A Cry of Innocence : Murder: The Mexican doctor kidnaped and brought to the U.S. in the Camarena case says he can’t get a fair trial. From jail, he grants his first interview.

Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain, whose 1990 kidnaping at the behest of American drug agents set off a titanic diplomatic and legal battle, said in a jailhouse interview that he is an innocent victim of a government willing to trample international law to put him behind bars.

In a Wednesday evening interview, his first with an American news organization, Alvarez declined to respond to government charges that he participated in the 1985 torture and murder of undercover drug agent Enrique Camarena, other than to deny it. But Alvarez offered a gripping account of his kidnaping and expressed doubts that he can ever receive a fair trial in the United States.

“I was completely terrorized,” Alvarez said. “It’s a situation that I wouldn’t wish upon any citizen of this country or of any country in the world.”

Later he added: “There is no justification for this inhumane and cruel act. That’s why there are laws, international laws, agreements. We live in a civilized world. There’s no country in the world where kidnaping is approved of.”

The day of the abduction, April 2, 1990, started “just like any other,” Alvarez recalled. He had breakfast with his family, then made his medical rounds, breaking to do a little shopping with his niece as the family began its preparations for the Easter holiday.

But that Monday in Guadalajara ended with six armed kidnapers bursting into Alvarez’s office, putting a gun to his head and throwing him into the back of a car. Alvarez said he was punched in the stomach, shocked with an electrical device, injected with drugs and whisked out of Mexico during his 21-hour captivity, which ended when he was dumped into the arms of waiting Drug Enforcement Administration agents in El Paso.

Within days, Alvarez’s kidnaping had exploded into a major international incident, overshadowed only by the accusation that provoked it: The Guadalajara gynecologist is charged with administering drugs to Camarena in 1985 to keep the agent alive while he was being tortured by Mexican drug lords seeking information about the DEA.

Alvarez will probably go to trial on those accusations this fall, because the U.S. Supreme Court last week upheld the doctor’s kidnaping. By a 6-3 vote, the court ruled that the abduction did not violate the extradition treaty with Mexico. That closed off what may well have been Alvarez’s last chance for avoiding a criminal trial.

In his interview with The Times, Alvarez, a heavyset, stoic man, vehemently denied that he participated in the Camarena torture, but he declined to discuss that case in detail. Alvarez, who says he is deeply depressed and keeps a diary to record his anguish, spoke softly and answered most questions without hesitation during the 50-minute session, which took place in a glass-walled interview room at the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles.

One of his lawyers, American Civil Liberties Union attorney Robin S. Toma, translated Alvarez’s remarks and occasionally urged him not to answer a question because of his upcoming trial. Alvarez obeyed, deflecting questions about the Camarena torture by merely repeating his claim of innocence.

Until this week, Alvarez maintained a self-imposed silence, refusing to grant interviews while his lawyers pursued legal objections to the kidnaping. Wednesday, he clearly relished the chance to speak, and he vented his frustration with the Supreme Court ruling.

“Until the decision, I had waited and always hoped for justice from the Supreme Court,” he said. “Out of respect, because my case was pending, I felt I should not make any comment. But when the decision was handed down last week, I realized that I had not received justice, and so I felt it was important for me to speak out, so people in Mexico and the United States would understand what has happened.”

Alvarez’s trial, which has been scheduled for Aug. 25 but will probably be delayed for a few months longer, will mark the latest chapter in the torture-murder of Camarena.

The agent, nicknamed Kiki, disappeared on Feb. 7, 1985. His body, along with that of DEA pilot Alfredo Zavala Avelar, was found in a shallow grave outside Guadalajara a month later.

Outraged DEA agents and other American authorities vowed to bring the murderers to justice.

As the investigation plodded forward, American agents complained that they were not getting cooperation from Mexican authorities. Some of the suspects--most notably drug kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero--were tried and convicted in Mexico, but others remained free and beyond the reach of American authorities.

When DEA agents became convinced that Alvarez was not going to be punished in Mexico, they secretly hatched a plan to kidnap him and bring him to the United States. It was just before sunset on April 4, 1990, that their quarry arrived by private plane in El Paso.

John C. Lawn, who headed the DEA during most of the Camarena investigation and left a month before Alvarez was kidnaped, said Thursday that arresting the doctor was one of the agency’s top priorities as it sought to avenge Camarena’s death and bring his murderers to justice.

“We talk about the Hippocratic oath, the role of a doctor to maintain the well-being of a person, and then we learn about a doctor who keeps a person alive just so he can be tortured and killed,” said Lawn, now the chief operating officer of the New York Yankees. “That is just horrifying. It reminds me of something that was happening a few decades ago” in Nazi Germany.

Alvarez dismisses the suggestion that he is a monster who collaborated in the Camarena murder.

“I’m innocent,” he said. “I’m a professional. I’m a gynecologist.”

Despite years in custody, Alvarez still has never directly faced his accusers on the charges that he helped torture Camarena or that he was an accessory after the fact to the agent’s abduction. As a result, the details of Alvarez’s involvement remain sketchy and disputed.

According to an affidavit filed two years ago in federal court, Alvarez told investigators that he was at the house where Camarena was tortured, but denied having administered drugs to the agent. Alvarez, that document states, told agents that a doctor named Juan Mejia Monge was attending to Camarena, “checking his pupils and vital signs.”

Monge, Alvarez reportedly said, “mentioned to me that he (Camarena) was in a bad state.”

Investigators treat Alvarez’s account with considerable skepticism. They say they have substantial physical and testimonial evidence that Alvarez observed the torture and injected Camarena with drugs.

Moreover, government officials note that some of the details of Alvarez’s story have changed since his arrest. When he was first taken into custody, for instance, he made no mention of mistreatment at the hands of his captors.

But Wednesday, as in previous statements made in court, Alvarez accused the men who kidnaped him of administering electric shocks to the soles of his feet--though his shoes--and of injecting him with a drug that made him lightheaded and groggy.

“I think they wanted to scare me or to terrorize me,” he said.

Robert K. Steinberg, who represents Alvarez in his criminal case, said the doctor had not mentioned the shocks or injections when he was taken into custody because he was frightened and because he did not trust the DEA agents who were questioning him.

It has been more than 27 months since Alvarez was jailed, and during that time he says he has developed an ulcer and suffered a heart attack. Life has turned painfully monotonous, he says, and he has traded his gynecological practice for cleaning the television room at the federal detention center.

He calls home every Saturday to speak to his wife and four children, three of whom are grown. They have gone to the jail once, but his visitors are mostly lawyers. Alvarez describes himself as a religious man, wears a rosary and says he meets every afternoon with a group of Latino inmates for prayer services.

Through it all, despite the government’s claims that he participated in Camarena’s torture, Alvarez insists that he is innocent, falsely accused by overzealous American officials.

“The truth is always shown in one’s face, in their person,” Alvarez said Wednesday, fixing his clear brown eyes in an intent gaze. “Only a person seeing me can judge me.”