Mexicans Outraged Over Police Attack That Killed 3

Lingering over dinner with a friend from out of town, they were the last to leave the Caribe Restaurant at about 3 a.m. Despite the hour, they stopped to window shop at a furniture store. Earlier, they had learned that the baby they were expecting was a boy.

At 28, Linda Bejarano was a popular television anchorwoman and the mother of two girls. Her husband, Manuel Gomez, once the spokesman for an opposition gubernatorial candidate, was a successful talk show host. His 77-year-old mother had joined them at dinner.

But the foursome’s night on the town would end in tragedy. Driving home in Gomez’s white Chrysler New Yorker, they were suddenly besieged by police in plainclothes and unmarked vans. A hail of pistol and machine-gun fire left 50 bullet holes in the car and three dead--four counting the unborn baby.

Gomez, the only survivor, says he was held incommunicado for seven hours after losing his pregnant wife, his mother and a friend of 17 years. During the interrogation, he says, he was accused of being a drug trafficker, then told the shooting had been a mistake. Police were seeking a similar white Chrysler with an illegal drug shipment. They produced one later in the day.

Crime is no stranger to sweltering Juarez, a desert border city that is the jumping-off point for many Mexicans trying to enter illegally into the United States across the Rio Grande and the Texas desert. While the principal industry is foreign-owned assembly plants, clearly the narcotics trade is on the rise. Local reporters say murky drug killings have increased in the last two years, although they are never certain whether the assassinations are the work of police or rival drug rings.

But the slaying of innocent civilians by federal policemen is not common. The incident last Saturday has outraged this community and threatens to explode into a political crisis for the government, which already is suffering a crisis of legitimacy from controversial elections earlier this month.

In an effort to quell public anger, federal Atty. Gen. Sergio Garcia Ramirez flew to Juarez to meet with Gomez and assure the community of justice.

Four men are in jail facing homicide charges, but only one was a federal judicial policeman. The others were what local reporters call “godmothers” or hired guns who illegally accompany the police on official business. Gomez contends that at least three more men participated in the attack.

30 Journalists Murdered

Despite the four arrests and sworn statements, the killings remain shrouded in mystery. In a country where more than 30 journalists have been murdered in the last six years, the shootings raise suspicions that Bejarano and Gomez may have been targets--although neither is known to have reported on police, drugs or other sensitive issues.

One editorial cartoon in a Juarez newspaper depicted the grave of a journalist with the caption, “Either by terror or by error.” The Juarez journalists association, which is planning a protest march today, is printing bumper stickers that say “Press. Don’t shoot. I’m not a narco.”

Gomez, 46, was identified with the rightist National Action Party, which just swept congressional elections in Chihuahua state from the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. But Gomez says he has not been active in politics for two years. His close friend said Gomez last year wrote a book about politics that drew threats, but Gomez says the book was unpublished and he denies receiving threats.

Still, National Action officials want to take up the slayings as their issue, while Gomez insists he does not want the deaths to become a cause for any political party.

Local reporters say police did not deliver the bodies of Bejarano, her mother-in-law, Lucrecia Martinez de Gomez, and Carlos Alfonso Garcia to the Red Cross for several hours after the shooting. An official autopsy reported that Bejarano had traces of gunpowder on her hand, indicating that she may have fired a gun. But Gomez rejects the suggestion as absurd, and no gun was found.

A Horrible Coincidence

Police say the shooting was the result of a horrible coincidence, that the Gomez family happened to be driving the wrong car at the wrong time when they passed police and were pursued. Gomez said the attack was an ambush, that police were waiting outside his mother’s house when they returned from dinner.

“They weren’t waiting to kill Manuel Gomez or Linda Bejarano, but they were waiting there to kill someone,” Gomez said in an interview. “I don’t want revenge. I do want to witness justice.”

Because he is pushing for more arrests, Gomez says he fears for his safety and for the security of his 4- and 6-year-old daughters.

His version of the events last Saturday is this: His friend, Carlos, drove the group home from dinner that night. Gomez said they were carrying more than $11,000 in pesos--a payment he had collected earlier in the night from the Chinese circus, for which he had done publicity.

They had just pulled up in front of his mother’s house when his wife shouted, “Don’t stop.” Gomez turned to see two cars blocking the street behind him with their headlights trained on the car. In the light, he saw the silhouette of a man with a gun. Believing it was a stick-up, Garcia stepped on the gas.

Shower of Weapons Fire

As they fled, a van pulled out from the cross-street at the corner and crashed into them. They heard shots and then ducked under a shower of automatic weapons fire. His wife and mother crouched in the back screaming as they sped along for several blocks, until Garcia was hit. He slumped over the wheel and the car rolled to a stop.

Gomez got out of the car with his hands up. One of the armed agents opened the back door, looked at the bleeding, screaming women and said, “What an idiotic thing we have just done.”

Gomez said he was kept in the van for about an hour before he was taken to police headquarters, where he was interrogated and refused a telephone call. He said the women were alive when he was taken away and police did not tell him they were dead until shortly before he was released.

Police officials and the jailed agents say the shooting was the result of an earlier incident about 25 miles south of Juarez when police tried to stop a white Chrysler believed to be carrying a cocaine shipment. The car reportedly escaped after a shoot-out and police radioed ahead to Juarez police to intercept it.

The jailed agents said in published statements that they spotted Gomez’s white car at about 3 a.m. and followed it. Federal police agent Gerardo Carrillo said the car ran into one of the police vans, then fled. He said that he fired warning shots into the air and that someone fired back from the Chrysler. Then police opened fire.

Conflict Over Lights

Carrillo insisted that police had turned on their flashing lights; Gomez said there were no police lights.

After Gomez was released, officials showed reporters another white Chrysler, allegedly found by state police, abandoned in the city. The car had bullet holes in the left rear side, blood on the seat and about 30 pounds of white powder, apparently cocaine, inside. Police could not explain why, having escaped police, drug dealers would abandon their haul.

Norberto Salinas Navarrete, the attorney general’s representative in Chihuahua who is overseeing the investigation, said the agents acted “precipitously.” He called the killings “an error without justification,” and said, “We know there are three people dead, and we consider these agents responsible for homicide.”

He said Carrillo was the only federal policeman, but asserted that two others “had credentials from local police.” One, he admitted, was working illegally.

Salinas declined to speculate on the true version of the events, but he discounted the theory that Gomez and Bejarano were targets.

“It seems logical to me that if the goal had been to eliminate Gomez, he would have been eliminated. They had him in their power.”