Mexico Charges 19 Police Officers in Cocaine Cover-Up

After three months of investigation, Mexican prosecutors have linked an air shipment of at least 10 tons of South American cocaine smuggled through the Baja Peninsula into the U.S. in November to corrupt police commanders allegedly working for one of Mexico’s powerful drug cartels.

Arrest warrants were issued last week for 19 state and federal police officers, including the deputy federal police chief in the state of Baja California Sur at the time of the shipment, according to the Mexican attorney general’s office. At least two have been arrested: the former commander of the state judicial police in the Todos Santos region and one of his agents.

Prosecutors and eyewitnesses said that police met, unloaded and then destroyed a French-made Caravelle jet that investigators confirmed was carrying cocaine for Colombia’s Cali cartel when it broke its nose wheel landing on a clandestine airstrip at the tip of Baja California Sur.

A communique from the top prosecutor’s office here said the wanted police officials had ties to the Tijuana cartel, one of five major Mexican drug mafias that U.S. officials say supply up to three-fourths of the cocaine sold in the United States.

The arrest warrants represent one of the boldest moves by President Ernesto Zedillo’s government against the nexus between the drug cartels and corrupt federal officials--a relationship known here as narco-politics.

But they also show how that corruption has continued under Zedillo’s attorney general, Antonio Lozano Gracia, who has declared war on the cartels. Lozano has said it will take years to separate his federal police and prosecutors from a smuggling industry that earns billions of dollars each year.

The early morning landing of the Caravelle in a dry lake bed near the Baja town of Todos Santos on Nov. 6 was first reported by The Times a week later. However, Mexican federal officials at the time refused to confirm or deny reports by U.S. officials that the aircraft--equivalent in size to a Boeing 727 and modified to carry up to 15 tons of drugs--had been carrying cocaine.

The attorney general’s office also refused to comment in November on eyewitness accounts that men dressed in federal judicial police uniforms had used heavy equipment to chop, burn and bury the aircraft in an attempt to hide the evidence after unloading the drugs into a fleet of vans and trucks.

But Mexican army specialists and federal drug agents dug up the aircraft’s remains, and the communique issued Thursday by the attorney general’s office stated that the jet was traced to a Colombian company reportedly owned by Miguel and Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, the alleged leaders of the Cali cartel now jailed in Colombia.