U.S. Charges Former Mexican Governor as Cocaine Smuggler

U.S. prosecutors Friday unsealed an indictment accusing a former Mexican governor of cocaine smuggling on the same day he was jailed here after two years on the run.

The joint moves were an unusual display of emerging U.S.-Mexican cooperation against drug traffickers.

Mario Villanueva, at the time governor of Quintana Roo state, vanished in 1999 days before he was to leave office and just when Mexican authorities were about to charge him with trafficking. Federal police Thursday night arrested Villanueva, disguised with a goatee and a ponytail, in the resort city of Cancun.

Hours later, the U.S. indictment was unsealed in Manhattan, unveiling detailed charges against Villanueva--including accusations that he was paid $500,000 for each of numerous shipments of cocaine to the United States between 1994 and 1998 while he was governor. In all, the indictment charges, he conspired to bring 200 tons of cocaine across the border.

The first and so far the only Mexican governor charged with drug trafficking, he is also the highest-ranking former Mexican government official indicted by the United States. He has repeatedly denied that he is guilty, saying the charges are politically motivated, but investigators accuse him of turning his state on the Yucatan peninsula into a major shipping route for Colombian cocaine.

U.S. and Mexican officials alike called the two-pronged action against Villanueva a breakthrough in cooperation after years of deep U.S. doubts about the integrity of Mexican law enforcement. When he took office in December, Mexican President Vicente Fox promised to attack corruption in the justice system that had thwarted previous probes.

“We had outstanding cooperation from the Fox administration,” said Felix Jimenez, U.S. special agent in charge of the New York office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Asked in a phone interview to compare the past joint efforts with this one, Jimenez said: “Night and day.”

Fox told reporters that the arrest demonstrated “our great effort, on all fronts . . . to end impunity in the country.” He said that while the Villanueva case was important, it was just one of about 1,000 arrests being carried out each month on criminal charges compared with 80 a month in the last administration.

Villanueva was taken into custody with his driver and a former junior official of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which lost the presidency to Fox after 71 years in power. The PRI’s national president, Dulce Maria Sauri, said in Mexico City that the arrest came just days before Sunday’s gubernatorial race in the adjacent state of Yucatan. She questioned whether the timing was meant to damage the PRI on the eve of a close battle with Fox’s National Action Party.

Sauri noted that it was the former PRI government of President Ernesto Zedillo that in 1999 brought the first charges against Villanueva. She said that Villanueva had “separated himself” from the party when the charges were brought against him and that he is no longer a member.

Luis Astorga, who studies drug trafficking at the Institute for Social Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said some parts of Mexico’s political class had built up a web of involvement in drug trafficking during the PRI’s rule. He said the Fox administration has the advantage of being free of that legacy. “Taking advantage of this, Fox can and should sever the historic link of the political class with drug trafficking.”

Wearing a bulletproof vest, Villanueva was flown from Cancun to Mexico City before dawn Friday and then driven in a convoy of army and police vans to a maximum-security prison outside the capital.

Mexican Atty. Gen. Rafael Macedo de la Concha told a television interviewer that the arrest “has resulted in part from intense work and interchange of information with different international agencies, specifically in this case with the DEA, and we have followed a very intense pursuit in the last few months.”

Macedo said any extradition request would go through normal judicial channels. Mexico and the U.S. signed a protocol last week under which suspects, after being prosecuted in one country, can be extradited temporarily to the other for trial to ensure that the investigative trail doesn’t grow cold.

Astorga noted that if Mexico complies with a U.S. request for Villanueva’s extradition, “this would mark a qualitative difference in the U.S.-Mexican relationship and the cooperation between the various agencies in combating drugs.”

The Mexican charges against Villanueva include 28 counts of trafficking, money laundering and taking part in organized crime. The case was built up starting in 1997, with testimony from witnesses who accused Villanueva of protecting a major Mexican cartel as it expanded operations in Quintana Roo. Villanueva was said to have worked with Ramon “El Metro” Alcides Magana, the purported boss in southeastern Mexico for the Juarez cartel.

The U.S. allegations take the accusations much further.

The indictment, according to a Justice Department summary, says Villanueva took part in a conspiracy to import about 200 tons of cocaine into the U.S. while he was governor. Two such shipments, totaling about 3,800 pounds, were seized in the Bronx and in Middletown, N.Y., in February and March 1997.

One shipment in 1995 was loaded onto an airplane owned by the governor’s office, the indictment adds.