Camarena Prosecution Dealt Blow : Narcotics: The judge rules a witness may not try a 2nd time to identify a defendant. The defense plans to ask that charges against the man be dismissed.

The prosecution suffered a significant setback Wednesday in the trial of four men accused of involvement in the murder of U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena when a federal judge refused to allow the government to give a witness a second chance to identify a defendant.

On May 23, Enrique Placencia Aguilar, a government-paid witness, could not identify defendant Javier Vasquez Velasco in court.

Placencia had testified earlier that he knew Vasquez and had seen him at a December, 1984, meeting during which Camarena’s photo was passed among drug traffickers linked to the agent’s February, 1985, murder in Guadalajara.

A former Guadalajara police SWAT team officer, Placencia looked around the court room for more than two minutes but could not pick out Vasquez, 38.

On Wednesday, Assistant U.S. Atty. Manuel Medrano pleaded with U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie to give Placencia a second chance.

The prosecutor asserted that Placencia’s vision had been obscured when he testified. Rafeedie, however, reminded Medrano that he had asked the witness at the time whether he had difficulty seeing and Placencia said no.

Greg Nicolaysen, Vasquez’s defense lawyer, said the ruling substantially increases his client’s chance for acquittal.

“We’ve maintained all along that they had no case against Javier and that Placencia was a fabricated witness,” the lawyer said.

He said that when the government concludes its case, he will ask the judge to dismiss the charges against his client.

Medrano declined to comment on the potential significance of Rafeedie’s ruling. The prosecutor said he has a motion pending before Rafeedie to allow Placencia to testify that he previously had identified Vasquez in a photo spread.

Vasquez was not indicted for any specific acts related to Camarena’s murder. Rather, he is charged with murdering an American writer, John Walker, and a Cuban medical student, Alberto Radelat, at a Guadalajara restaurant just eight days before Camarena was kidnaped.

The two victims had inadvertently walked into a party of drug traffickers, were mistaken for U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and were brutally murdered, according to earlier testimony. Rafeedie has permitted the murders of Camarena and the other men to be consolidated because there was a significant connection between the cases.

Months ago, Placencia told the DEA that he had been an eyewitness to the restaurant killings and that Vasquez was one of the murderers. He has yet to testify to that.

In another development Wednesday, DEA Agent Delbert Salazar testified that defendant Juan Jose Bernabe Ramirez told him last July 25 that he had been present when Camarena was tortured in Guadalajara.

Salzar said that Bernabe made the admission in a Covina restaurant when Salazar was posing as the bodyguard of a narcotics trafficker who, in fact, was another DEA agent.

“He said that he’d been present during the interrogation,” Salazar said in court.

However, during lengthy cross-examination by defense lawyer Mary Kelly, Salazar said that on several other occasions Bernabe, a former Jalisco state policeman, told him that he had gone with drug lord Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo to the house where Camarena was being interrogated, but that Fonseca had left him outside.