Former Mexican Officer Guilty in Camarena Death

A former Mexican state policeman was convicted Thursday of the torture-murder of U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena and his pilot at the Guadalajara estate of a wealthy Mexican drug baron.

Raul Lopez-Alvarez, 29, faces up to life in prison for his conviction on six felony counts stemming from the 1985 kidnap and murder, which has strained U.S.-Mexican relations and unveiled evidence of widespread corruption in Mexico’s law enforcement ranks.

Jurors were still deliberating on two other defendants, Rene Martin Verdugo-Urquidez, 36, allegedly a top lieutenant for the drug organization that masterminded the killings, and Jesus Felix-Gutierrez, 38, a former East Los Angeles seafood company owner accused of helping drug baron Rafael Caro-Quintero escape from Mexico after the incident.

After an eight-week trial in Los Angeles federal court, jurors deliberated for one day before returning the verdict against Lopez-Alvarez, convicting him of two counts of committing a violent act in support of a racketeering enterprise, conspiracy, kidnaping a federal agent, felony murder and acting as an accessory after the fact by aiding Caro-Quintero’s escape.

His lawyer, Deputy Federal Public Defender Elsa Leyva, was near tears after the verdict and declined comment.

Lopez-Alvarez, a graduate of Los Angeles’ Garfield High School who had returned to his native Mexico to join the Jalisco state homicide squad, had contended that he was merely boasting about details he read in the newspapers when he asserted his involvement in the kidnaping and torture to an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agent.

In secretly videotaped admissions and other statements to a co-defendant in a Mexican jail, Lopez-Alvarez described how he and other police officers abducted Camarena outside the U.S. Consulate in Guadalajara on Feb. 7, 1985, and took him to one of Caro-Quintero’s houses in the city.

Lopez-Alvarez said he returned to Caro-Quintero’s estate later that day with the purported “godfather” of the organization, Ernesto Fonseca-Carrillo, and described the argument that broke out when Fonseca-Carrillo learned that Caro-Quintero “got carried away” during the torture and Camarena had been mortally wounded.

The elder drug lord slapped Caro-Quintero, Lopez-Alvarez related, and said bitterly: “What a (expletive) mess you’ve got us into.”

Leyva and Yolanda M. Barrera, chief deputy federal public defender, put Lopez-Alvarez’s mother on the stand to show how the young policeman had read details about the killing in a magazine article and picked up the rest in a Mexico City jail from other defendants.

Some of Lopez-Alvarez’s purported admissions did not mesh with what really occurred, and in some cases Lopez-Alvarez contradicted himself, the defense argued.

For instance, Lopez-Alvarez said that Camarena and his pilot, Alfredo Zavala-Avelar, were buried temporarily at Caro-Quintero’s estate, but later said they were buried alive elsewhere, neither of which occurred, Barrera said.

“What this trial has shown is that Mr. Lopez-Alvarez has a very fertile imagination . . . that he likes to be thought of as a big man, as somebody who knows something important,” Barrera told the jury.

But prosecutors Jimmy Gurule and Roel C. Campos said many of the details Lopez-Alvarez provided could not have been gleaned from news accounts.

Jurors were not told about Lopez-Alvarez’s conviction in February on charges of conspiring to murder a U.S. Customs agent.

It was during that investigation that Lopez-Alvarez made the statements about the Camarena case to the undercover DEA agent, who was posing as a drug dealer who wanted to hire someone to kill a troublesome federal agent.

Those portions of the tape dealing with the conspiracy to murder the customs agent were not played to the jury. Defense lawyers contended that Lopez-Alvarez had not intended to follow through with the murder, but was merely trying to get the undercover agent’s money.

Five other defendants, in addition to those tried in the last two months before U.S. District Judge Edward J. Rafeedie, have also been indicted by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles.

Four of them, Caro-Quintero, Fonseca-Carrillo, Sergio Espino-Verdin and Albino Bazan-Padilla, are in Mexican custody awaiting a verdict in their trial on narcotics and murder charges stemming from the Camarena case.

The fifth, former Mexican federal Police Commandante Armando Pavon-Reyes was convicted and sentenced in Mexico on charges of helping Caro-Quintero escape.