DEA Payment for Doctor Detailed : Camarena case: Witness says he paid friends $20,000 plus $6,000 a week to deliver the suspect to the U.S. The DEA insists it was not a reward or bounty.

A man who worked for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration testified Friday that he paid $20,000 in DEA funds plus $6,000 a week in expenses to people who brought a Mexican doctor to the United States to face charges in the murder of a U.S. drug agent.

The testimony at a federal court hearing in Los Angeles followed confirmation by the DEA in Washington that there had been a $20,000 payment. DEA spokesman Frank Shults called it payment for “services” and neither a reward nor a bounty.

The alleged kidnaping of Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain in Mexico and his delivery to U.S. authorities to face charges in the slaying of DEA Agent Enrique Camarena has created a rift between the U.S. and Mexican governments.

Former Mexican police officer Antonio Garate Bustamante testified at the hearing that his DEA supervisor, Hector Berrellez, approved the plan for Garate to arrange for friends to spirit the doctor out of Mexico.

Berrellez also testified. He said the highest authority for the plan was DEA Deputy Director Pete Gruden.

U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie questioned Garate on how the plan was authorized and formulated.

“Did you seek any authorization from anyone in the DEA?” Rafeedie asked Garate.

“Yes,” said Garate. “I kept my supervisor, Mr. Hector Berrellez, informed.”

“Did you tell Berrellez you were going to bring Dr. Alvarez Machain here?” asked the judge.

“Yes,” said Garate.

“And did he say go ahead with it?” asked the judge.

“Yes,” said the witness.

Garate detailed a plan that developed in two phases. First, he said, it was to involve officials of the Mexican federal police, and there was talk of a $100,000 reward as well as swapping the doctor for a Mexican fugitive held in the United States. But that plan fell through, he said, and a second plan was formed.

Garate said he found friends who would take on the job without advance payment.

“I told them that no money would be provided up front,” he said, “and they would have no assistance from the DEA. Whatever they were doing they were doing on their own.”

However, he said he promised to pay all their expenses and specified that Alvarez should not be harmed during the operation.

Although he claimed at one point they “did it more for friendship than money,” he acknowledged that he did give them partial payment of $20,000 and $6,000 once a week beginning last April 8 and continuing to the present.

“Are these payments to continue indefinitely?” asked the judge.

“I don’t know,” said the witness. “I know they have to come to an end sometime.”

The expense payments supported 23 people, including seven involved in the doctor’s actual abduction and their families, Garate said.

The judge ordered the hearing when an attorney for Alvarez filed a motion for dismissal of charges, claiming outrageous government misconduct. Mexican authorities have demanded Alvarez’s return to his native country.

In Washington earlier, DEA spokesman Shults would not specify the services rendered for the $20,000. However, he said it could have covered such things as rental of the plane that flew the Guadalajara gynecologist to El Paso.

Alvarez was arrested April 3 to face charges in the 1985 kidnaping, torture and murder of Camarena and his pilot.

Shults, speaking before the testimony in Los Angeles, said he was told the only payment was the $20,000.

The payment was made about 10 days after Alvarez was arrested, said Shults, adding that there was no advance payment even though the people responsible had sought $50,000 in advance.

“They wanted up-front money and we wouldn’t pay it,” he said. He declined to specify who received the payment, describing them only as “people who were cooperating with us.”

Alvarez’s trial has been indefinitely delayed pending the outcome of the hearing into how he was brought to the United States. A long line of U.S. court decisions have held that a fugitive can stand trial in the United States even if the arrest overseas was improper or illegal.

Camarena, 31, was kidnaped on a Guadalajara street Feb. 7, 1985. Testimony at the trial of three other men in 1988 showed that he was taken to a house and tortured and interrogated by drug lords, then killed along with his pilot, Alfredo Zavala Avelar. Their bodies were found about a month later at a ranch 65 miles outside Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city.

Prosecutors maintain that Alvarez gave Camarena drugs to revive him for additional torture before his slaying.

The drug lords reportedly were incensed because Camarena’s undercover work had led U.S. and Mexican authorities to a desert marijuana plantation, where they seized 10,000 tons of the drug worth billions of dollars.