Fighting Return to Mexico, Ex-Official Is in U.S. Limbo

Once the No. 2 official in Mexico’s Justice Department and now accused of collusion with drug traffickers, Mario Ruiz Massieu finds himself caught in an unusual limbo between freedom in a new country and potentially indefinite incarceration in his homeland.

Since he was arrested at Mexico’s behest 11 months ago while changing planes in New Jersey, Ruiz Massieu has won a series of U.S. court judgments finding the criminal evidence insufficient for holding him.

Yet authorities continue to keep Ruiz Massieu in a prison cell while trying to find a way to return him to his homeland for prosecution, as the Mexican government has requested.

Today in Newark, U.S. District Judge Maryanne Trump Barry is to preside over yet another hearing on the matter.

The possible grounds for returning Ruiz Massieu are dwindling, and the case is becoming both a legal and diplomatic spectacle. The United States is pressuring Mexico to crack down on narcotics and related corruption, and Washington is eager to support President Ernesto Zedillo’s efforts to bring high-level suspects to justice.

Allowing Ruiz Massieu to go free “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences,” Secretary of State Warren Christopher said in a recent petition for Ruiz Massieu’s deportation. He added that “our inability to return to Mexico Mr. Ruiz Massieu--a case the Mexican presidency has told us is of the highest importance--would jeopardize our ability to work with Mexico on law enforcement matters.”

In the opinion of some legal authorities, however, deporting Ruiz Massieu risks the perception of railroading a possibly innocent man when courts have ruled four times that the evidence against him is unreliable.

Cathy Fleming, Ruiz Massieu’s attorney, said the U.S. resort to deportation proceedings represents an effort “to punish him for exercising his right to contest extradition and to speak out against the corruption of the Mexican judicial system.”

Fleming contended that the former Mexican official has been denied basic rights, especially since he has asked for political asylum on grounds that his life would be in jeopardy if he returned to Mexico.

Rita Simon, an American University law professor, said a controversial new provision in U.S. immigration law allows authorities to seek deportation of a foreign citizen, even without charges of criminal conduct, if U.S. officials believe the person’s “presence or activities” here could have adverse consequences for U.S. foreign policy.

But Simon agrees with Fleming that the case poses questions of fairness. In an interview, she said U.S. foreign policy “is pretty shaky ground on which to base someone’s deportation” when criminal charges cannot be supported.

Ruiz Massieu was arrested in March, 1995, at Newark International Airport as he sought to change planes en route to Madrid. He was charged with U.S. currency law violations for allegedly failing to declare most of the $44,000 he was carrying in his briefcase--a charge that has since been dismissed. He had resigned his Mexican government post the previous November in a well-publicized policy dispute with his superiors.

Mexican prosecutors claim that Ruiz Massieu had fled their country with $200,000 in funds belonging to the government--money his office had confiscated from drug dealers.

He is also accused of having embezzled other funds from his government, of having accepted drug traffickers’ bribes and of obstructing an inquiry into the assassination of his brother to protect people close to former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Mexican officials said they wanted to put him on trial.

But in the first of four judicial rulings that have gone in favor of Ruiz Massieu, U.S. Magistrate Ronald J. Hedges ruled in June that U.S. prosecutors, on behalf of Mexican authorities, presented insufficient evidence that Ruiz Massieu was connected with an assassination cover-up.

The judge also found that Mexican evidence against the defendant had been obtained through the torture of suspects arrested in the 1994 assassination of Francisco Ruiz Massieu, who was the second-highest-ranking official in Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Mario Ruiz Massieu strongly denied any involvement, insisting under oath that he never would have sought to protect his brother’s killers.

Ruling next on the embezzlement charges, Hedges said in a separate opinion in September that prosecutors had not shown a clear connection between unaccounted-for Mexican funds and larger sums that Ruiz Massieu deposited in his personal bank accounts.

While faulting Ruiz Massieu for failing to account for his office funds “in the proper manner” before he resigned, the judge said he was “not satisfied that there is a reasonable correlation” between missing government funds, illicit drug money and Ruiz Massieu’s wealth--which the defendant was able to demonstrate had resulted partly from official bonuses he had received.

In November, after prosecutors presented Hedges with written statements from nine other witnesses--but no live testimony--in an effort to shore up their criminal charges, the judge once again ruled that there was “no probable cause” to believe Ruiz Massieu had committed any crime in Mexico, and he dismissed their new complaint.

Federal prosecutors refiled an extradition petition before another judge in Newark--this time, Magistrate Stanley R. Chesler.

But the U.S. government lawyers subsequently withdrew from the case after conceding that some Mexican documents lacked credibility. The prosecutors admitted that they were no longer confident they could show what happened to hundreds of thousands of dollars that Mexico attributed to Ruiz Massieu’s alleged embezzlement.

Chesler ruled that the revelation had caused “substantial damage” to the government’s case and threw the case out.

Now, with U.S. authorities having abandoned the idea of pressing criminal charges against Ruiz Massieu, Judge Barry is weighing their case for deportation on foreign policy grounds.