Caught on the Borderline : San Diego Men Say They Were Framed for Cardinal’s Murder, but Extradition to Mexico Is Imminent

Any day now, the U.S. marshals will come for Tarzan and Cougar, two gang members imprisoned in the high-rise federal jail here on charges of killing a Roman Catholic cardinal in Guadalajara.

The homeboys from the Logan Heights barrio will be shackled, turned over to Mexican police in a top-security operation at the border and then flown to a Mexican prison to stand trial.

Recruited in an unprecedented alliance between a Mexican drug cartel and a U.S. street gang, prosecutors say, the suspects embarked on an odyssey that is the stuff of gangster melodrama. It culminated last year in the airport gunfight in Guadalajara that left the cardinal and six others dead.

Nine gang members have been arrested, all of them young foot soldiers in the Arellano cartel of Tijuana. They allegedly plunged into a gunslinging, high-rolling drug war with political dimensions far beyond the narrow universe of the San Diego gang known as 30th Street.

The death of Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo--police say the Arellano gunmen shot him by mistake while trying to kill a rival--shocked Mexicans. But 18 months later, the case has been eclipsed by raging political violence and intrigue. Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari did not mention the cardinal’s death in his final speech to the country’s congress recently, an omission lamented by critics who allege a cover-up of the killing. And the well-connected Arellanos have eluded capture, even traveling to Mexico City to proclaim their innocence at meetings with the Vatican’s ambassador to Mexico.

The murky political elements may never be clarified, but at the street level, there is no mystery: The popular wisdom has it that the alleged masterminds are at large while the pawns are taking the rap.

“I didn’t think I was going to get involved in anything like this,” said Jesus (Cougar) Zamora Salas, a melancholy 21-year-old. “There’s no evidence whatsoever that I shot the cardinal or that I attempted to shoot anyone at the airport. . . . I know they are going to torture me. I know that. And they are going to want me to confess to something, anything.”

In appealing their extradition as high as the U.S. Supreme Court, Zamora and Carlos (Tarzan) Enrique Garcia insist that they are scapegoats. They said during recent interviews that authorities are sending them to their potential doom using weak evidence extracted through torture of fellow suspects in Mexico.

“It’s because of the neighborhood,” said the muscular Garcia, 24, whose shaved head and quick grin give him a cheerfully menacing air. “We are all from the same neighborhood, so they picked me out of a crowd. I feel like this whole thing is a joke. The day I go down there, it won’t be a joke no more.”

Garcia and Zamora are products of a cross-border culture. Garcia was born in Tijuana and Zamora in San Diego; both grew up in working-class immigrant families in the hardscrabble Logan Heights enclave hemmed in by freeways, warehouses and docks. Both earned high school diplomas while running with the city’s most violent Latino gang, police say.

Garcia worked as a welder amid intermittent stints behind bars for drug possession, assault and traffic violations. Unlike Zamora, he denies gang affiliation. But he admits friendship with die-hard gang members such as Ramon (Spooky) Torres Mendez.

Torres, 25, was arrested in Tijuana and admitted taking part in the shootout. He died in a Guadalajara prison cell last fall. Police first declared it a homicide, then ruled the death accidental, a bizarre reversal met with disbelief by the press and the public.

“I think he was beaten to death,” Garcia said. “It had to be the police who killed him. I guess he thought he could handle it. He was the type that thought he was tougher than everybody.”

Most of the evidence for Garcia and Zamora’s extradition came from the statements of Torres and three others to Mexican authorities shortly after the cardinal’s murder. Defense lawyers presented testimony from family members that Mexican police tortured those suspects into implicating two dozen gang members, many by street names.

However, human rights questions are beyond the limited scope of the extradition procedure, which focuses on whether probable cause exists for the defendant to be tried in another nation. Prosecutors responded to the allegations of torture by citing non-coercive interviews conducted in Guadalajara by FBI agents, in which the suspects again identified fellow gang members.

The Mexican attorney general’s attache in Los Angeles says Zamora and Garcia have nothing to fear in Mexican custody.

“They are going to be very well guarded,” said the attache, Miguel Ponce Edmonson. “The Mexican state must respond for their physical integrity, especially in a case as important as this. We want to make sure they don’t even catch cold.”

Up to 30 Logan Heights homeboys were allegedly recruited by the Arellanos, three Sinaloan brothers fighting for control of northwest Mexico’s drug empire. Some gang members were as young as 14, but most were in their 20s. They drifted inexorably into organized crime, police say, after outgrowing teen-age turf wars.

The connection to the barrio was David Barron Corona, 31, a gang veterano known by the deferential moniker “Honorable Citizen.” After serving time for a fatal 1979 shooting in San Diego, Barron resurfaced in Tijuana and became a trusted cartel lieutenant. He demonstrated his ferocity under fire in October, 1992, when two truckloads of gangsters dispatched by rival kingpin Joaquin (Chapo) Guzman stormed a Puerto Vallarta nightclub. The Arellanos fled as Barron fended off attackers, scooping up the weapons of fallen gunmen.

“After that, they were making up songs about him,” a federal agent said.

A bodyguard told FBI agents about accompanying Barron on an outing last year to a children’s entertainment center in downtown Tijuana. “The center was reserved for the entire day only for David and about 40 of his family members, including grandparents, to celebrate the birthday of his 1-year-old boy, also called David.”

In contrast, Tarzan, Cougar and the others remained subservient henchmen, according to court documents. Barron and another veterano , Alfredo (Popeye) Araujo, recruited them in the barrio or at raucous Tijuana dance clubs. Their south-of-the-border duties allegedly ranged from contract murders to buying groceries to guarding palatial safe houses.

Hired in February of last year, Zamora says he and about 10 friends earned $500 a week working a wealthy hillside area of Tijuana. He admits seeing rifles in the homes and carrying a .38-caliber pistol, but says his only job was to clean up houses and cars. He says he did not know his bosses were drug traffickers.

“I had kind of an idea, but I was not sure,” he said. “They just said, ‘You’re going to make some money, easy money.’ ”

A San Diego police detective said the gang members were caught up in an almost cinematic whirl of cash, violence and luxury.

“I think if they had known the predicament they were going to get into, they wouldn’t have done it,” he said. “But maybe it was like a big game to them. You get people throwing money at you, you start thinking you’re invincible.”

Curiously, the hit squad that went after Chapo Guzman in May included gang members recruited only weeks earlier. Ramon Arellano, the youngest of the drug lords, allegedly led a dozen young men to Guadalajara, where they were issued assault rifles. Torres, the since-deceased gang member, told FBI agents that it would have been the first time in his life that he fired an AK-47.

Garcia denies ever going to Guadalajara, though he provides no alibi.

Zamora admits making the trip and staying at houses stocked with weapons. But he denies an informant’s statement to the FBI that places him among gunmen who cruised the city in a pickup truck, hunting for Guzman.

“Nobody said anything about anything, what we were going to do or anything. We were there for a week and a half. Very quiet days. Then we got word, somebody at the house says, ‘I got tickets to go back to Tijuana’ ”

Zamora says he never heard of the Arellanos or Guzman and never imagined that the group planned to kill anyone. He said his lack of knowledge “seems kind of weird, but it’s true. It’s like they want to keep you ignorant about it, like not to know nothing, not to know any names.”

On the afternoon of May 24, police say, Cardinal Posadas arrived in the airport parking lot in a Ford Grand Marquis just as the Arellano gang attacked Guzman’s entourage. The gunmen mistook the cardinal for Guzman and mowed him down in the front passenger seat, authorities said. A federal report described a “maximum-security, well-organized” ambush in which five carloads of weapons were strategically located in the parking lot and a federal police officer was enlisted to keep other police out of the way.

Defense attorneys question the official version; they maintain that their clients are merely fall guys. The confessions of suspects in Guadalajara indicate no plan for an airport ambush: They said that the mission to kill Guzman was called off, that they were given cash to go shopping before the flight to Tijuana, and that the gunfire caught them off guard.

One henchman showed up at the airport falling-down drunk. Another, Juan Carlos Mendoza Castillo, described seeing Barron and another gunman running toward the parking lot carrying AK-47s, but none admitted witnessing the actual shooting of the cardinal. When the mayhem broke out, Zamora says, he was already on the plane, which authorities--in league with the gangsters--delayed on the runway to aid the escape.

The idea that the rival gangs and the cardinal crossed paths by coincidence strains credulity. Many Mexicans reject the conclusion that assailants shot the bespectacled, 64-year-old Posadas, who was wearing black clerical garb, 14 times at point-blank range by mistake.

“It is infantile to believe that a professional gunman could confuse a priest with a drug trafficker,” editor Jesus Blancornelas of the Tijuana weekly Zeta wrote last year, suggesting that the slaying was a “political crime.”

Guadalajara’s new archbishop, Juan Sandoval Iniguez, has declared publicly that several eyewitnesses say the murder appeared intentional. He told Zeta recently that the probe has bogged down and demanded a credible explanation.

Zamora’s attorney, David Cohen, points out that this year’s assassinations of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio and ruling party leader Francisco Ruiz Massieu bear resemblances to the cardinal’s death. Young, working-class triggermen were arrested against a backdrop of drugs and politics in all three crimes, he said.

“The bottom line is that someone must be held responsible for the shooting and that someone (is) a number of gang members from San Diego,” he wrote in an appeal of a federal judge’s extradition order.

Although authorities blame the Colosio murder on a lone gunman, critics allege a conspiracy of drug lords and politicians. In the Ruiz case, investigators have accused corrupt politicians with drug ties, but are still searching for the alleged masterminds.

As for a motive, Cohen subscribes to the conspiracy theory that the cardinal was slain because he favored political reform and suggests that the young gang members were kept in the dark about the real target. Conversely, others say the cardinal was somehow involved with traffickers.

Barron and Araujo, the highest-ranking 30th Street members in the cartel, have not been arrested.

The Byzantine conspiracy theories are largely irrelevant to Tarzan and Cougar, whose last hope is a long-shot humanitarian appeal to the U.S. State Department. They have steadfastly refused to cooperate with U.S. investigators.

“When you get arrested, you keep quiet,” Garcia shrugged. “There’s no reason why I should be afraid as long as I’m right here. I’ll deal with it when I get down there.”