Testimony Implicates Atty. Gen. of Mexico : Drugs: DEA agent says a defendant in the Camarena murder trial told him the official, while a governor, ‘was involved’ with traffickers.

A Drug Enforcement Administration agent testified Wednesday that a defendant in the Enrique Camarena murder trial told him last July that Mexico’s attorney general “was involved” with drug traffickers while he was governor of the Mexican state of Jalisco in the mid-1980s.

Under questioning by the prosecution, DEA Agent Abel Reynoso said in Los Angeles federal court that defendant Javier Vasquez Velasco made the statement about Atty. Gen. Enrique Alvarez del Castillo in a tape-recorded interview last July, when he was asking Vasquez questions about drug traffickers as part of the investigation of Camarena’s February, 1985, murder in Guadalajara.

Reynoso was asked only one question about Alvarez and there was no follow-up.

Jose Angel Pescador Osuna, Mexico’s consul general in Los Angeles, asserted that it was “very irresponsible” of prosecutors to elicit Reynoso’s statement since Alvarez has not been charged in the Camarena case. The diplomat said he has known Alvarez for a long time and does not believe the accusations.

Some DEA officials have said they believed that Alvarez--who governed Jalisco, which includes Guadalajara, at the time that city was a hub of drug activity--was not particularly vigilant in his response to narcotics trafficking.

In recent weeks, Alvarez has been one of the Mexican officials who has been most vocal in criticizing the DEA for orchestrating the kidnaping of a Guadalajara doctor who was indicted in Los Angeles in the Camarena murder.

The brief reference to Alvarez on Wednesday was just the latest of numerous negative comments made about Mexican law enforcement personnel during the trial of four men accused of involvement in Camarena’s murder.

Later in his testimony, Reynoso said Vasquez told him about visiting a huge marijuana plantation in Zacatecas, Mexico, and seeing Mexican federal judicial police and Jalisco state police guarding the fields. He said Vasquez told him that he had seen 40 tons of marijuana transported from the fields while he was there.

Reynoso was cross-examined at length by Vasquez’s defense lawyer, Gregory Nicolaysen. Vasquez is not specifically accused of murdering Camarena. He has been indicted for the killings of an American writer and a Cuban medical student, who were mistaken for DEA agents and beaten to death in a Guadalajara restaurant on Jan. 30, 1985, just eight days before Camarena was kidnaped.

The cases are being tried together because U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie determined that there was a significant connection between the murders.

At the time Vasquez was interviewed by Reynoso, he was not under indictment. Reynoso acknowledged that Vasquez had talked to him voluntarily and told him what he had heard about the restaurant killings from two of his brothers, both of whom were there.

Earlier Wednesday, a Mexican real estate agent said that while driving to a local hotel from the Guadalajara house where Camarena was tortured, a drug trafficker, Rene Verdugo Urquidez, had remarked on Feb. 8, 1985, that he had “taken care of a problem.”

The real estate agent, Jorge Gomez Espana, said that Verdugo, who was convicted in the first Camarena murder trial in Los Angeles in 1988, did not elaborate on the remark. Gomez testified that he had gone to the house, owned by drug trafficker Rafael Caro Quintero, to dispel a rumor that he was a DEA informant.

Gomez testified under a grant of immunity from the U.S. government. Other charges against him have been reduced, he said.