Man Reportedly Confesses to Ciudad Juarez Drug Killings

A Mexican man has confessed that he helped kill at least a dozen people on the orders of this border city’s drug-smuggling cartel and an ally on the state police force, then buried their bodies in the backyard of his rented house here, a prosecutor said Wednesday.

Alejandro Garcia was arrested with his wife and son on Tuesday as investigators, who had already unearthed 11 corpses from his yard, spent a fifth day digging there. Garcia, who was trying to flee to Texas when captured, reportedly told police that they would find more bodies if they kept looking.

The arrests here in Chihuahua state coincided with the army’s capture of Javier Torres Felix, a reputed major drug trafficker in the northwestern state of Sinaloa. Torres Felix was seized at a home in Culiacan, the state capital, hours after he or his gunmen attacked an army patrol, killing a corporal, the police said.

At least 70 people have died this month in violence apparently linked to the drug trade along the U.S. border and in other parts of Mexico -- more than 50 of them in Sinaloa. Mexican officials say the mayhem is a sign of progress in their war against the country’s seven major drug cartels, which they say are splintering and fighting among themselves.

But although the anti-drug effort has intensified at the federal level since President Vicente Fox took office in December 2000, it is hampered by police corruption at lower levels and has failed to slow the flow of cocaine and other drugs from Mexico into the U.S., specialists on both sides of the border say.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, Mexico’s chief prosecutor of organized crime, acknowledged Wednesday that federal drug enforcement had been thwarted by “an extreme breakdown” of law enforcement agencies in Chihuahua state.

The prosecutor, who announced Garcia’s arrest at a news conference here, said the suspect told police he had carried out numerous killings over the last year under orders of a Juarez cartel operative and a Chihuahua state police commander who was collaborating with the gang.

Santiago Vasconcelos did not name the commander but announced that federal authorities had intervened in the state to investigate the entire police force.

“Instead of protecting and guaranteeing the safety of the population, they are openly working with organized crime,” the prosecutor said of the state police. “This is serious, and we are not going to tolerate it. We will fight it to its core.”

Federal police plan to search six more homes in Ciudad Juarez for victims of the cartel’s killing rampage, the prosecutor said. The violence apparently grew from a recent joint effort by the Gulf cartel, based in Tamaulipas state, and traffickers from central and western Mexico to muscle in on the Juarez cartel’s turf, officials said.

All 11 victims exhumed behind the rented stucco house in a quiet neighborhood here were men. They had been strangled, the police said. Some had been dead less than two weeks.

On Wednesday evening, about 50 people who had been searching for missing relatives lined up outside the city morgue and were let in two at a time to view the badly decomposed corpses, which lay naked in body bags on tables. A fetid stench wafted out each time the glass doors opened.

At least five bodies had been identified.

The confessed killer told police that he had taken orders from one of the Juarez cartel’s top lieutenants, Humberto Santillan Tabares. Mexican authorities ordered the house raided after Santillan’s Jan. 16 arrest in El Paso, Texas, on drug-smuggling charges.

On Tuesday, authorities here had identified Santillan as the owner of the stucco house; on Wednesday, they listed another man as the owner and said he had rented it to Garcia.

Boudreaux reported from Mexico City and Hart from Ciudad Juarez.