Suspects in DEA Slaying Charge Massive Cover-Up

Lawyers for three men charged in the torture-murder of U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena accused top Mexican government officials Thursday of obstructing U.S. efforts to find the true killers in order to conceal “massive corruption” within the government’s own ranks.

The allegations, leveled against agencies from the Mexican attorney general’s office to the army, came on the opening day of trial in Los Angeles against two men accused of participating in the murder of Camarena and his pilot near Guadalajara and a third charged with aiding the escape of the wealthy drug baron who allegedly directed the killings.

The U.S. District Court trial culminates a frustrating, three-year effort to bring criminal charges in the case, involving the first murder of a Drug Enforcement Administration agent in the American government’s stepped-up efforts to combat drug trafficking in Mexico.

Government prosecutors said Camarena and his pilot, Alfredo Zavala Avelar, were kidnaped on Feb. 7, 1985, and taken to the Guadalajara estate of drug kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero, where they were interrogated about a suspected informant within Caro Quintero’s drug organization and savagely beaten to death.

Nine men, including Caro Quintero and another alleged drug kingpin, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, have been indicted by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles in connection with the murders.

But only three men are in U.S. custody and facing trial this week: Raul Lopez Alvarez, 28, Rene Verdugo Urquidez, 36, both charged with Camarena’s kidnap and murder, and Jesus Felix Gutierrez, 38, charged with being an accessory after the fact by helping Caro Quintero flee to Costa Rica.

In opening statements, defense lawyers said a web of corruption spanning from the Mexican state police to the top levels of the Mexican government continually impeded U.S. investigators’ efforts to find the real killers.

“We expect that the evidence will show there was a massive cover-up in this murder investigation to protect high Mexican government officials,” Felix Gutierrez’s lawyer, Barry Tarlow, told the jury.

“It goes up to the top of the army, to the Mexican director of security. People in Mexico are being protected by the highest levels of government,” Tarlow added in an interview later.

Both the defense and the prosecution portrayed Caro Quintero as a wealthy drug kingpin whose empire included tens of thousands of acres of marijuana fields in the wild lands outside Guadalajara, where Camarena had been based for the DEA.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Jimmy Gurule, who is prosecuting the case, said Caro Quintero’s narcotics organization was reeling from a series of recent raids that Camarena had masterminded against his crops. One seizure alone had netted 10,000 tons of marijuana with an estimated street value of $5 billion and the detainment of more than 6,000 employees.

Suspected a ‘Mole’

The kidnaping and torture session, Gurule said, were planned in order to determine whether there was a “mole” within the narcotics empire making secret reports to the DEA.

But defense lawyers claimed that the government is prosecuting three men who are “innocent dupes” in the scheme while the real killers go unpunished because of collaboration by the Mexican authorities.

The lawyers said they will present evidence that U.S. investigators were prevented from entering the suspected interrogation site for 12 hours while Mexican police officials sifted through evidence. They said U.S. representatives were barred for two days from the ranch south of Guadalajara where the bodies of Camarena and Zavala Avelar were eventually found.

One of the men charged but not in custody, Armando Pavon Reyes, was a chief homicide investigator in the case for the Mexican police. Defense lawyers said he accepted a $261,000 check from Caro Quintero at the Mexico City airport and allowed Caro Quintero’s plane to take off for Costa Rica as Caro Quintero toasted him from the window of the plane with a glass of champagne.

Ex-DEA Agent Testifies

The government’s first witness in the case, former Guadalajara DEA Agent Victor D. Wallace, admitted under cross-examination that the Mexican Federal Judicial Police is “a very corrupt organization,” and that state police refused to provide assistance on the day after Camarena’s disappearance when the DEA asked for help.

Government prosecutors admit that they have been unsuccessful at seeking extradition of many of the accused principals in the case, many of whom are currently awaiting trial in Mexican custody.

But Gurule said there is evidence linking all three men facing U.S. charges to the crime, including one of Verdugo Urquidez’s hairs found at the suspected torture scene and Lopez Alvarez’s own statements bragging about his role in the torture to an undercover DEA agent.

Lopez Alvarez’s lawyer, deputy public defender Else Leyva, claimed that Lopez Alvarez made those statements in an attempt to bluff the undercover agent into giving him money.

Head for Confrontation

But according to Gurule, Lopez Alvarez, then a state police official in Mexico, told the undercover agent that he alerted Caro Quintero and his associates when 20 to 30 Mexican police officers and additional DEA agents were bound for the airport at Guadalajara for an armed confrontation with Caro Quintero and 15 of his men.

Lopez Alvarez, who accompanied DEA agents to the airport, admitted that he was on Caro Quintero’s payroll and said he had planned to shoot the DEA agents in the back in the event that gunfire was exchanged, Gurule said.