Opening Volleys in Camarena Case : Trial: Prosecutors say they will show agent’s murder was part of a campaign to ‘intimidate the DEA.’

Leaders of a Mexican narcotics cartel tortured and murdered U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena in retaliation for raids that had cost the traffickers $5 billion, a federal prosecutor said Tuesday as a trial began for four men accused in the 1985 slaying.

In opening arguments before a federal jury in Los Angeles, Assistant U.S. Atty. John L. Carlton said he would prove that the narcotics cartel, which involved high-placed officials of the Mexican government, had been stung by two successful raids by the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1984, and began a campaign “to intimidate the DEA.”

“The cartel’s anger and frustration,” Carlton said, “increasingly focused on one DEA agent,” and that agent was Camarena, a veteran based in Guadalajara at the time.

His murder has become a rallying point for U.S. law enforcement engaged in the self-described war against drugs, and the DEA’s dogged crusade to avenge the death of one of its own has brought additional controversy to the case, heightening tensions between the U.S. and Mexican governments.

Carlton said much of the prosecution’s case against the four defendants would depend on the testimony of confidential informants, some of whom he acknowledged had committed crimes. He attacked Mexican law enforcement, saying that members of the federal security directorate, that country’s equivalent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were on the payroll of drug traffickers.

The four defendants claim they are wrongly accused, and in opening statements their individual attorneys attacked the credibility of paid prosecution witnesses.

Throughout Carlton’s 75-minute presentation, Jose Antonio Ortiz, an assistant to Mexico’s Los Angeles consul general, sat in the audience on the second floor of the federal courthouse downtown, busily taking notes, evidence of the Mexican government’s concern about the U.S. handling of the case.

The four defendants are Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, a convicted Honduran drug kingpin; Ruben Zuno Arce, the brother-in-law of former Mexican President Luis Echeverria Alvarez; Juan Bernabe Ramirez, a former Mexican policeman; and Javier Vasquez Velasco.

Carlton said that Matta and Zuno were among the plotters of Camarena’s kidnaping and murder, and that Bernabe acted as a guard at the house while the agent was interrogated and tortured. Matta is accused of murder, although the prosecution has not alleged that he did the killing. All three of these men are charged with conspiring to kidnap Camarena.

Vasquez is alleged to have killed John Walker and Alberto Radelat, two U.S. tourists who were mistaken for DEA agents after they stumbled into a restaurant meeting of Guadalajara drug traffickers one week before Camarena was slain. Vasquez has been charged with committing a violent crime in aid of racketeering.

All four defendants face life imprisonment if convicted.

Much of the first day of the long-awaited trial was devoted to opening statements before the jury of six men and six women. The first witness, a former DEA agent, took the stand in mid-afternoon. The courtroom was filled for the trial, which is expected to last two months.

Among accusations leveled by Carlton in his opening statement was that Zuno acted as a link between the drug cartel and the highest levels of the Mexican government.

In a new assertion, he said that Zuno gave specific instructions on how Camarena should be interrogated at a Guadalajara house after he was kidnaped on Feb. 7, 1985, outside the U.S. Consulate there.

More than two dozen persons have been convicted of crimes related to the slaying in Mexico and several are serving long prison sentences. Last year, after two of Mexico’s leading drug kingpins--Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo--were convicted of the murder there, Mexico’s attorney general declared that all the killers had been brought to justice and that the case was closed.

None of the four men on trial now has been charged in Mexico. As the trial opened, however, the Mexican attorney general announced in Mexico City that he was reopening his country’s investigation of the case.

Defense lawyers attempted to persuade the jury to consider their clients individually, not as part of a group. One of Matta’s lawyers, Michael Burns, stressed that the defendants were sitting at separate tables.

“The prosecution will attempt to fool you into convicting an innocent man,” said Burns. Last year, Matta was convicted in U.S. court on separate charges of moving cocaine worth $73 million through Los Angeles. He was given a life sentence. Burns acknowledged in court that Matta, 45, currently faces other drug trafficking charges in Los Angeles.

“But that’s in another court. . . . that’s for another day,” Burns said. “This is not a drug trial. This is a murder trial . . . What I want you to understand is that you should give a man who may or not be a drug dealer a fair trial on other charges.”

The trial’s first fireworks erupted before Carlton had finished his remarks. Another of Matta’s defense team, Martin R. Stolar, objected vociferously to Carlton’s statement that two strands of Matta’s hair were found at the Guadalajara house where Camarena was tortured and murdered.

Last week, Stolar asked Judge Edward Rafeedie to allow him to call an expert witness to examine the hairs with an electron microscope, which he said is more sophisticated than the method used by the FBI in determining that the hair was Matta’s. Rafeedie has not ruled on that motion. Outside the presence of the jury, he denied Stolar’s request to declare a mistrial because of Carlton’s reference to the hairs.

Several of the jurors took notes as they tried to absorb a blizzard of names--many of them long Spanish names--involved in the tangled case.

According to Carlton, on the day Camarena disappeared he had made arrangements to meet his wife for lunch.

“He never made that appointment,” Carlton said.

Instead, he was kidnaped outside the U.S. Consulate in Guadalajara. A month later, Camarena’s mutilated body was found at a ranch 65 miles from Guadalajara, along with that of Alfredo Zavala Avelar, a pilot for the Mexican agriculture department who had served as a DEA informant, scouting for marijuana fields.

In 1984, Zavala had led Camarena and other agents to two major marijuana fields operated by the Guadalajara cartel.

Carlton said Camarena and Zavala “were kidnaped, tortured and murdered because they did their work too well.”

Zuno’s attorney, Edward Medvene, a federal prosecutor some years ago, made the lengthiest opening statement of the defense lawyers. He called Camarena’s killers “animals” who were not connected to his client.

Medvene emphatically denied that Zuno had any involvement in the Camarena killing and said that it took the government four years and nine months to come up with a witness against his client--a man who is now a government-paid informant, Hector Cervantes Santos.

The attorney said Cervantes had been found by a DEA operative named Antonio Garate Bustamante, a figure of controversy in the case. The government does not plan to call the L.A.-based Garate as a witness. He is the self-proclaimed architect of the kidnaping of a Mexican doctor who also has been indicted in the case and is facing charges.

Medvene stressed that Cervantes had been relocated to the United States by the DEA. He told the jurors that Cervantes and three other prospective witnesses against his client had been paid $188,000 for information and expenses by the government.

The attorney added that a group of confidential informants expected to testify in the case had been paid a total of more than $800,000 by the government. Medvene utilized a large chart to illustrate the payments for the jurors.

Medvene accused the government of having a convicted drug dealer put into solitary confinement at a federal prison after he refused to testify against Zuno and told the jurors that one of the witnesses against his client would be a man who had committed 35 murders.

Finally, he said that Zuno, 59, would take the stand in his own defense.

Gregory Nicolaysen, Vasquez’s lawyer, and Mary Kelly, Bernabe’s lawyer, made only brief statements proclaiming their clients innocent.

The government’s first witness was James Kuykendall, who retired from the DEA last June after 16 years with the agency. He headed the DEA’s Guadalajara office from 1982 to 1985, and worked extensively with Camarena.

Kuykendall, who will return to the witness stand today, gave a detailed presentation of DEA operations in Mexico. Carlton asked him several questions about Mexican law enforcement agencies, including the federal security directorate.

“I’m not sure what their function was,” he said. “Many of the ones we met acted as henchmen for major narcotics traffickers.”

This is the second Los Angeles trial stemming from Camarena’s murder. Three men were convicted in a 1988 trial and given long prison sentences. Sixteen other persons have been indicted, including the four currently on trial.