Judge Rules DEA Kidnap Violated U.S.-Mexico Pact : Camarena case: In precedent-setting decision, repatriation is ordered for doctor accused in murder.

In a precedent-setting decision, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled Friday that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s kidnaping of a Mexican doctor violated the United States’ extradition treaty with Mexico and ordered the defendant in the Enrique Camarena murder trial returned to his homeland.

The judge’s decision, if it stands, could impede the DEA in its quest to apprehend all the individuals believed involved in Camarena’s 1985 murder, which infuriated his fellow agents and touched off a five-year investigation still under way called Operation Leyenda.

“The court finds that the United States violated its extradition treaty with Mexico when it unilaterally abducted” Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain, said U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie. “This court lacks jurisdiction to try this defendant.”

The judge ordered the government to release Alvarez, who is accused of administering drugs to Camarena while he was being tortured by his captors, and repatriate him. Rafeedie stayed his order for one week after Assistant U.S. Atty. William Fahey asked for time to consider an appeal.

Rafeedie also warned the DEA that similar violations of a nation’s sovereignty will not be tolerated even when they have been initiated to curb international drug traffickers.

The judge noted that three of the eight people who have been arrested in the United States stemming from the investigation of Camarena’s murder in Guadalajara, Mexico, have been forcibly brought to the United States.

“In its laudable efforts to pursue the killers of Enrique Camarena and halt the flow of drugs, the DEA is, by its repeated abductions, inviting the exercise of the court’s supervisory powers in the greater interest of maintaining respect for the law,” the judge said in a warning to the DEA that he might throw out future charges against people brought to the United States against their will.

Several other Mexican nationals have been indicted here in the Camarena case, but their extradition has not been requested because Mexico traditionally resists extradition of its citizens and U.S. Justice Department officials thought that such requests would be futile.

Federal prosecutors as well as Alvarez’s lawyer appeared stunned by Rafeedie’s decision.

“I’m flabbergasted,” said Robert K. Steinberg, Alvarez’s lawyer, who filed a motion in May asking that his client be released on the grounds that his kidnaping constituted “outrageous government misconduct.”

Steinberg said Alvarez, a 43-year-old Guadalajara gynecologist, felt “numb.”

Mexican officials, who have vehemently protested the kidnaping as a violation of their country’s sovereignty, reacted with delight.

“What great news for us!” exclaimed Otto Granados, a spokesman for President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. “This is an appropriate response on the part of the United States. Not only is the judicial branch complying with the law, but in doing so it reinforces what we consider to be a code of ethics and fair play. It is a good atmosphere for U.S.-Mexican relations.”

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles declined comment, as did Hector Berrellez, the DEA agent who heads the Camarena investigation in Los Angeles. Berrellez approved the kidnaping plan.

Alvarez was spirited out of Guadalajara on April 2, by a group of Mexican men with close ties to a Los Angeles-based DEA operative, Antonio Garate Bustamante, who worked under Berrellez’s supervision.

In May, Garate and Berrellez testified that about $60,000 had been paid to the kidnapers. Berrellez testified that the operation had been approved all the way up the line with his supervisors in Los Angeles and Washington.

On Friday, a DEA spokesman said he hoped the Justice Department would appeal the decision. A Justice Department spokesman said there would be no comment until the agency’s lawyers had read the judge’s 39-page decision.

However, a department source insisted that no one in U.S. Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh’s office was advised in advance of the plan that succeeded in bringing Alvarez across the border. The source said that Thornburgh learned of the operation only after Alvarez was brought to El Paso, Tex., on April 3.

The statement appeared to contradict remarks Rafeedie made from the bench and in his decision.

“The DEA gave the go-ahead for the abduction,” the judge said. “This command was approved at the highest levels of the DEA. The United States attorney general’s office was consulted.”

He specifically rejected a contention raised by Fahey in May that the DEA was not responsible because its agents did not personally kidnap Alvarez.

“The United States is responsible for the actions of its paid agents,” the judge said. “. . . The record reveals that the DEA and its informants were integrally involved” in the abduction.

Rafeedie indicated that his decision broke new ground. He said that he could find no other case exactly like this one.

Unlike the Alvarez ruling, Rafeedie had issued a decision just last month spurning a similar plea from another defendant in the Camarena case, Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, who was forcibly apprehended in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in April, 1988, by a combination of U.S. and Honduran forces.

Since 1886, U.S. law has generally held that a forcible abduction does not offend due process and does not require that a court dismiss an indictment for the loss of jurisdiction on those grounds, Rafeedie said. But the judge said there was a vital distinction between the Alvarez case and all the other federal cases on this subject that have been issued since 1886.

That distinction, Rafeedie emphasized, is that the Mexican government registered a formal diplomatic protest with the U.S. State Department. He said that Mexico sent three diplomatic letters to the State Department protesting the kidnaping as a violation of Mexican sovereignty.

The judge said that in all the other cases he reviewed of a foreign national seeking dismissal of charges after being brought forcibly to the United States, the governments of the other countries had approved of or acquiesced in the kidnapings.

Experts on international law said Rafeedie’s decision, if upheld on appeal, would be significant.

“This is the first case that I know of where someone has been ordered by a U.S. judge to be sent back on the basis of a violation of an extradition treaty,” said John Murphy, professor of international law at Villanova University in Philadelphia.

Alvarez was indicted by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles on Jan. 31. The indictment stated that he came to a house owned by Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero where Camarena was being tortured and administered drugs to the DEA agent so he could be revived for further interrogation. He was charged with five felonies, including conspiracy and murder.

Testimony given at a May 25 hearing in federal court revealed that the DEA had attempted to have Alvarez turned over by Mexican authorities in a prisoner swap before he was indicted.

Garate testified that the negotiations between the DEA and Mexican officials began in December, 1989, when he was contacted by Mexican Federal Judicial Police Commandant Jorge Castillo del Rey. He said that Castillo wanted to arrange a swap in which the United States would get Alvarez and the Mexicans would Isaac Naredo Moreno, a Mexican fugitive living in the United States.

An agreement was reached, according to testimony by Berrellez and Garate, the former head of the Guadalajara riot police and one-time associate of Mexican drug lord Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo. But the arrangement broke down when Mexican officials demanded $50,000 in expense money, Garate said.

Subsequently, Garate told Berrellez that he had friends in Mexico who could kidnap Alvarez and bring him to the United States. Berrellez told Garate to inform his associates he DEA would pay a $50,000 reward plus expenses if they could deliver Alvarez to agents in the United States.

On April 2, six men, some brandishing police badges, stormed into Alvarez’s office and took him away. The next day he was flown to El Paso and turned over to DEA agents, one of whom was Berrellez.

On June 5, Alvarez was charged in Mexico with crimes stemming from Camarena’s murder.

Steinberg said that to the best of his knowledge his client was not involved in drug trafficking, though he acknowledged Alvarez had been a physician for Caro.

“This man is incapable of a violent act,” Steinberg said. “He’s a jolly buffoon who liked to hang around with the big guys. It was an honor to be invited to Caro Quintero’s rancho. . . . He enjoyed being important and being invited to the house, but half the state did, including the governor of Jalisco.”

Times staff writers Marjorie Miller in Mexico City and Ronald J. Ostrow in Washington contributed to this story.