Jurors Return Last Camarena Conviction : Trial: Fourth defendant was involved in murders of two Americans. The panel members say they sometimes argued bitterly before reaching decisions.

Federal jurors in Los Angeles convicted the fourth and final defendant in the Enrique Camarena murder trial on Monday and then described in detail wrenching and sometimes volatile deliberations in a complicated case with international repercussions.

For 16 days, the jurors had groped toward justice, deciding what weight to give the testimony of paid informants and reviewing tales of gruesome torture, of multibillion-dollar drug cartels, and of widespread corruption at the highest levels of Mexican government. The jurors said they sometimes argued bitterly before reaching unanimous verdicts.

Jury forewoman Peggy E. Dolan said that often no single statement from a witness could be taken on face value. Each version had to be matched against other versions, other testimony, until the jurors could become reasonably convinced that they had the truth.

“We scrutinized every line of testimony,” Dolan said.

On Monday, the six-man, six-woman jury convicted Javier Vasquez Velasco, a 38-year-old bodyguard, of two counts of committing violent acts in aid of racketeering. The convictions stemmed from the Jan. 30, 1985, deaths of John Walker, an American writer, and Alberto Radelat, a Cuban medical student, who were murdered after they inadvertently walked into a party of narcotics traffickers at a Guadalajara restaurant and were mistaken for Drug Enforcement Administration agents.

Just a week later, on Feb. 7, 1985, “Kiki” Camarena, a veteran DEA agent, was abducted off a Guadalajara street, taken to the home of narcotics baron Rafael Caro Quintero, and interrogated and tortured for more than 30 hours. His mutilated body was found about a month later at a ranch 65 miles outside Guadalajara.

Several months ago, U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie decided to try Vasquez along with three defendants accused of involvement in the Camarena murder after he ruled that there was a significant overlap between the two cases. Federal prosecutors had asserted that the cases were linked, contending that all of the murders were acts committed by a huge Mexican narcotics cartel in retaliation for raids that had cost the traffickers nearly $5 billion in 1984.

Late last month, after a two-month trial, the Los Angeles jury convicted Honduran drug kingpin Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, Mexican businessman Ruben Zuno Arce, and former Mexican policeman Juan Jose Bernabe Ramirez of three charges each: conspiring to kidnap, torture and murder Camarena in support of a racketeering enterprise; conspiring to kidnap a DEA agent who was performing his official duties, and aiding and abetting the kidnaping of a federal agent. Both Matta and Bernabe were acquitted of murder.

With the verdicts Monday, seven persons have been convicted in Los Angeles on charges related to the kidnaping and murder of Camarena, with three other men having been convicted in a 1988 trial. Thus far, 22 people have been indicted in Los Angeles in the Camarena case and more than two dozen have been convicted in Mexico.

The case created tensions between the U.S. and Mexican governments, with officials in this country angered by evidence of involvement by high-level Mexican law enforcement officials in the murder, and Mexican officials upset with such criticism and with the tactics of U.S. agents in their pursuit of Camarena’s killers.

Atty Gen. Dick Thornburgh, who has criticized the Mexican government’s response to Camarena’s killing, issued a measured response to the end of the trial: “We can take no pleasure in the final outcome of this trial, due to the grisly events outlined by the evidence presented. However, there is justice in the fact that many of those responsible for the brutal kidnaping, torture and murder of Special Agent Camarena have now been held accountable for their dreadful acts.”

Vasquez’s attorney, Gregory Nicolaysen, described the conviction as a “real tragedy,” adding: “It tells us the government was able to convince the jury to accept at face value testimony which was clearly proven to be false.”

Much of the jury’s deliberation effort was spent sorting out the complex cast of characters. For each defendant they posted on a blackboard a list of the witnesses against him, the dates, the places, the allegations, and they kept photos of the principals close at hand. They also gave nicknames to the defendants and witnesses, many of whom had long Spanish surnames. Bernabe was “Bernie.” Zuno was called “Don Ruben,” a term frequently used by witnesses referring to Zuno’s prominent status in Mexico--he is the brother-in-law of former Mexican President Luis Echeverria Alvarez.

The jurors reviewed some extremely grim testimony. Perhaps the most wrenching evidence came when prosecutors played a 64-minute taped interrogation of a desperate, dying Camarena as he sought to alternately placate and deceive his torturers.

One juror, Joanne Frederick, said she read a transcript of Camarena’s torture “over and over.” It gave her, she said, a sense of the man and a sense of outrage.

“I thought of his wife and kids. It’s unfair . . . he had to die that way.”

In the end though, she said, what convinced her of the defendants’ guilt was the total picture of the case drawn by federal prosecutors Manuel A. Medrano and John L. Carlton.

“It took me a long time to understand what the government was doing and then all of a sudden it hit me,” she said.

The credibility of two key government-paid prosecution witnesses--Hector Cervantes Santos and Enrique Plascencia Aguilar, both former Guadalajara riot policemen with ties to drug traffickers--was constantly in question, jurors said. Both witnesses appeared to contradict themselves.

In fact, the controversy over these two witnesses resulted in the jury’s original foreman, William Parris, resigning on the ninth day of deliberations. Parris said he was among the minority of jurors who initially felt that the two witnesses “were lying through their teeth.” But most jurors thought the two men were truthful, and Parris said he decided it would be “very difficult” for him to lead the jury under those circumstances.

Eventually, Parris said that he was swayed by the other jurors that there was enough circumstantial and corroborating evidence to convict on most counts.

Dolan, who replaced Parris as foreman, and several other jurors said that they acquitted Matta and Bernabe of murder charges because prosecutors failed to place the defendants beyond a reasonable doubt in the house where Camarena was killed.

Several jurors said they gave absolutely no credence to the testimony of David Macias, a defense witness who accused the DEA of trying to pressure him into testifying against Zuno, a man he said he met only recently.

Last Friday, Zuno’s lawyers asked Rafeedie to declare a mistrial, claiming jurors had discussed a newspaper article reporting Matta’s conviction. Several jurors acknowledged that there were newspapers in the jury room virtually every day, but said that they did not read stories about the trial.

However, three jurors said that the jury had discussed defense lawyer Martin R. Stolar’s attack of the Matta verdicts as “inconsistent.” Juror Linda Overholt said that some jurors apparently heard the criticisms on car radios.

On the following day, she said, the jurors reviewed the Matta verdicts and decided they were “good decisions.” Said juror Dolan: “The consensus was we didn’t give a damn what he (Stolar) thinks and we went on to the next defendant.”