Camarena Revenge: Going Too Far

Enrique Salazar Camarena, an American drug agent, died in agony five years ago after two days of excruciating torture by a drug ring in Guadalajara, Mexico, probing to see what he knew about its links to Mexican law enforcement.

Since then, the Justice Department’s Drug Enforcement Administration has been relentless in its effort to track down and bring to justice everyone involved in his death.

It is natural, even noble and in the best tradition of law enforcement, for officers to seek out the killer or killers of one of their own. But there is nothing noble about one version of the way the most recent suspect in the Camarena case was brought before a federal judge in Los Angeles. If true, it mocks the very idea of international law.

The Mexican government is demanding to know whether Dr. Humberto Alvarez-Machain was kidnaped by bounty hunters and delivered to DEA agents in El Paso, Tex., who paid $100,000 for the delivery. The physician had been indicted in Los Angeles on the basis of reports that he injected Camarena with a drug during the brutal interrogation to keep his heart from failing.

Drug agency officials deny everything. But Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh, who by coincidence had flown to Mexico for a drug-enforcement conference Wednesday and therefore headlong into the storm over the case, says he wants a thorough investigation and a full report. Camarena died horribly. His killers must be punished. And corruption thwarts justice often enough in Mexico that it’s understandable when Americans are tempted to bend the law themselves to get results. But there is more at stake here than Mexican sensitivity. There is the question of whether America really wants to take the first steps, as it is doing, toward a world in which agents of all nations--or their bounty hunters--could freely snatch citizens off the streets of any other nation. Not if it gives the question serious thought.