Prosecution Rests in Camarena Case : Trial: Judge refuses to dismiss charges against one defendant but might drop them against a doctor who allegedly helped torture the agent.

Prosecutors rested their case Thursday against two Mexican citizens charged with taking part in the 1985 murder of an American drug agent, concluding a week of testimony that has strained U.S.-Mexico relations with witnesses’ accounts of the crime and its planning.

Immediately after the prosecution concluded, U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie indicated that he would consider granting a motion to drop charges against Humberto Alvarez Machain. He denied a similar request by the second defendant, Ruben Zuno Arce.

Motions to dismiss are routinely made--and rejected--after the prosecution concludes its case. But in comments from the bench, Rafeedie appeared to be troubled by the lack of direct evidence linking Alvarez Machain to the murder of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique Camarena.

The end of the prosecution’s case closed a week in which witnesses have implicated not only the two defendants but also a host of high-ranking Mexican political and law enforcement officials.

According to two witnesses, the men serving in 1985 as Mexico’s defense minister and minister of the interior and the governor of the state of Jalisco all attended meetings at which Camarena’s abduction was planned. One of those witnesses also said he saw those officials and others at the home where Camarena and his DEA pilot were tortured to death in February, 1985.

That testimony provoked an immediate and intense reaction from Mexican authorities, who denounced the prosecutors and branded the trial illegal.

In a news conference Thursday, Enrique Alvarez del Castillo, the former governor of Jalisco, called the charges “false and painful.”

“The testimonies are absolutely and notoriously false,” he said, presenting copies of newspaper articles that he said accounted for his whereabouts on Feb. 7, 1985, the day that Camarena was grabbed from a Guadalajara street and taken to a home where he was tortured.

Other officials also have denied the charges. Manuel Bartlett Diaz, who in 1985 was the minister of the interior and is now the governor-elect of the state of Puebla, on Tuesday denied any connection to drug trafficking.

From the start, the case against Zuno and Alvarez Machain has stirred intense political interest. Zuno is the brother-in-law of former Mexican President Luis Echeverria, and Alvarez Machain, a Guadalajara gynecologist, was kidnaped at the behest of the DEA in April, 1990. Mexican officials believe that the kidnaping was a violation of treaty agreements between the United States and Mexico as well as an abrogation of international law.

The abduction was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year.

Although that ruling forced Alvarez Machain to stand trial, Rafeedie indicated Thursday that he would consider dismissing the case against the doctor without letting it go to the jury.

Prosecutors allege that Alvarez Machain injected Camarena with lidocaine while the agent was being tortured in order to revive him so that he could be tortured further.

But prosecutors did not present any evidence that Camarena actually received such an injection. Forensic experts testified that it would have been impossible to detect traces of lidocaine in Camarena’s remains by the time his body was found, nearly a month after he had been killed.

“We don’t have any direct evidence that Camarena was injected with anything,” Judge Rafeedie said. Instead, the prosecution’s case against Alvarez Machain was based largely on a syringe found at the house where Camarena was tortured and on the testimony of a witness who testified that he saw Alvarez Machain rinsing some syringes at the same house while Camarena was there.

Rafeedie asked lawyers for the government to submit a detailed account of the evidence that would warrant sending the case against Alvarez Machain to the jury. That account, along with one from Alvarez Machain’s lawyer outlining his reasons for believing that the case should be dismissed, will be filed with the judge Monday.

The evidence presented against Zuno, however, was less circumstantial, with two witnesses placing him at meetings where Camarena’s kidnaping and murder were discussed.

But defense lawyers aggressively challenged the credibility of the two witnesses, both of whom admitted that they had worked for Guadalajara drug kingpin Ernesto Fonseca. One of the men, Rene Lopez Romero, testified that he helped kidnap Camarena and acknowledged that he was present during the torture and murder of four American Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1984.

During cross-examination Thursday, defense attorneys reminded jurors of those crimes--and of Lopez’s deal with the American government, which provides him limited immunity from prosecution and payments of $3,000 a month.

“In the seven months you worked for Ernesto Fonseca, you were involved in three separate instances of kidnap, torture, murder. Is that correct?” defense lawyer Alan Rubin asked.

Lopez admitted that was true, but stressed that he had never killed or tortured anyone. “I have never killed anybody in my life,” he said, adding: “If Ernesto had ordered me to do so, I might have.”

Researcher Susan Drummet in Mexico City contributed to this story.