Camarena Witness Places Defendants at Kidnap Meetings

The former security chief for a Guadalajara drug trafficker testified Thursday that all four defendants on trial for the 1985 murder of U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena attended one or more meetings where Mexican narcotics lords and government officials urged that Camarena be kidnaped because of trouble he was causing them.

The witness, Hector Cervantes Santos, described a series of meetings in 1984 and 1985 in which the kidnaping was discussed. He told the court that Ruben Zuno Arce, a Mexican businessman, was present at three of the meetings. The three remaining defendants, he added, were present at one of the meetings. They are Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, a convicted Honduran drug kingpin; Javier Vasquez Velasco, a Mexican citizen who also has lived in the United States, and Juan Jose Bernabe Ramirez, a former Mexican police officer.

Cervantes said at the earliest meetings, in September and October, 1984, the plotters were not certain who the troublesome Drug Enforcement Administration agent was.

But, according to Cervantes, Manuel Ibarra Herrera, then the head of Mexico’s Federal Judicial Police, told the group at one of the meetings in October that something had to be done because the agent’s activities were “causing trouble” for Manuel Bartlett Diaz, who was Mexico’s Minister of the Interior and is now Minister of Education. Cervantes did not elaborate on Bartlett’s purported problems.

This was the first time that Bartlett’s name has emerged in the case being tried in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Ibarra is under indictment in the United States in the Camarena case, but is living freely in Mexico.

The meetings, described by Cervantes through an interpreter, were held at the large Guadalajara home--known as “La Quinta”--of his boss, attorney Javier Barba Hernandez, who prosecutors say is a member of the Guadalajara narcotics cartel. Bartlett’s problems allegedly were raised at a meeting that was held during a wedding party for Barba’s brother.

In a dramatic moment Thursday, Cervantes stepped down from the witness stand and pointed to Matta to identify him for the jury as one of the men at the meeting. The two men glared at one another and then Cervantes returned to the witness stand.

On the day of the wedding, Cervantes testified, Miguel Aldana Ibarra, a commander in the Federal Judicial Police, showed Matta a folder of police files. Matta told the group that “we will soon have the identity” of the problem DEA agent and that he would be silenced, Cervantes said. Aldana also has been indicted in Los Angeles and is in custody in Mexico on other charges.

According to Cervantes, Zuno said at one of the meetings that he wanted to find out what the DEA knew about “my general” Juan Arevalo Gardoqui, then Mexico’s Minister of Defense. Camarena was interrogated on what he knew about Arevalo when he was tortured at a Guadalajara house in February, 1985, according to tapes that the DEA obtained later. Prosecutors have described Zuno as the link between the Mexican political Establishment and the drug traffickers.

On two occasions, Cervantes said, Zuno gave Barba credentials for a Mexican law enforcement agency, with the clear implication that they could be used by henchmen of the drug traffickers.

On cross-examination, Cervantes disclosed that Mexican drug kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero had proposed kidnaping John Gavin, then the U.S. ambassador to Mexico. Cervantes testified that Barba had strongly opposed kidnaping Gavin, saying it was too dangerous, and that others at the meeting agreed. He asserted Thursday, in contradiction to his grand jury testimony, that Zuno had originally backed the plan to kidnap Gavin.

Cervantes testified for nearly five hours and was expected to return today for more questioning. He wore a new brown suit, a white shirt and a gold tie. It was a more subdued outfit than the gray double-breasted suit, black shirt and gray tie he wore Wednesday that looked like it came straight out of a 1940s gangster movie.

The witness also offered grim testimony about how he cleaned Barba’s blood-stained Mercury Marquis after Barba and another man returned from a Guadalajara restaurant called La Langosta where an American writer, John Walker, and a Mexican medical student, Alberto Radelat, were beaten to death, allegedly after they stumbled into a party held by drug traffickers on Jan. 30, 1985.

When Barba and his friend Javier Vasquez Ochoa returned to Barba’s house, Cervantes recalled, their hands, clothes, boots and guns were stained with blood. Barba and Vasquez Ochoa told Cervantes, he said, that they had caught “some gringos” spying on them and beat them severely using ice picks. Vasquez Ochoa’s uncle, Javier Vasquez Velasco, has been indicted in Los Angeles in the killings of Walker and Radelat.

Eventually, prosecutors said, the traffickers settled on Camarena as a kidnaping target and abducted him from a Guadalajara street on Feb. 7, 1985. He was taken to a house owned by Caro, where he was interrogated, tortured and killed.

Cervantes described how a bodyguard of another drug chieftain, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, came to Barba’s house and told him that Caro “had gone too far” and that the American had been killed. He said Barba immediately called Zuno and told him trouble was looming because of the murder.

A few days later, Barba told Cervantes he was going into hiding. “He gave me a .357 magnum, 600,000 pesos and a pair of his boots,” Cervantes said. Cervantes stayed at the house and saw Barba only one more time. Barba was killed in a shoot-out with Mexican federal judicial police on Nov. 17, 1986, amid rumors that Mexican law enforcement authorities were worried that he might tell what he knew about the Camarena murder.

Cervantes has been a government-paid informant since Nov. 24, 1989, according to DEA records. He, his wife and two children have been relocated to the United States and have received more than $36,000 in payments from the DEA since November.

During cross-examination, Zuno’s lawyer, Edward Medvene, questioned Cervantes about why he had allegedly told DEA investigators different things at different times.

Cervantes acknowledged that he did not initially disclose certain information to the DEA, including the presence of Javier Garcia Paniagua, a ranking Mexican political official, at two of the meetings where the kidnaping was discussed. Garcia now is Mexico City’s police chief. Cervantes said he did not make the disclosure until his family had been relocated to the United States because it would have been dangerous to do so.

Medvene pressed Cervantes on whether he would receive DEA payments for life and be allowed to remain a resident of the United States. Cervantes responded: “Nothing has been said that this money would go on for the rest of my life.” Asked if the decision would be left up to the DEA, he replied: “Yes, I am in their hands.”

Cervantes did not give a clear answer about why he decided to come forth and testify more than 4 1/2 years after the Camarena killing. He said last fall he initially was contacted by a man he knew only as “the Panther” and then was put in touch with Antonio Garate Bustamante, a DEA operative, who arranged for interviews with Los Angeles-based DEA agents.

Meanwhile, in a matter related to the Camarena case, officials said Thursday that the United States has no plans to extradite a Mexican doctor brought across the border by bounty hunters to face charges in the murder.

Mexico’s request for the return of Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain, to face possible prosecution there, was received by the State Department and the United States will “respond in due course,” Justice Department spokesman Doug Tillett said.

However, officials who spoke on condition of anonymity noted that Mexico had not made a formal extradition request but only called for Alvarez’s return. The officials also pointed to recent public statements by the Justice Department stressing that there were no plans to return Alvarez to Mexico.

Alvarez, accused of participating in the torture and murder of Camarena, was abducted in Guadalajara by bounty hunters, flown to El Paso, Tex., on April 3 and turned over to Los Angeles-based DEA agents.