Witness’ Slaying Blow to Drug Fight

U.S. prosecutors and counter-narcotics agents were hardly surprised Friday when a federal jury delivered not-guilty verdicts for seven accused members of a major drug-smuggling ring here.

But they were furious.

On the eve of the trial last week, the government’s chief witness was kidnapped in daylight outside his used-clothing business in this sleepy Texas border town, forced across the border into Mexico and brutally slain.

The case of 42-year-old Hector Salinas, a minor-drug -operative- turned-DEA-informant whose testimony was crucial to the U.S. government’s case against the seven charged with conspiracy to distribute 1 1/2 tons of marijuana in Texas last May, has shocked local residents and even some of the tough federal agents here who worry about its impact on their policing of the booming drug trade.

And it highlights the ability of rich traffickers to undermine anti-drug efforts: Authorities here and in Mexico believe that drug traffickers ordered Salinas’ death and may have hired Mexican police to carry it out. Witnesses said the four men who abducted Salinas from the streets of McAllen a week ago wore Mexican federal police uniforms and told the bystanders that it would be useless to report the crime to police.

Mexican and U.S. detectives probing the slaying confirmed that they are investigating possible police involvement, a phenomenon that increasingly plagues anti-drug efforts on both sides of the border. U.S. authorities cite corruption as one of the biggest hurdles in stemming the flow of drugs from Mexico, one that has had a chilling effect on joint counter-narcotics operations along the 2,000-mile border.

Investigators here stressed that they have no evidence of a clear link to Mexican police.

“It’s easy to buy even Mexican federal police uniforms in South Texas,” said Cmdr. Pablo Villanueva Hernandez, the Tamaulipas state police chief in Reynosa who is heading the investigation into Salinas’ slaying in the Mexican border town where his body was found.

“But we’re interviewing [Mexican] federal police officers here. We’re investigating that angle. . . . What we are sure of is that they’re drug traffickers and that they kidnapped and killed Hector Salinas to prevent him from testifying at the trial in McAllen this week.”

Villanueva added that Salinas’ attackers apparently were trying to send a message to other potential informants.

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Although he was kidnapped July 17, Salinas’ body wasn’t found until the second day of the trial Tuesday. He had been badly beaten. His hands and feet were bound with masking tape. He apparently died of suffocation; a plastic bag had been taped over his head in what police speculate was a signal from his killers that informants would be silenced. His body was so badly decomposed that his wife had to identify him through dental records and an appendectomy scar.

That brutality, combined with the brazenness of the killers in crossing into the United States to abduct a U.S. federal witness, fueled the outrage of U.S. officials who spend months--sometimes years--building cases against the Mexican drug rings that supply much of the marijuana and three-fourths of the cocaine sold in the United States.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Terry Leonard, who prosecuted this week’s case, called Salinas his “star witness.”

“He would have testified to everyone’s involvement,” Leonard told The Times moments after the verdict. His killing “made the case very difficult to win,” he said.

Since the arrest two months ago of the accused ringleader, Mario Garcia Saldivar, along with four other Mexicans, an American and a Honduran, Leonard had successfully fought defense attorneys’ attempts to force the government to name Salinas, who was identified in court documents only as SOI (Source of Information) #1.

But it was clear from court testimony and documents that the confidential informant was Salinas. Last April, U.S. federal agents raided his small used-clothing warehouse, where he said he was storing marijuana for Garcia. Salinas agreed to cooperate with the government and led agents to Garcia when 2,971 pounds of marijuana were being delivered to the accused ringleader, the government alleged.

Without Salinas, Leonard had only law enforcement agents and Salinas’ son, who knew little of the operation, to present in court this week.

The victorious defense attorneys argued that their clients were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and that the confiscated marijuana did not belong to them.

Reflecting on Salinas’ slaying, Leonard said it was as rare as it was troubling for future drug cases, most of which rely on informants.

“I’ve been doing this for many years, and this is the first time we’ve ever had this kind of intimidation of federal witnesses here,” Leonard said. “I’ve tried more than 100 cases in state court and more than 100 cases in federal court, and it’s never happened [to me] before.”

Other federal officials confirm that killings of key witnesses have been uncommon along the border. Many witnesses receive federal protection, but Salinas, who had received no death threats, had not requested it.

The killing comes at a time when U.S. law enforcement agencies say Mexican marijuana and South American cocaine are pouring across the Rio Grande here at a staggering rate.

Barry Abbott, special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration office in McAllen, said his agents seized 95,000 pounds of marijuana during the first three quarters of the 1997 fiscal year--more than the combined total from the two previous years.

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Just south of the border in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, he said, Mexican drug enforcement agents have seized more than 14 tons of cocaine headed for the United States in the past nine months.

Abbott declined to comment on the impact of Salinas’ slaying on local anti-drug efforts. But he said: “We’re aware of the fact that there is an element of danger in all cases such as these.”

Fineman is The Times’ Mexico City Bureau chief.