On the first day of trial of four men charged in the murder of U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena, a federal judge in Los Angeles told prospective jurors that it would be "one of the most interesting cases on which you will have the opportunity to serve."
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 officials.
They have heard an American woman's tearful description of her unsuccessful attempt to find her husband after he disappeared in Guadalajara; 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 they listened to wrenching tapes of Drug Enforcement Administration Agent Camarena, then 37, pleading with his killers not to torture him anymore.
The trial was in recess for most of last week and is to resume today.
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, 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.
Some of the informants gave testimony that was not seriously challenged. Among them was Juan Fernandez, who said he helped manage a string of ranches for Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero and doled out bribes to officials in four Mexican law enforcement agencies.
