Mexico’s War on Drugs Confronts Enemy Within : Corruption: Attack on trafficking could lead to the highest realms. Some question government’s resolve.

A hit team fleeing the Guadalajara airport after killing a Roman Catholic cardinal and six other people last month handed off their automatic weapons to a cohort in waiting--a federal police officer hired to stash the guns in his car.

A federal investigation of the assault quickly led officials to arrest the Jalisco state police chief, charging that he was on the payroll of the drug barons who had meant to kill rival trafficker Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman.

A roundup of Guzman’s henchmen produced three more top cops apparently on the take. Several suspects told authorities they had seen the mob boss hand “briefcases full of dollars” to two federal police commanders and a deputy based in Guadalajara.

And over the weekend, the former police chief of Mexico City was arrested on charges that he had accepted a $50,000 bribe to release Guzman after he was captured in the capital two years ago.

“The problem is not the participation of police in the airport (shooting),” said Atty. Gen. Jorge Carpizo MacGregor. “The problem is that, really, the traffickers have managed to buy the police.”

Like the 1985 murder of a U.S. drug agent in Guadalajara, the May 24 assassination of Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo once again has revealed part of a system of official corruption that has allowed drug traffickers to operate freely in Mexico, shipping tons of marijuana, cocaine and heroin each month to the U.S. drug market, the world’s largest.

Carpizo, a human rights crusader who took over the top law enforcement post last January, says he not only is trying to nab the cardinal’s killers but to dismember well-protected drug mobs that have felt free to stay in five-star hotels, launch a midday assault at Mexico’s second-largest airport and leave the bloody scene as first-class passengers on a commercial airliner.

The attorney general, who oversees the Federal Judicial Police force, has jailed the three top officers allegedly on Guzman’s payroll as well as the officer who reportedly helped the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix family stage the airport attack.

After complaining to Congress about “traitors” within, Carpizo fired 67 other police agents whom he suspects of being corrupt. Among them are seven more of Carpizo’s 80 federal “first commanders” and 22 deputy commanders.

The government also set up a new, centralized National Institute for Fighting Drug Trafficking to combat the country’s drug barons.

Despite these moves, some observers are questioning the government’s willingness and ability to clean up systematic drug corruption. Police sources have long contended that Guzman’s protection, for example, reaches higher than police commanders and into the civilian world of national politicians and business leaders, none of whom have been touched in the recent crackdown.

In its search for Guzman and the Arellano Felix brothers, Carpizo’s office plastered the country with wanted posters and ran media advertisements offering a $5-million reward for information leading to their arrests.

Yet some critics charge they are merely trying to clean up an international embarrassment for President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who fears that the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement may be in jeopardy because of the murders.

“The Mexicans still haven’t done anything to arrest a major trafficker for trafficking,” said a U.S. official who asked not to be identified.

Or, as political columnist Luis Javier Garrido wrote in La Jornada newspaper last week, “The capos only have to be arrested when they violate some ‘unwritten’ agreements with officials and/or when the international scandal is very big.”

In 1985, federal police allowed Rafael Caro Quintero, the trafficker who masterminded the torture-murder of U.S. drug agent Enrique S. Camarena, to flee the country. With U.S. pressure, he subsequently was captured in Costa Rica and returned to Mexico for trial.

Among those indicted in the United States in connection with the killing were the former head of Interpol in Mexico, Miguel Aldana Ibarra, and his cousin Manuel Ibarra Herrera, who served as head of the Federal Judicial Police. Ibarra is at large. Aldana was arrested on drug charges in 1990.

U.S. officials have asserted that Caro Quintero’s protection--and that of other powerful traffickers at the time--went all the way to the defense minister and other Cabinet members, but they have never presented enough evidence to press charges. The Mexican government says that such allegations are unfounded.

It is such cases that lead national and foreign political observers to question the government’s willingness this time to pursue official corruption to the end.

After the cardinal’s killing last month, the Arellano Felix brothers’ hit team--including at least one of the four brothers--left Guadalajara aboard a commercial Aeromexico flight held 20 minutes for their boarding. Upon arrival in Tijuana, they were escorted out of the airport through a back door by unidentified officials. They remain at large.

The Arellano Felix brothers reportedly were trying to kill Guzman, who had been staying at one of Guadalajara’s top hotels for several days before the attack. Guzman showed up at the airport with 10 bodyguards and fled the scene in a taxi, without injury.

Eluding a massive manhunt, Guzman managed to drive out of Guadalajara and south across Mexico’s border with Guatemala, where he was captured by Guatemalan officials and returned to Mexico. He is in jail.

Carpizo insists that he is eating into the traffickers’ infrastructure with the confiscations of dozens of safehouses and of Guzman’s underground tunnel from Tijuana to San Diego, and with the arrests of police and civilians working for them.

“We have been attacking the system of corruption since January. With the cardinal’s death, we are getting more information than we had. . . . With the safehouses in Tijuana and Guadalajara, we have broken the backbone of these people in these two key cities. We are beginning to dismember Chapo’s band,” Carpizo said.

As part of his campaign to keep police from becoming too entrenched and corrupted, Carpizo rotates commanders out of their posts every six months. But sources say it takes a commander less than a week to become enmeshed in graft and that Carpizo has not been able to end a system under which commanders must pay superiors hundreds of dollars for lucrative border posts.

Carpizo clearly has heard this charge before but responds that he can only act on proof.

He admits to learning on the job. When another Mafia boss, Emilio Quintero Payan, was gunned down outside Mexico City last month, officials discovered the name and cellular telephone number of yet another police commander, Fulvio Jimenez, in the mob chief’s private phone book.

“When I got here, I was told Fulvio was efficient. I didn’t know anybody,” Carpizo said.

Jimenez has been arrested.

Salvador Peralta, a commander jailed for allegedly taking money from Guzman, also had been key in arresting several drug traffickers. Carpizo said he believes corrupt commanders receive payments from one trafficking group and then protect their reputations by arresting members of rival organizations.

He is optimistic about cutting the cycle of police corruption, but critics say the Guadalajara assault may mean that Carpizo is too late. “If traffickers have reached the point of unleashing their battles in international airports--that is, in areas particularly used by the upper and middle classes and under the responsibility of the federal government--what won’t they do in other circumstances?” columnist Lorenzo Meyer wrote in the Excelsior newspaper.