Camarena Murder Trial Lives Up to Expectations : Crime: The judge had promised the prospective jurors that the proceeding, which will resume today, would be a most interesting case. He wasn’t wrong.

On the first day of trial of four men charged in the murder of U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena, a federal judge in Los Angeles told prospective jurors that it would be “one of the most interesting cases on which you will have the opportunity to serve.”

U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie’s statement was no exaggeration.

During the first four weeks of the Camarena trial, jurors have heard about powerful, swaggering drug dealers, including one who kept a lion at his house; corrupt police officials, including one who “got loaded” on cocaine at a narcotics trafficker’s home; and a tense standoff between heavily armed bodyguards of a drug kingpin and Mexican law enforcement officials.

They have heard an American woman’s tearful description of her unsuccessful attempt to find her husband after he disappeared in Guadalajara; and the almost casual confession of a courier that he transported, by car, $150 million in drug sale proceeds from the United States to Mexico.

And they listened to wrenching tapes of Drug Enforcement Administration Agent Camarena, then 37, pleading with his killers not to torture him anymore.

The trial was in recess for most of last week and is to resume today.

Meanwhile, the Mexican government has reopened its investigation of the February, 1985, Guadalajara murders of Camarena and his pilot, Alfredo Zavala Avelar, as embarrassing allegations about ties between Mexican police officials and drug traffickers are raised continually in the courtroom. Those charges, on top of the fact that seven former Mexican police officials have been indicted in Los Angeles, have added a significant dimension to a trial that was likely from the start to rankle relations between Mexico and the United States.

The first 50 witnesses to testify in the case have included a bevy of DEA agents, an FBI criminologist, a doctor who examined Camarena’s mutilated body in a Guadalajara hospital, a Mexican lawyer who was shot and nearly killed because he helped the DEA and more than a dozen paid DEA informants, most of them Mexican and many of whom have engaged in criminal activity and been given immunity for their testimony.

Some of the informants gave testimony that was not seriously challenged. Among them was Juan Fernandez, who said he helped manage a string of ranches for Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero and doled out bribes to officials in four Mexican law enforcement agencies.

Thus far, the six men and six women on the jury are taking copious notes. Keeping track of the hundreds of people involved in the case, virtually all of whom have Spanish names, is a herculean task. The problem was underscored by the prosecution’s distribution to reporters of a five-page glossary containing hundreds of names of people who will be mentioned during the trial.

Moreover, many of the witnesses have testified in Spanish, requiring their remarks to be translated into English. All of the defendants speak Spanish and have interpreters at their sides.

This is the second Los Angeles federal trial of people accused of involvement in Camarena’s murder. Three men were convicted in 1988 and given long prison sentences.

The current trial may prove to be more significant than the first one because two of the defendants are accused of being among those that plotted Camarena’s kidnaping and murder. None of the defendants in the first case was alleged to have had such a pivotal role.

Securing convictions of those two men--Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, 45, a Honduran drug kingpin, and Ruben Zuno Arce, 59, a politically influential Mexican businessman who prosecutors contend is the key link between narcotics traffickers and the Mexican government--is very important to the DEA, which is continuing to investigate Camarena’s murder.

The other two defendants are Juan Jose Bernabe Ramirez, 31, a former Jalisco state policeman who is accused of being one of the bodyguards at the Guadalajara house where Camarena was tortured, and Javier Vasquez Velasco, 38, also a Mexican citizen. He is accused of killing an American writer and a Cuban medical student, who were mistaken for DEA agents and murdered just eight days before Camarena was kidnaped. Judge Rafeedie has allowed the government to combine the two cases, saying there is significant overlap between them.

Camarena’s murder and the ensuing investigation has strained U.S.-Mexican relations for five years. Numerous DEA officials have complained that Mexican law enforcement was slow to help search for Camarena’s killers and, at times, impeded the investigation.

For their part, Mexican officials have complained that their U.S. counterparts have not given them sufficient credit for the successful prosecutions of more than two dozen people in Mexico on charges stemming from Camarena’s murder.

The Mexican government also is unhappy about how the trial has gone so far. Mexican law enforcement has been portrayed as corrupt as the Chicago police during the height of mobster Al Capone’s reign in the 1920s.

Additionally, serious accusations have been leveled at several other prominent Mexican government officials, including assertions that the attorney general, Enrique Alvarez del Castillo, was involved with drug traffickers in the mid-1980s while he was governor of Jalisco, the scene of Camarena’s murder. He and many of the other top officials vaguely linked in testimony to the case have not been indicted.

Jose Angel Pescador Osuna, Mexico’s Los Angeles consul general, contends that leveling such accusations at unindicted officials is “very irresponsible.”

Pescador said he worried that if allegations of this type about uncharged Mexican officials continue to surface at the trial, it could harm Mexico’s relations with the United States. The allegations “generate problems that don’t seem appropriate at this time,” Pescador said.

“We have an expression in Spanish, ‘un pelo en la sopa,’ (a hair in the soup) which describes this situation,” he said. “We don’t want to spoil the soup because of this,” Pescador stressed.

In an interview at his office near historic Olvera Street, he said that while there may have been problems involving some Mexican law enforcement officials and their ties to drug traffickers in the past, times have changed.

“We are in 1990,” he said. “We want to be sure the U.S. government and the American people know there is a new way of doing things in Mexico.”