Mexican Police Aide Guilty in Camarena Case

A jury here Monday convicted a Mexican police official of lying to a federal grand jury investigating the slaying of a U.S. drug agent in Mexico.

The conviction of Mario Martinez Herrera was the first in a U.S. court related to the February, 1985, abduction and slaying of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique Camarena Salazar in Guadalajara.

Martinez, 38, has been linked to the Camarena case, which was blamed for souring relations between U.S. and Mexican officials for several months in 1985 and led to the temporary shutdown of several crossing points along the 2,000-mile border between the two countries.

Sentencing was set for Feb. 17. The maximum sentence Martinez could receive is five years in prison.

Perjury Charge

Federal prosecutors claimed Martinez, arrested Sept. 15 as a material witness in the Camarena case, had lied to the grand jury Sept. 19 when he said he had never been in Guadalajara except in transit. He was immediately indicted on a perjury charge.

After a three-day bail hearing in which his defense attorney tried to show that prosecutors had the wrong man, Martinez was ordered held without bail.

Prosecutors from the Justice Department based their perjury case on the testimony of a Mexican attorney who has been a DEA informant for seven years. Casario Garciabueno said he saw Martinez in Guadalajara several times in 1984.

The government also called an FBI agent who specializes in hair and fiber analysis, who testified that a single human hair found in the house where Camarena was tortured had characteristics matching a hair sample voluntarily provided by Martinez.

“What it really boiled down to was whether or not they believed Garciabueno or whether they believed Mr. Martinez,” said Michael P. Murray, the court-appointed attorney for Martinez.

Appeal Planned

Murray said he will appeal the conviction based on U.S. District Judge J. Lawrence Irving’s refusal to grant a delay in presenting Martinez’s defense. Murray said he was not given the identities of prosecution witnesses until 48 hours before the trial and then none of the witnesses would agree to be interviewed.

Jury foreman Lawrence Walker said jurors could find no reason for Garciabueno to lie. He said the fact that Garciabueno was both an attorney and an informant had no bearing on the jury’s deliberations.

Walker said testimony about the hair was given little weight by the jury because hair is not a positive form of identification such as fingerprints.