Doctor’s Prints Found at Torture Site, Court Told

Fingerprints belonging to Guadalajara gynecologist Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain were found on plastic bags at the home where Drug Enforcement Administration Agent Enrique Camarena was tortured in 1985, an FBI fingerprint expert testified Thursday.

“I identified Mr. Machain’s prints on several of the plastic bags,” said Carl E. Collins Jr., an FBI fingerprint specialist. All told, Collins said, Alvarez’s prints were found on five of eight dry cleaning bags discovered in the Guadalajara home where Camarena was held and tortured.

The fingerprints bolster the government’s case that Alvarez knew Camarena’s abductors, but they do not conclusively place him at the scene of the crime.

“I don’t think it proves anything,” defense lawyer Alan Rubin said outside court. “It doesn’t prove that he was there.”

Rubin suggested that the fingerprints could have been placed on the bags at another location, and Collins agreed in testimony that they were not necessarily imprinted during the time while Camarena was at the house at 881 Lope de Vega in Guadalajara.

The fingerprint evidence highlighted a day of testimony in which federal prosecutors laid the groundwork for their case against Alvarez and co-defendant Ruben Zuno Arce. Both men are charged in connection with the slaying, which prosecutors say was planned and carried out by members of a powerful and well-connected Guadalajara drug cartel.

Camarena disappeared Feb. 7, 1985, and his badly battered body was discovered a month later.

Alvarez is charged with conspiring to kidnap, torture and murder Camarena, as well as with felony murder. Prosecutors say Alvarez was house doctor to the cartel and administered an injection of lidocaine to Camarena to keep him alive so that his torturers could continue trying to extract information from him.

In a statement to agents after he was abducted in Guadalajara and forcibly brought to the United States, Alvarez acknowledged being at 881 Lope de Vega while Camarena was there, but denied that he had participated in the torture. Rubin has said that that statement was made under duress.

Witnesses testified Wednesday that a syringe containing traces of lidocaine, which is sometimes used to stabilize an irregular heartbeat, was found in the bathroom of the guest house on the grounds of the property where Camarena was held. No fingerprints were found on that syringe, and the American doctor who performed an autopsy on Camarena said that the agent’s body was too badly decomposed to perform tests to determine whether he had received such an injection.

In other testimony Wednesday, government agents elaborated on their frustrating search for Camarena’s killers, describing incidents in which Mexican officials repeatedly interfered with their inquiry. In one case, an FBI agent said he was ordered to leave the crime scene after discovering a license plate stuffed inside a drain pipe.

“I was told that my search would not be allowed to continue,” FBI Agent Ronald Rawalt testified.