Enrique Camarena

Interpol is waiting for fingerprint records to arrive by mail to determine whether a man in custody in Italy is a former Mexican police commander wanted in the United States in connection with the killing of a U.S. drug agent. Henry (Chip) Maurer, a spokesman for Interpol in Washington, said this week that law enforcement officials began double-checking the arrested man's identity after another man in Mexico City claimed to be Jorge Armando Pavon Reyes.

Charging that the American government has "lost its moral compass," lawyers for a Mexican gynecologist who was kidnaped at the behest of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration are urging President-elect Bill Clinton to prevent government agents from ever abducting another foreign national.

Mexican businessman Ruben Zuno Arce was found guilty Monday of conspiring to kidnap and murder an American drug agent in 1985, ending a chapter in the intense investigation of the crime. Zuno, brother-in-law of former Mexican President Luis Echeverria Alvarez, closed his eyes and shook his head slowly as the jury verdicts were read. "Big injustice," he said in Spanish as he was led from the courtroom by U.S. marshals.

Lawyers for Mexican businessman Ruben Zuno Arce, who is accused of helping plan the 1985 kidnaping of an American drug agent, requested a mistrial Wednesday because, they said, government documents that surfaced on the final day of the proceeding contained material that might have helped their case. The motion was denied by U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie, but he added that the new information was "very disturbing."

President-elect Bill Clinton on Tuesday questioned a Supreme Court ruling that found no illegality in the U.S. abduction of Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain, who later was acquitted of murdering a federal drug agent. He said the ruling "goes way too far" in staking out the U.S. right to abduct people from foreign soil.

President Carlos Salinas de Gortari on Tuesday hailed the release of Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain as a "correction" of a violation of international law, and the Mexican attorney general said no charges would be filed against Alvarez Machain in Mexico. In unusually strong language, Salinas accused U.S. prosecutors of slandering Mexican officials as part of their case against Alvarez Machain and co-defendant Ruben Zuno Arce.

More than two years after he was kidnaped at the behest of the Drug Enforcement Administration and brought to the United States from Mexico to stand trial, Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain was ordered set free Monday by a federal judge who ruled that the case against him was so weak that the jury should not be allowed to consider it.

U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie once described himself as the only carnival barker to ever make it to the federal bench. He wasn't joking. As a young man in Los Angeles just before and after World War II, Rafeedie made a living running carnival rides and traveling the carny circuit with a portable horse race game called Derby.

Prosecutors rested their case Thursday against two Mexican citizens charged with taking part in the 1985 murder of an American drug agent, concluding a week of testimony that has strained U.S.-Mexico relations with witnesses' accounts of the crime and its planning. Immediately after the prosecution concluded, U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie indicated that he would consider granting a motion to drop charges against Humberto Alvarez Machain.

A former Mexican policeman who became a bodyguard to a drug kingpin testified Wednesday that two defendants, along with an array of high-ranking Mexican government officials, were at the Guadalajara house where an American drug agent was being tortured and killed in 1985.