Mexican Police Ties to Drug Trade Emerge : Latin America: Clashes between agencies, charge that officers were at killing reveal corruption’s extent.

Investigations into the assassination of a former western state attorney general and a highly publicized confrontation between law enforcement agencies over a northern Mexico cocaine shipment have provided increasing evidence of the depth of police involvement in this nation’s drug trade.

Marco Antonio Hernandez Rosas--the federal highway patrol commander who implicated officers of the federal Judicial Police in a hijacking of confiscated cocaine earlier this month in the state of Zacatecas--had himself been under investigation by the federal attorney general’s office for allegedly using his position to protect drug traffickers, sources said Monday.

Over the weekend, a suspect in the murder of former Jalisco Atty. Gen. Leobardo Larios Guzman said that two police officers participated in the gangland-style killing earlier this month.

“We still have not determined whether they were state or federal police,” said a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office. “Apparently, [suspect Jose Luis Castro Ruiz] did not know them and was not sure where they were from.”

These recent cases--combined with accusations that former federal Deputy Atty. Gen. Mario Ruiz Massieu was on the payroll of drug cartels--indicate that, despite periodic efforts to combat narcotics corruption, drug traffickers still have tentacles reaching into various levels of law enforcement.

“It is an old and extremely clear story,” said human rights defender Sergio Aguayo. “Narcotics trafficking in Mexico is protected and served by police who act with almost complete impunity.”

The problem became obvious a decade ago, he said, when Enrique Camarena, an agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, was tortured and killed by drug dealers aided by law enforcement officers. But not much has been done about it. “For many years, the government has done little more than recognize that there was a problem,” Aguayo said.

Two years ago, when Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo and six other people were killed by drug dealers in a shootout at the Guadalajara airport, pressure increased on the government to act. Since then, federal and state attorneys general have routinely begun their terms with purges of their agencies. But the results have not been encouraging, as recent investigations show.

Larios Guzman, who left the state attorney general post in February during a change of administration, was killed in revenge for having refused bribes from the Arellano drug cartel, based in Tijuana, suspect Castro Ruiz allegedly told police.

For his integrity, Larios Guzman was ambushed outside his Guadalajara home early in the morning May 10 by gunmen who, ironically, included two police, according to Castro Ruiz’s statement to police.

Meanwhile, the Zacatecas cocaine dispute between the federal highway patrol and police has left law enforcement agencies leaking information to the media that links officers from other agencies to drug dealers. Hernandez Rosas, the highway patrol commander, was the most recent target of news reports accusing him of having been convicted of escorting a truckload of marijuana in 1990, when he was a highway patrol commander in the central state of Morelos.

“It is a serious problem when all police biographies contain connections to narcotics,” Aguayo said. “This is the tragedy that Mexico is living through.”