Court Clears Former Baja Official : Crime: The ex-deputy attorney general had been accused of protecting drug lords after violence shook the Mexican state last year.

Baja California’s former deputy attorney general has been cleared of charges of protecting drug lords, according to state officials, who said Tuesday that corruption and political conflict have impeded investigations of the drug violence that hit the state last year.

A federal appellate court in Mexicali this week dismissed charges of obstruction of justice and abuse of authority against Sergio Ortiz Lara, the state’s former second-ranking law enforcement chief, officials said. A Tijuana prosecutor also was cleared in the same incident.

“As I have said since the beginning, we had confidence in justice,” said Ortiz, a 44-year-old law professor, at a news conference Tuesday. “Finally justice has been done.”

Ortiz’s arrest in May came at the end of two whirlwind months of scandal and intrigue in Tijuana in which a gunfight between federal and state police left six dead, presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was assassinated and the city police chief died in a highway ambush. The three convoluted cases remain open, though somewhat obscured by Mexico’s continuing political and economic crises.

Federal authorities charged Ortiz with aiding the escape from state police headquarters of two kingpins in the Arellano drug cartel after the March 3 gunfight. That shooting erupted when allegedly corrupt state officers working as bodyguards for the drug lords clashed with federal agents, killing a federal commander. Top Mexican government officials also garnered headlines by implicating Ortiz in the April 28 murder of Federico Benitez Lopez, the city’s police chief.

That accusation never made it to court, however, and was questioned even by critics of Gov. Ernesto Ruffo Appel because Ortiz and Benitez were close allies of the governor. Ruffo aired his grievances with then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who dismissed his federal attorney general soon afterward.

“It has been impossible to prove any charges against (Ortiz),” Ruffo told reporters Tuesday. “At that time, there was a nationwide campaign against this official of Baja California. . . . I hope we can clarify all of this. Much confusion was provoked by federal authorities.”

The court’s decision represented a personal and political victory for Ruffo, who took the extraordinary step of lending state funds to Ortiz to pay his bail.

State officials admit that corrupt state officers protected the traffickers. But they say Ortiz merely did his job by taking charge of the shooting scene, and they blame a state police homicide commander for the escape of the suspects--reportedly including kingpin Ramon Arellano.

And the state administration, which is run by the opposition National Action Party (PAN), described Ortiz’s arrest as part of a concerted political attack by the federal government. Federal officers hustled Ortiz away from his office at gunpoint and transported him to jail in a heavily armed caravan, a spectacle that almost ignited another gun battle with state police in downtown Tijuana.

Ortiz has remained a state employee while the case was pending, working in a land management department.

The scandal revolves around the enormously powerful Arellano cartel, whose reputed control of corrupt federal and state government officials across Mexico has helped give rise to the term “narco-politics.” In fact, Gov. Ruffo confirmed Tuesday what Mexican and U.S. law enforcement officials have been saying privately: Investigators suspect that the murder of Benitez was ordered by the Arellanos in revenge for a series of drug busts and carried out by federal police officers working for the cartel.

State investigators have identified the suspects, including federal police commanders now in other states. But months have passed without any arrests, even after Mexico’s new president made history in December by naming the first federal attorney general from Ruffo’s PAN party. Ruffo said that continuing corruption in the federal police has blocked state investigators in the Benitez case.

“This is a very delicate matter,” Ruffo said. “Just because there is a new attorney general does not mean that there is total control of the institution. . . . There is great lack of confidence in their actions. And this has required a great level of caution even on the part of the attorney general himself.”

Without trustworthy federal cooperation, state officials fear that arresting the suspected killers could produce new violence.

“The new attorney general has been asked to come up with one federal commander who can be trusted to help us, just one, and he has not been able to,” a high-ranking official said. “The concern is that there could be more deaths.”