Federal prosecutors withheld a politically volatile allegation from attorneys who were defending two men accused in the 1985 killing of U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena in Mexico, documents show.
An informant who helped build the 1992 criminal case in Los Angeles contended that Mexico's president at the time of the slaying and a former president discussed Camarena with a drug lord who allegedly ordered the agent's kidnapping and murder two months later.
The accusation against former Presidents Miguel de la Madrid and Jose Lopez Portillo was made by Ramon Lira, a former Mexican policeman who worked as a bodyguard for the drug trafficker, according to a Drug Enforcement Administration report.
But prosecutors provided only a sanitized version of the report, with the allegation excised, to attorneys for two defendants accused of conspiring with others to kill Camarena.
Lira was one of two paid informants who had placed both defendants at a Guadalajara house when Camarena was killed. But he was the only person to implicate the two ex-presidents in the plot--an allegation that some former U.S. ambassadors to Mexico call ludicrous.
Richard Drooyan, who is chief assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, said "there was nothing sinister" about the deletion and suggested that it may have been made to avoid embarrassing Mexico's highest officials. He said there was no reason to think that the deletion harmed the defense in the case because the government ultimately did not call Lira to testify.
But legal scholars contacted by The Times said that withholding the information could have harmed the defense because Lira's allegation itself raises questions about the credibility of the U.S. government's informants. Several also questioned why the deletion was made in a manner that would not have signaled to defense attorneys that something was removed.
"There is reason to believe that they didn't want anybody to know they had deleted the information," said William J. Genego, a former USC law professor who heads the rules committee of the National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "There is no appropriate explanation for that, other than a bad explanation."
Lira's allegation, contained in his first formal statement to the DEA in September 1992, went far beyond those made by other informants in hundreds of pages of DEA reports released by the U.S. government. At the time, Mexican officials were already furious with the U.S. for relying on what they contended were unfounded allegations from unreliable sources.
