for the attorney general’s office said 150 police captured Fonseca and 23 suspected accomplices in a massive raid in the Pacific resort of Puerta Vallarta on Monday. The arrest came five days after Rafael Caro Quintero, a key suspect in the killing of a U.S. drug agent, was captured in Costa Rica.

Fonseca told interrogators that Caro Quintero killed U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique S. Camarena and Mexican pilot Alfredo Zavala Avelar.

Advertisement

At his arraignment in Mexico City on Tuesday on drug trafficking charges, Caro Quintero said that he had been tortured and forced to sign a confession. The confession, read to Caro Quintero before he addressed the court, says he had bribed dozens of top-level Mexican police officials to let him continue running a major drug trafficking operation.

“The signature is mine, but the statements are false,” Caro Quintero said.

He said police beat him, denied him sleep and fired carbonated water up his nostrils. He appeared tired and unshaven, but he did not display any signs of having been beaten when he was asked to do so by Judge Pedro Elias Soto Lara.

The confession states that U.S. drug agent Camarena was taken to Caro Quintero’s house after he was kidnaped Feb. 7 within sight of the U.S. Consulate General in Guadalajara.

It said that Caro Quintero greeted the agent and took him into the house, but there was no elaboration. The bodies of Camarena and his pilot, who worked with Camarena and was kidnaped the same day, were found March 5, wrapped in plastic bags, on a ranch 60 miles southeast of Guadalajara, a city regarded as a major drug center in Mexico.

Caro Quintero was questioned throughout the weekend after he was brought to Mexico City late Friday on a government plane from Costa Rica, where he had been hiding out on an estate.

The confession says Caro Quintero paid the equivalent of about $265,000 to a top Mexican police official to be able to leave Guadalajara on Feb. 9.

Advertisement

It said the payment went to Armando Pavon Reyes, former commander of the Federal Judical Police in Guadalajara. Pavon Reyes, who was seen giving Caro Quintero a farewell embrace at the Guadalajara airport, was questioned Monday at Interpol headquarters here.

Caro Quintero’s court appearance Tuesday was concerned only with drug offenses, for which the maximum sentence is 40 years without parole. There is no death sentence in Mexico.

Caro Quintero will also be put at the disposition of a state court in Jalisco, which has issued a warrant for his arrest for the murders of Camarena and Zavala, they added.

Six Jalisco state police agents and a former officer were arrested and charged with the murders last month. In confessions that they later repudiated, claiming duress, two of the policemen admitted that they kidnaped the two men and took them to Caro Quintero’s house in Guadalajara, 335 miles northwest of the capital.

Advertisement