TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/85/85.2

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 6.0 KB | 118 lines

                                                                                March 18, 1985

NATION

Deadly Traffic on the Boarder


A drug agent is found murdered


John Gavin, the tough-talking U.S. ambassador to Mexico, could
barely contain his rage as he tersely announced that the search
for Enrique Amarena Salazar had ended. Camarena, a U.S. citizen
and an eleven-year veteran of the Drug Enforcement
Administration, had been kidnaped by four gunmen in Guadalajara
early last month. Alfredo Zavala Avelar, a pilot who flew
Camarena on many of his DEA missions, had been abducted later
that same day. The bodies of the men, Gavin said, were
discovered by the side of road near a ranch about 100 miles from
Guadalajara. They had been severely beaten, and bound, gagged,
and stuffed into white plastic bags. Said Gavin:  "We call on
responsible authorities in the government of the Republic of
Mexico to join us in intensifying the search for and the
apprehension of these detestable criminal elements."

For weeks Gavin and other U.S. officials had criticized Mexico's
"lack of vigor and ... cooperation" in the hunt for Camarena.
The U.S. went so far as to inspect every automobile at many of
the 26 official crossing points along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican
border, aggravating already tense diplomatic relations. Last
week, after drug traffickers threatened to kidnap and kill a
Customs officer, U.S. border agents packed .357 Magnum revolvers
and carried shotguns on duty. Nine remote stations were closed,
hurting business in border towns from California to Texas. At
week's end only two had been reopened.

The crisis was far from resolved by the discovery of the two
men's bodies. U.S. officials suspect that Mexican law
enforcement officers may actually have been involved in the
abduction and murder. "We have a great many questions [about the
story]," said Gavin.

According to the Mexican account, the federal judicial police
received an anonymous letter saying the two missing men might be
found at the ranch of Manuel Bravo Cervantes, a former
legislator, in Michoacan state. When some 30 federal judicial
policemen approached the Bravo house, the policy say, shots from
inside killed an officer, setting off a half-hour gunfight.
Bravo, his wife and their two sons died in the battle. The
police claimed they later seized two pounds of cocaine and a slew
of guns and ammunition.

Three days afterward, DEA agents and Mexican police searched the
30-acre ranch and its surroundings but found no sign of Camarena
and Zavala. But that evening, a peasant youth discovered the two
plastic bags about ten yards from a highway that runs past the
Bravo ranch. The corpses had apparently been dumped there after
the agents left the ranch. The soil found on the bags was not
common to the immediate area. Investigators concluded that the
bodies had been buried, disinterred and brought to the ranch so
they could be found there.

Mexican authorities claim that Bravo was a "known drug
trafficker."  DEA agents say he was suspected of illegal arms
dealing, but they do not believe he was in the narcotics trade.
Moreover, the federales, who had recently been making a
deliberate effort to cooperate with U.S. investigators, did not
tell the DEA of the Bravo raid beforehand. Nor were Michoacan
state police notified of the raid in their jurisdiction until
after the shooting started; when the local officers arrived at
the scene, the federal police even prevented them from entering
the ranch grounds.

Skeptical U.S. officials believe the Mexican authorities received
an anonymous letter, but think that the overzealous officers
might have opended fire on the Bravo house without sufficient
provocation. Needing to justify the carnage, the police could
have planted the cocaine in the home and later placed the bodies
of Camarena and Zavala nearby. If this were the case, the
federal police must have known who had kidnaped, killed and
buried the two men.

The prime suspects in the Camarena-Zavala case are still two
Mexican drug kingpins, Miguel Felix Gallardo and Rafael Caro
Quintero. But the U.S. believes that Mexico's gangland
"families" have been operating with wide-scale police protection.
Officers who were supposedly tracking Caro Quintero in connection
with the Camarena case claimed they simply failed to recognize
the well-known crook when he boarded a private plane in
Guadalajara two days after the agent's abduction. Caro Quintero
flew to Caborca, a remote desert town where he may now be in
hiding.

Corrupt high-level officials seem to be playing a larger role
than ever in the international drug trade. In Miami last week,
DEA agents arrested Norman Saunders, Chief Minister of the Turks
and Caicos Islands, a British protectorate of tiny islands north
of Haiti. Arrested along with him were his Minister of Commerce
and Development, a member of the islands' legislature, and a
French-Canadian businessman who lives in the Bahamas. Saunders,
accompanied by the others, allegedly accepted $50,000 from
undercover agents as down payment for providing a safe stopover
for a plane carrying drugs from South America to Florida. If
convicted the politicians face up to 30 years in prison.

Right now, U.S. and Mexican law enforcers are clearly losing the
fight to break up the drug trade south of the border. One night
last week, four Mexican police officers and a civilian were shot
dead trying to stop a tanker truck loaded with marijuana from
going through a Customs post near San Fernando, Mexico, about 90
miles from the Texas border at Brownsville. The cargo and three
suspects were finally seized 25 miles south of the border city of
Reynosa, Mexico, but the original drivers had escaped. In his
press conference last week, Ambassador Gavin quoted Mexican
President Miguel de la Madred Hurtado, who called the drug crisis
"a cancer" on both countries. Said Gavin:  "We are in a war, and
we cannot accept that Enrique Camarena died in vain."

By Jacob V. Lamar Jr. Reported by David Beckwith/Washington and
Ricardo Chavira/Mexico City