Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 20, 1990 TAG: 9006200026
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Medium
U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie's statement was no exaggeration.
During the first four weeks of the Camarena trial, jurors have heard about powerful, swaggering drug dealers, including one who kept a lion at his house; corrupt police officials, including one who "got loaded" on cocaine at a narcotics trafficker's home; and a tense standoff between heavily armed bodyguards of a drug kingpin and Mexican law enforcement.
They have heard an American woman's tearful description of her unsuccessful attempt to find her husband after he disappeared in Guadalajara, Mexico, and the almost casual confession of a courier that he transported, by car, $150 million in drug sale proceeds from the United States to Mexico.
And, just before the trial recessed for a week earlier this month, the jurors listened to wrenching tapes of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Camarena, then 37, pleading with his killers not to torture him further.
Meanwhile, the Mexican government has reopened its investigation of the February 1985 Guadalajara murders of Camarena and his pilot, Alfredo Zavala Avelar, as embarrassing allegations about ties between Mexican police officials and drug traffickers are raised continually in the courtroom. Those charges, on top of the fact that seven former Mexican police officials have been indicted in Los Angeles, have added a significant dimension to a trial that was likely from the start to rankle relations between Mexico and the United States.
The first 50 witnesses to testify in the case have included a bevy of DEA agents, an FBI criminologist, a doctor who examined Camarena's mutilated body in a Guadalajara hospital and a Mexican lawyer who was shot and nearly killed because he helped the DEA and more than a dozen paid DEA informants, most of them Mexican and many of whom have engaged in criminal activity and been given immunity for their testimony.
Doubts were raised about the testimony of some informants, such as Hector Cervantes Santos, the self-described former security chieftain for narcotics trafficker Javier Barba Hernandez. He testified that all four defendants attended one or more of the meetings where drug lords and some Mexican police officials planned Camarena's kidnapping.
On cross-examination, he contradicted himself on some key points, including how many meetings had been held. Some of his testimony also appeared to be undermined by a later prosecution witness, Laurence V. Harrison, who said that he set up sophisticated radio systems for the drug traffickers and, like Cervantes, is now a government-paid witness.
The prosecution may call an additional 20 witnesses when the trial resumes.
This is the second Los Angeles federal trial of persons accused of involvement in Camarena's murder. Three men were convicted in 1988 and given long prison sentences.
The current trial may prove to be more significant than the first one because two of the defendants are accused of being among those who plotted Camarena's kidnapping and murder. None of the defendants in the first case was alleged to have had such a pivotal role.
Securing convictions of those two men - Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, 45, a Honduran drug kingpin, and Ruben Zuno Arce, 59, a politically influential Mexican businessman who prosecutors contend is the key link between narcotics traffickers and the Mexican government - is very important to the DEA, which is continuing to investigate Camarena's murder.
The other two defendants are Juan Jose Bernabe Ramirez, 31, a former Jalisco State policeman who is accused of being one of the bodyguards at the Guadalajara house where Camarena was tortured, and Javier Vasquez Velasco, 38, also a Mexican citizen. Velasco is accused of killing an American writer and a Cuban medical student, who were mistaken for DEA agents and murdered just eight days before Camarena was kidnapped. Judge Rafeedie has allowed the government to combine the two cases, saying that there is significant overlap between them.
by CNB