Camarena’s Killer Gets 240-Year Prison Term

A former Mexican state policeman was sentenced Friday to 240 years in federal prison for his role in the 1985 torture-murder of U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena and his pilot in Mexico.

Raul Lopez-Alvarez, 29, a one-time Los Angeles resident, will not be eligible for parole until he has served at least 60 years for his participation in the murder of Camarena and the pilot, Alfredo Zavala Avelar. The murders were committed, authorities said, at the behest of a Mexican drug lord.

U.S. District Judge Edward J. Rafeedie imposed the stiff sentence after an impassioned argument by Yolanda M. Barrera, chief deputy federal public defender, who with her voice breaking insisted that Lopez-Alvarez was “a good man” who was innocent of all the charges. Secretly videotaped admissions made by Lopez-Alvarez, she said, were merely boasts made to a federal undercover agent posing as a drug dealer.

Called ‘an Assassin’

Assistant U.S. Atty. Jimmy Gurule countered that the pudgy-faced defendant was “a contract murderer, an assassin,” who would deserve the death penalty if it were available in federal cases.

Rafeedie, before imposing the sentence, took note of the “disparity” but added that he would have been “astonished” if the jury, which deliberated for one day, had failed to return a guilty verdict.

Rafeedie’s sentence was hailed by U.S. Atty. Robert C. Bonner, who issued a statement Friday saying, “It is the minimum kind of sentence that drug-trafficking terrorists . . . can expect for kidnaping or murdering federal law enforcement agents.”

Lopez-Alvarez was convicted last September, after an eight-week trial in Los Angeles Federal Court, of six felony counts--two counts of committing a violent act in support of a racketeering enterprise, felony murder, kidnaping a federal agent, conspiracy and acting as an accessory after the fact.

In the secretly videotaped admissions to the undercover agent and other statements to a co-defendant in a Mexican jail, Lopez-Alvarez described how he and other police officers abducted Camarena, an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agent. Lopez-Alvarez, a graduate of Los Angeles’ Garfield High School who had returned to his native Mexico to join the Jalisco state homicide squad, said Camarena was kidnaped outside the U.S. Consulate in Guadalajara on Feb. 7, 1985, and taken to the nearby estate of wealthy Mexican drug baron Rafael Caro-Quintero.

Tortured for 24 Hours

Federal prosecutors believe that Camarena was killed because drug enforcement activities he took part in were disrupting the flow of narcotics from Mexico and costing drug traffickers millions of dollars. Camarena was tortured for more than 24 hours before he was finally killed with several heavy blows to the head.

During his trial, Lopez-Alvarez’s lawyers contended that he merely provided facts that he had read in news articles. “He thought this would make him look important,” said a disconsolate Barrera, after the sentencing.

Last February, Lopez-Alvarez was convicted of two counts of conspiracy to commit kidnaping and murder, growing out of an offer he made to murder a federal customs agent for a $25,000 fee during the same conversations with the undercover investigator. He has not yet been sentenced in that case.

Two Others Sentenced

Earlier this week, two co-defendants in the Camarena case, Rene Verdugo Urquidez, 36, and Jesus Felix Gutierrez, 38, were also sentenced by Judge Rafeedie. Verdugo, an admitted marijuana trafficker identified as a top lieutenant of Caro-Quintero, received 240 years in prison and will also not be eligible for parole for 60 years. Felix Gutierrez, the former owner of a Los Angeles-area seafood company, was sentenced to a maximum 10-year term for helping Caro-Quintero flee to Costa Rica in an unsuccessful effort to avoid prosecution after the killings.

Five other men, including Caro-Quintero, were also indicted in Los Angeles for the murders. Caro-Quintero is now in custody in Mexico with three others and is standing trial there on murder and kidnaping charges.