Anti-Drug Chief, 3 Aides Found Slain in Mexico

Assassins tortured and killed the Tijuana district chief of the federal anti-narcotics agency and three of his aides, authorities here said Sunday--the second slaying within a week of a Mexican anti-drug officer.

And it was the seventh grisly murder this year of a law enforcement official who had dealt with narcotics cases in Baja California, prompting fears among senior U.S. officials that drug violence could begin to threaten civil authorities in Mexico much as it does in Colombia. None of the killings have been solved.

In the latest incident, Jorge Garcia Vargas, 43, and three federal agents who served as his bodyguards were found strangled early Saturday in a black Dodge Ram Charger in the middle-class Mexico City suburb of Cuajimalpa, according to the attorney general’s office of the federal district of Mexico City.

The four men’s wrists had been bound and their bodies badly beaten, officials said. “It appears that before they killed them, they tortured them,” spokesman Ricardo Zamora said. “It was very ugly.”

Zamora declined to state a motive for the slayings, but an official in the attorney general’s office said they had all the hallmarks of a drug-related execution.

Garcia Vargas directed the Tijuana offices of the Institute for the Combat of Drugs, which has close ties to its U.S. equivalent, the Drug Enforcement Administration. He was well known to U.S. anti-drug agents, and his nickname was “El Yankee,” according to a ranking Mexican federal agent in Tijuana.

The rash of police killings is “all very out of control,” said Jacinto Rodriguez, 28, an agent on duty Sunday at the Tijuana offices of the agency. “We are all very nervous.”

Ignacio Calderon, a spokesman for the federal district’s attorney general’s office, whose jurisdiction includes Mexico City, said he did not know why Garcia Vargas and his three bodyguards had flown from Tijuana to Mexico City on Friday morning. But the anti-drug agency has its central offices there.

Garcia Vargas had taken over the agency’s Tijuana branch in October after an assignment in Mazatlan. His predecessor, Ricardo Cordero Ontiveros, was jailed on corruption charges in Tijuana after he publicly stated that corruption and indifference had made Mexico’s anti-narcotics effort “a joke.”

Garcia Vargas’ body was found with those of his aides, men evidently working as his bodyguard, personal secretary and driver. Along with Garcia Vargas, the three--Reynaldo Perez Aguirre, 35, Rafael Esparza Villalobos, 45, and Gustavo Alberto Luz Tijerina, 44--were found by police who had been called by residents of the street where the sports utility vehicle was abandoned.

Garcia Vargas is the latest casualty in what some are calling an offensive by drug traffickers against Baja prosecutors and police commanders. Some top U.S. officials suspect that much of the violence is related to the so-called Tijuana drug cartel, whose reputed leaders are the Arellano Felix brothers.

Human rights leaders say other factors are corruption and political intrigue in Tijuana, combined with the recent firings of allegedly corrupt police, and U.S. pressures for a tougher stance against traffickers.

“There are many crossed wires here,” said Victor Clark, a prominent human rights leader in Tijuana. “This could be [done by] the fired police or traffickers.

“We are in a terrible cycle,” he said. “Is this going to happen every week? With this death, our situation is certainly grave.”

Just a week earlier, killers in Mexico City gunned down the Baja federal police commander, Ernesto Ibarra Santes, along with his two bodyguards and a cab driver. Ibarra, who was well-liked by U.S. law enforcement authorities, had vowed to go after the Arellano Felix brothers and purge the Mexican federal police ranks of any corrupt agents who stood in his way.

Ibarra was named to his post in mid-August, when Mexico’s Attorney General Antonio Lozano Gracia announced the firing of more than 700 allegedly crooked federal police nationwide, a shake-up that resulted in the replacement of the Baja commander and the dismissal of half the 120 agents there.

On Sunday, the day that Garcia Vargas’ killing was confirmed by investigators here, the independent TV network Azteca referred to the deaths in Mexico City as a direct result of drug violence related to the Arellano Felix cartel in Tijuana, which it called “the hottest” place in the country.

The police firings were a suspected motive in the Aug. 17 killing of Tijuana prosecutor Jesus Romero Magana--who handled narcotics cases--a few steps from his doorway. But Romero also was the first federal prosecutor to interrogate Mario Aburto, the only triggerman convicted in the killing of Mexican presidential heir apparent Luis Donaldo Colosio at a Tijuana rally in March 1994.

A former Baja federal police commander, Isaac Sanchez Perez, was shot dead July 19 in Mexico City, where he was an anti-narcotics deputy police commander.

Sergio Moreno Perez, the state’s top prosecutor for a year until January, was kidnapped with his adult son in Michoacan in May. Their bodies later were discovered in a car in the Mexico City suburbs. A predecessor, Arturo Ochoa Palacios, was shot at close range as he exercised at a Tijuana health club April 17.

The Feb. 23 slaying of Sergio Armando Silva, a former operations chief of Baja federal police, was followed five days later by the gangland-style murder in Tijuana of his close friend, Rebeca Acuna.

O’Connor reported from Tijuana and Fineman reported from Mexico City.