U.S. Trial Foretold Depth of Mexico Drug Corruption

It was a crisp January afternoon in 1992 when Carlos Enrique Cervantes de Gortari, the cousin of Mexico’s then-president, dined for three hours at an airport hotel restaurant here discussing shrimp farming, comparing wines and conspiring to smuggle millions of dollars of Colombian cocaine through Mexico into the United States.

An old friend, a Mexican journalist, drew a map and then regaled an undercover U.S. drug agent on how Cervantes de Gortari--a nuclear engineer and Mexican army officer--and his associates used DC-6 aircraft, mini-submarines and widespread Mexican police corruption in Baja California to import vast quantities of cocaine destined for Southern California and the rest of the United States, court documents here show.

“Mr. De Gortari told us that he guaranteed 100% any cocaine that came through him. He guaranteed its protection,” U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent Frank Fernandez, working undercover with a major Colombian cocaine trafficker at the Jan. 29 dinner, would recall from the witness stand.

Almost a year later, after a trial with 142 hours of testimony and dozens of references to high-level Mexican drug corruption, a federal jury here convicted Cervantes de Gortari and three other politically connected Mexicans on drug conspiracy charges. The president’s cousin in 1993 received a 15-year prison sentence; his co-conspirators got jail terms of 12 to 17 years.

The 4-year-old case against his cousin made no reference to drug corruption by Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the former president who has flatly denied having had ties to narcotics trafficking.

But it provided in gripping detail a documented link between a member of the Mexican president’s family and the booming drug-smuggling trade in Mexico that U.S. officials say supplies up to 75% of the cocaine sold in the United States.

A Blind Eye

The case’s thousands of pages of court documents and testimony, as reviewed this week by The Times, also underscore how the billions of dollars in drug profits have corrupted Mexico’s law enforcement and political elite for years.

They show how two U.S. administrations apparently turned a blind eye to mounting evidence of that corruption as, year after year under a congressionally required certification process, they formally declared that Mexico cooperates in the war on drugs.

As the Clinton administration prepares this week to meet the annual deadline and announce its decision on such certification for Mexico and 30 other nations, U.S. officials have been expressing their disappointment and astonishment at the high-level drug corruption behind last week’s arrest of Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, Mexico’s top counter-narcotics official, on drug charges.

But even before that stunning development, U.S. law enforcement officials say the Cervantes de Gortari case, which attracted no public attention at the time, offered just one of many signs that U.S. policy-makers could have heeded about the pervasiveness of drug corruption in Mexico--warnings also carried in many court trials and voluminous intelligence reports on file in Washington.

“There are enormous piles of intelligence that are sitting inside the classified files of the U.S. government that address this issue of official corruption in Mexico,” a senior U.S. law enforcement official said. “There’s just no audience [for such information] in Washington.”

But trials like the two-month prosecution of Cervantes de Gortari, besides producing convictions, have also already generated a wealth of additional information about high-level Mexican drug corruption, documents here and in Houston indicate.

Key Witness

For example, among the defendants convicted with Cervantes de Gortari was Magdalena Ruiz Pelayo, who is now emerging as a potential key witness to allegations of drug corruption involving Mexico’s former No. 2 law enforcement official and other members of Salinas’ family.

She maintained her innocence throughout the trial, testifying for days that she and the president’s cousin were just friends and business partners who were only brokering multimillion-dollar Mexican government contracts for food and fertilizer.

But court records also show that Ruiz Pelayo and her brother, Ramon, admitted their involvement in the drug trade and had begun cooperating with U.S. investigators as early as April 1993.

“In an effort to cooperate with federal authorities in the District of Arizona, the defendants, Magdalena Ruiz and Ramon Ruiz, have indicated that certain corrupt individuals employed with federal narcotics enforcement are operating at and around the border in Arizona,” Assistant U.S. Atty. James B. Nobile, who prosecuted the case, wrote on April 14, 1993, to U.S. District Judge H. Lee Sarokin.

During a sentencing on June 7, 1993, Michael Brownstein, Ruiz Pelayo’s lawyer, told Sarokin at the bench: “There is some very, very sensitive material that has been uncovered from her and from Ramon. . . . There is a lot of . . . material besides corruption in law enforcement that has been given to [U.S. federal] agents down in Tucson, and it’s difficult to say more, especially in the courtroom.”

Brownstein added that his client “even passed the polygraph test and was proven to be truthful as to the information she gave the government.”

Two weeks ago, Ruiz Pelayo’s name surfaced again in leaked documents published by Proceso, Mexico City’s weekly news magazine. It identified her as a potential witness to alleged drug corruption involving Mario Ruiz Massieu, who served as Mexico’s deputy attorney general under Salinas.

Ruiz Massieu, who is being detained in New Jersey on immigration issues, faces a Houston civil trial on March 10 in which U.S. prosecutors want the courts to order him to forfeit $9 million from his Texas bank accounts. They contend that sum came from drug bribes, and documents leaked from the case suggest that they will prove this in part based on testimony from Ruiz Pelayo.

The documents also show that she implicated Raul Salinas Lozano, the former president’s father, in the drug trade. Testifying in her own defense in Newark in November 1992, Ruiz Pelayo asserted that she worked for him as a private secretary for as long as a decade and until 1989.

“We were friends,” she said of the former president’s father. “He taught me everything related to . . . foreign commerce. How to go through customs. How we can . . . take out permits.”

But in an interview Wednesday, the elder Salinas denied that Ruiz Pelayo had ever worked for him.

“I have never seen Magdalena Ruiz Pelayo, and I do not know her, either well or distantly. I do not know who she was at all,” he said in a telephone interview in Mexico.

Regarding Cervantes de Gortari, he added: “Oh my! He must be a relative of my wife, but I don’t remember. . . . I don’t know the whole family. It’s very big.”

But records show that Cervantes de Gortari’s mother was a first cousin of the former president’s mother. He held several high government posts, including, at the time of his arrest, the job of technical secretary to Mexico’s National Nuclear Research Institute.

Prosecution witnesses testified that he and his associates boasted of their contacts in the Mexican police and military--connections that were used to smuggle large quantities of Colombian cocaine into Mexico and the United States.

‘Protected’ Shipments

At the Jan. 29 dinner, DEA agent Fernandez testified of Cervantes de Gortari: “Magdalena Ruiz [Pelayo] had made us aware that, because of his relation to the Mexican president, that he was in a position to obtain import permits and also obtain [Mexican] military and police protection for shipments of cocaine that were going to be imported into Mexico.”

During the same dinner, Cervantes de Gortari’s friend, journalist Jesus Jimenez Esparza, who was also convicted in the case, “said that those cocaine shipments are guaranteed and protected, not only by Mexican federal judicial police but also by an individual in the attorney general’s office in Mexico,” said Fernandez, who recorded the talk at the dinner.

That session was so critical and persuasive that the judge in the case concluded in February 1993 that “absent the [Jan. 29] meeting . . . I might very well agree that the government’s evidence was insufficient. But that meeting is so incriminating and certainly provides corroboration of all the assertions made by the government.”

The ex-president’s cousin maintained his innocence throughout his trial, sentencing and in appeals.

He delivered an impassioned speech before he was sentenced to 188 months in U.S. prison, quoting his father--a former Mexican criminal court judge--and asserting: “I come from respectable and respected families. . . . None of my activities, my training or my thoughts are related to crime.”

Political Clout

There was conflicting testimony on who had more political clout--the president’s cousin or Ruiz Pelayo.

Although prosecutors cast Cervantes de Gortari as the “don” of the drug conspiracy, at one point on the witness stand his attorney asked him: “Isn’t it a fact, sir, that you really have no political juice [clout] in Mexico?”

“No, sir. . . . I don’t have any.”

“In fact,” the lawyer continued, “the big cousin to the president, the president doesn’t even like you too much, does he?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Cervantes de Gortari replied. “But I don’t have political ‘juice.’ ”

“Isn’t it a fact, sir, that Magdalena [Ruiz Pelayo] does have a good relationship with the president and the president’s father?”

“She has spoken to me about that,” the cousin said, “but I have not personally confirmed it.”

Earlier, Ruiz Pelayo had testified that she had clout in the Mexican government.

Court records also show Ruiz Pelayo had a criminal record for drugs. Listing her permanent residence as El Centro, Calif., the Mexican American mother of two confirmed in court that she had been arrested by U.S. authorities on Aug. 26, 1991, crossing the border from Mexicali to Calexico with drugs and more than $15,000 in cash.

She testified that she was on probation in a San Diego drug-rehabilitation program when she was arrested on the drug-conspiracy charges in Newark.

Times staff writer Mary Beth Sheridan in Mexico City contributed to this report.

* SMUGGLED INFORMATION: Anti-drug strategy was passed on to narcotics cartels, a former top Mexican official says. A8