Deadly Traffic on the Border

By Jacob V. Lamar Jr.

John Gavin, the tough-talking U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, could barely contain his rage as he tersely announced that the search for Enrique Camarena 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 a 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 police 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 opened 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 near- by. 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 Madrid 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."

With reporting by David Beckwith/Washington and Ricardo Chavira/Mexico City