Navigation

Dallas Drug Bust

Understandably, the Mexican ambassador to the United States, Jesus F. Reyes-Heroles, objects to the article I wrote for Insight [see Symposium, June 12] in which I make allegations of deliberate and organized involvement in drug trafficking by the highest powers of Mexico. The ambassador would not be doing his job if he did not object. His letter in response to my article [see Fair Comment, July 17] reminds me of past letters from the Mexican Embassy and the office of the Mexican president in reaction to reporting I did along the U.S.-Mexico border.

This reporting dealt with evidence of organized, deliberate and high-reaching corruption -- as opposed to the opportunistic corruption that can be found in democratic countries.

These Mexican official responses were always full of the same kind of astonishing numbers -- of personnel assigned to drug eradication, the amount of drugs seized, the number of deaths and injuries of agents and soldiers and so on. Yet Mexico steadily is gaining a reputation as the drug superpower of the world.

I was a reporter in El Paso, Texas in 1984 when Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique Camarena revealed the existence of a multibillion-dollar marijuana complex in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua that employed 7,000 farmworkers. I was on site with other reporters covering the extraordinary scope and magnitude of this operation, which later was shown to be protected by the Mexican army, the Mexican secret police and the Mexican Federal Judicial Police, or MFJP.

In October 1984, a month before the existence of this massive narcotics operation became public, two prominent Chihuahua citizens offered to fly me down there to photograph this very same complex and help me gather evidence that it was under official protection. (But my newspaper decided against the idea, fearing it was too risky.) The fact that Mexican citizens even would need to go to an American reporter with such information shows the level of confidence the people of Mexico have in their own authorities.

Then came Camarena's murder in February 1985 and the subsequent evidence of high-level involvement in his killing and in its cover-up. Hector Berrellez, the now-retired DEA agent who led the investigation into Camarena's death, recently told me the U.S. government found sufficient evidence to indict Manuel Bartlett Diaz, then head of the Mexican Interior Ministry and in charge of the secret police, "for personally ordering Camarena's murder in retaliation for exposing the marijuana complex." The effort to indict Bartlett, he said, was blocked by the U.S. State Department for its own obscure and self-serving reasons. Similar evidence was gathered to implicate Juan Arevalo Gardoqui, the defense minister at the time, and Miguel Aldana Ibarra, the head of the MFJP.

Bartlett later hired a former U.S. attorney to discredit the witnesses who implicated him. Yet it was Bartlett's secret police, the Directorate of Federal Security -- the feared DFS -- who were among the major players in organized narco-protection throughout Mexico at the time. Among the players was Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, a Juarez street thug who became a powerful narco-comandante in charge of coordinating drug activities for the DFS for the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Coahuila. His headquarters was located in the bordertown of Juarez, where he was known to be the most powerful and ruthless of the drug lords, with private torture chambers in a downtown hotel he owned. As a result of the Camarena murder, Mexico was forced to purge 400 of the DFS' narco-comandantes and agents, including Aguilar. Curiously, once the DFS was reorganized and renamed the General Directorate of Political and Social Investigations, it was Aguilar's chief lieutenant, Cuauhtemoc Ortiz, who became the new agency director in Juarez. Both men were murdered in 1993 in an underworld power struggle for control of Juarez.

I worked on the border during the Carlos Salinas de Gortari presidential administration and at the time of the defection in 1993 of Comandante Guillermo Gonzalez Calderoni, the high-ranking commander of the MFJP (Mexico's equivalent of the FBI). Calderoni provided the FBI and the DEA with a wealth of information about the pivotal role of Raul Salinas de Gortari -- the brother of the president -- who personally arranged protection for drug trafficking. I knew Calderoni when he was the MFJP commander in Ciudad Juarez. Interestingly, in those days, i.e. before his defection to the United States, what Calderoni told me about the earnest efforts of the Mexican police differed in no respect from the ambassador's letter. Today, he tells a far different story.

Are we to believe that the administration of President Ernesto Zedillo is any different, particularly in light of the Casablanca allegations? That investigation was not a work of fiction, and the results have been public for more than two years. The lead agent, William Gately, said to me, and also repeated on national television, that the U.S. government is in possession of 12 to 15 audiotapes and videotapes recording a series of undercover conversations in 1998 with credible insiders regarding the laundering of $1.15 billion allegedly belonging collectively to the Mexican defense minister, Zedillo and other Mexican cabinet members. These allegations are on tape, but this evidence is sealed in government files because of the lack of will in Washington to allow the investigation to proceed any further. This is an extremely serious matter. Why doesn't the Mexican government investigate these allegations itself?.

Where I find the greatest distortion in the Mexican ambassador's article lies in his claim that nearly 30 tons of cocaine were seized in Mexico in 1999. If we can believe the numbers, they still beg the question: "What happens to the drugs after they are seized?"

The official Mexican statistics surely sound impressive. But, according to Berrellez and other agents with experience in Mexico, the Mexican federal police routinely sell seized narcotics--particularly valuable hard drugs such as heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines -- back to the traffickers. Berrellez says he proved this to himself by marking packages of marijuana seized by a joint team of U.S. and Mexican agents in the early 1980s. Though the Mexican government claimed it destroyed the drugs, some of these initialed packages later were seized again north of the border. Ditto the experience of former DEA agent Phil Jordan, whose 30-year law-enforcement career included 10 years as divisional director of the DEA in Dallas and a year as chief of the El Paso Intelligence Center. Jordan tells me he initialed packages after a bust in the late 1970s in San Luis Rio Colorado, a border town across from Yuma, Ariz. "Two or three weeks later I got a call from U.S. Customs regarding evidence that had been seized in Mexico that some of the same kilogram packages that we had seized were now turning up in the United States" he says.

While I was on the border, and later when researching my book, Drug Lord: The Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin, I heard the same stories from Americans, Mexicans and sources in law enforcement as well as in the underworld. All affirmed that seized drugs rarely are destroyed. There were stories of large marijuana fields, for example, that were burned only after the drug traffickers were allowed to harvest the tops of the plant -- the most commercially valuable part. I was told of publicized burnings of marijuana that were elaborate ruses: Some seized marijuana is piled on top of used tires, creating a fabulous bonfire and equally impressive photographs later published in local Mexican newspapers. Rather than destroy them, the Mexican government puts these drugs back into circulation. Jordan concurs: "Without any reservation I can say that this is a routine procedure in Mexico even today. The hard drugs are recycled. It may be sold back to the same trafficking organization that it belonged to, or it could be sold to the favored drug lord, or the police themselves will sell it to an established client in the United States."

The Mexican government goes through elaborate efforts to create a paper trail that appears to show seized narcotics have been destroyed. The paperwork begins with a laboratory report indicating the purity of the drug and ends with a document bearing official signatures attesting that the drugs had been destroyed. The Mexican government used to hold elaborate ceremonies in which supposed cocaine, heroin or marijuana was burned in impressive pyres. Yet, several credible sources told me that the ceremonies were elaborate charades aimed at public relations. Today, the ceremonies are not even held. According to the DEA's public-affairs office, the Mexican government refuses to invite foreign observers to the destruction of heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines, citing safety and "security" concerns. The Mexican government, therefore, has to be taken at its word.

That's more than trust; that's blind faith. Incredibly, the U.S. State Department accepts Mexican drug-seizure statistics on their face and incorporates them into its own records, thus legitimizing the deceit. These same meaningless official Mexican statistics are then used to justify the annual certification for Mexico's cooperation in fighting the war on drugs.

If it truly desires credibility, the Mexican government easily could gain it by allowing international verification of drug disposal. On-site inspection by foreign specialists using field equipment to check the packages of illegal drugs would leave no doubt they were eliminated. TO be effective and credible, the incineration of narcotics would have to take place under the gaze of these neutral parties, immediately after the chemical testing that establishes that it is in fact the real thing being destroyed.

Such international verification is long overdue. The people of the United States, Canada and Mexico need to ensure that such credible procedures are established and become routine. Concrete action such as verification will do more--far more than irate letters from its ambassadors--to enable Mexico to cast off its dark reputation.

Terrence Poppa was honored as a Pulitzer Prize runner-up in 1987 for his reporting in the the El Paso Herald-Post and is the author of Drug Lord: The Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin.

COPYRIGHT 2000 News World Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group