Pubdate: Mon, 31 Oct 2005
Source: San Antonio Express-News (TX)
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Copyright: 2005 San Antonio Express-News
Contact:  http://www.mysanantonio.com/expressnews/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/384
Author: Sean Mattson

MEXICAN JUSTICE IN DOPE CASES PUT HEAVY LOAD ON DUPED DRIVERS

CIENEGUILLAS PRISON, Mexico - The cargo container of foreign 
fertilizer that Gustavo Medina was hauling into northern Mexico 
seemed to be in perfect order.

Complete with the name of a customs official, the importation 
documents were issued at the Pacific port of Manzanillo. The red 
container had a metal government inspection seal supposedly affixed 
after it cleared customs.

Medina had been hired to transport it 650 miles to Monterrey on his 
rickety 1966 DINA truck. He got as far as a military checkpoint in Zacatecas.

On that winter day in 2001, army officers broke the container's seal 
and found 1,298 pounds of marijuana wrapped in plastic 
ready-for-export bundles and hidden under dozens of bags of mashed 
coconut husks.

Medina, 51, has been in this medium-security federal prison ever since.

He and eight other convicted truckers interviewed here say they were 
duped into hauling drugs to northern transfer points, including 
Ciudad Juarez and Nuevo Laredo, that supply the U.S. market.

Medina has trial paperwork outlining what he thought was rock-solid 
proof that he didn't know what he was hauling.

"Supposedly, that's all you need," Medina said from his lime-green 
10-by-10-foot cell, which sleeps four.

He might have benefited greatly from one more thing: an actual police 
investigation into the origin and destination of the pot he was hauling.

But in Mexico, such investigations appear uncommon.

The drug enforcement unit of Mexico's attorney general's office 
refused to say whether any other arrests or convictions stemmed from 
the various loads of drugs that put Medina and the others behind bars 
in Cieneguillas.

All the truckers claimed they were tricked into moving drugs hidden 
in their cargoes - in sealed boxes and ceramic pots, beneath rock or 
landscaping material - and they provided detailed information about 
where the goods had been loaded and where they were headed.

A look at their case files shows some of the arbitrary methods used 
to "prove" guilt in Mexico. But even if their alibis are a sham, 
these men probably are the only people ever to be busted for the 
drugs they hauled.

The Numbers Game

The attorney general's office could not provide an exact figure for 
jailed truckers since President Vicente Fox took office in December 
2000. It probably runs to several thousand.

Many of them undoubtedly accepted the risk in exchange for offers of 
cash far bigger than their typical $50-a-day earnings.

A former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent said the drug 
gangs dominating Mexico's overland smuggling routes rarely try to con 
truckers into moving their loads

"There have been a few isolated instances where some people have been 
tricked into smuggling drugs unwittingly," said Mike Vigil, a former 
chief of international operations for the DEA.

But Vigil reasoned that duped drivers would be a bigger risk at the 
random military checkpoints on northbound traffic arteries, and drug 
gangs know it.

"You want professional people - people who know they are carrying 
drugs and will be very careful," he said.

The government trumpets their capture as evidence that Mexico is 
holding its own in the international battle against the illicit drug trade.

"The most important thing is that we have detained more than 46,000 
people linked with drug trafficking," Fox said in a June speech 
touting his administration's anti-drug achievements.

By the end of July, the figure was more than 49,000 and counting.

Fifteen are purported drug gang leaders. Another 386 are said to be 
seconds-in-command, financiers or gunmen. More than 31,000 are 
characterized as small-fry neighborhood dealers.

The remaining 17,000 are labeled "involved functionaries" and 
"collaborators," according to a report by the attorney general's office.

Truckers fall under this last category.

At the small Zacatecas courthouse that feeds the Cieneguillas prison, 
about 200 truckers a year were tried on charges of drug trafficking 
from 2000 to 2002, said Juan Garcia Trejo, a court secretary who 
handles most trial aspects but not verdicts or sentencing.

Very few were acquitted, he said, adding later, "Sometimes you say, 
'I believe their story,' but they need to prove it."

The numbers reflect the job done by the Federal Judicial Police, an 
agency disbanded in late 2001 after hundreds of its officers were 
accused of links to the drug trade.

Since the force was replaced with the Federal Investigation Agency, 
such seizures in Garcia's district have dropped to about 10 to 15 
this year, though highway roadblocks still are commonplace.

But the courthouse's overall number of "crimes against health," as 
drug offenses in Mexico are called, has remained about the same.

"It's like they took away the cases of transportation (of drugs) and 
replaced them with small-time drug-dealing cases," Garcia said.

Easy Targets

Convicted truckers and their families aren't surprised that they are 
the only ones to have gone to jail because of the loads they were caught with.

"They didn't investigate," said Enoch Rosales, whose twin 16-year-old 
sons had to quit high school and find jobs - as truckers - to support 
the family when the army found 1,650 pounds of marijuana in a truck 
he was driving. "They didn't want to."

"I have always asked them to investigate me so they could see I 
wasn't a drug trafficker," he said while stretching in a jail cell 
after a homemade meal on a recent family visit day at the 
Cieneguillas prison. "I didn't have a house or a bank account. ... 
How could I be moving drugs?"

Often, it is the families of the jailed truckers who do most of the 
investigating in a vain attempt to win an acquittal.

The daughter of one convicted trucker said she found and confronted 
the man responsible for the load of marijuana hidden in sealed boxes 
of diapers that sent her father to Cieneguillas.

She said the truck was loaded at a warehouse right beside her 
father's house, so it wasn't a difficult search.

She said the man even offered to "fix" the situation with a visit to 
the Zacatecas courthouse but that her father's final non-appealable 
conviction already had been issued.

"It was better that way," the daughter added. "Then we would have 
owed him a favor."

No additional arrests were ever made in the case, she added.

Juan Cruz, whose son Hipolito, 29, was captured with 836 pounds of 
marijuana beneath a load of lawn turf, visited and photographed the 
place just south of Guadalajara where the pot allegedly was loaded 
into the truck.

He said it took two months from the date of his son's arrest for 
police to visit the turf farm. When questioned, the owner said he 
didn't know to whom he had sold the 11,000-peso load Hipolito was 
hired to move to Ciudad Juarez.

The official investigation promptly ended there, Cruz said.

"How can a big business not know who it sells something to?" an 
exasperated Cruz asked.

The wife of Medina, the trucker jailed since 2001, hired a private 
investigator who found a man they claimed was responsible for her 
husband's marijuana-filled shipping container. He was the person 
Medina said he was told to contact if he ran into problems.

Called to testify at Medina's trial, the man's testimony consisted of 
repeated denials that he knew Medina, according to court documents.

The customs agent whose name appeared on the shipping document 
testified he had no idea why his name was on the paperwork.

No investigation of the seal on the container, which is supposed to 
be applied under supervision of customs officials, was launched, said 
Medina, who took the unusual measure of filing charges against 
authorities, demanding a full-scale investigation.

Brothers Luis and Antonio Zavala, who were caught in 2001 with a load 
of marijuana packed into ceramic pots with false bottoms, told the 
army they would cooperate with an investigation by driving the drugs 
back to the person responsible for loading the vehicle or to its destination.

They were allowed to contact the sender, who would come to pick up 
his truck under the guise that it had broken down.

But an hour before the planned rendezvous, the brothers were whisked 
off to Cieneguillas.

Supply Vs. Demand

Increased flows of drugs through Mexico, a wave of drug violence 
there and dropping U.S. prices for drugs (especially cocaine) despite 
increased demand - these statistics suggest filling Mexican jails 
with bottom-rung offenders has had little impact on the drug trade.

"The arrests and seizures of drugs have not modified or diminished 
the strength of the drug market," said Ernesto Lopez Portillo, a 
policing specialist and director of the Institute for Security and 
Democracy, a think tank in Mexico City.

"The strategy that favors combating the supply above combating demand 
is unsuccessful," he said, and judges, prosecutors and law 
enforcement officers "do not have systems of accountability."

Mexican law enforcers are not required to give details about the 
statistics they provide, and though their funding has increased under 
Fox, their efficiency and effectiveness have not, Lopez said.

Then there is the matter of police technique.

Vigil, the former DEA agent, said it's common practice among U.S. law 
enforcement agencies to use low-level violators as informants to get 
the bigger fish. The practice hasn't caught on in Mexico.

Investigations stemming from seizures are complicated because 
truckers do not reveal enough about their employers, said Maria 
Teresa Garcia Chavez of the federal attorney general office in Zacatecas.

She hinted that they keep quiet for fear of retribution, saying, 
"They've already learned their lesson, so the last thing they want 
are larger consequences."

Others point to Mexico's outdated laws as an obstacle.

"Part of the problem ... in following any trail back from an arrest 
of a driver of a truck or following it forward is that (under) the 
laws here in Mexico, the antiquated laws, you can't charge someone 
unless you find them with drugs in their hands," Lynn Roche, a 
spokeswoman for the U.S. Consulate General in Guadalajara, said on 
behalf of DEA agents in Guadalajara who declined to be interviewed.

Specialists in Mexican justice say criminal intent must be proven to 
convict a person of trafficking drugs in this nation. But a person 
caught with the smoking gun is convicted almost by default, even when 
he offers evidence he didn't pull the trigger.

"I told the judge that he had my son's life in his hands and that he 
was innocent," said Cruz, the man whose son was caught with 826 
pounds of marijuana. "But he told me, 'He was at the wheel, he had 
the drugs and he's the only one that's guilty.'"

In practice, the nation's justice system requires defendants to prove 
their innocence, even though that is incorrect under Mexican law, 
said Enrique Diaz Aranda, a law professor at the capital city's 
National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM.

Fox has tried to reform the judiciary, but his proposals have been 
stonewalled by an opposition-dominated Congress.

'Worth Nothing'

Trucker Medina made a number of mistakes in accepting the job that 
came back to haunt him. A self-employed trucker and farmer, he was 
hired by someone he didn't know, and his contacts, on both ends of 
the journey, were names and a phone number scribbled on two scraps of paper.

Police investigators said the residence he was supposed to deliver 
the container to didn't exist and that they couldn't find the place 
where he loaded it.

In convicting and sentencing Medina, the judge reasoned that "it is 
logical to think that (Medina) knew that he was carrying something 
hidden in the container" because of the two suspicious "little 
papers" he had been given.

The judge also surmised that Medina had gotten nervous about driving 
the drugs and wanted to back out because he had offered the job to a 
friend, who had testified that Medina told him his 35-year-old truck 
was having problems.

A mechanic testified that Medina had to stop for repairs on the first 
leg of his trip.

His sentencing documents also refer to two antiquated precedents of 
Mexican law.

One was used to discredit Medina's long list of witnesses. It states 
that if a witness, on separate occasions months apart, delivers 
exactly the same testimony, he or she must have been coached 
(presumably by a lawyer) and therefore must be lying.

The second says police investigations "have total probative value," 
meaning no mistakes or lies are ever presented by prosecutors.

The use of such precedents is of special concern, considering the 
pressure police are under to score convictions in the war on drugs, 
analysts said.

Horacio Reyes Tamez, 65, said the Federal Judicial Police agents who 
arrested him in 2000 testified he had 550 pounds of marijuana in a 
hidden compartment, that they pulled him over "because he was acting 
suspicious" and that he had offered them thousands of pesos in bribes 
to let him go.

"But if it was at night, how could they see me, and how could I have 
offered them any money if I didn't have any?" asked Tamez, who, in 
his Sunday best, struck an odd figure in the Cieneguillas courtyard 
as visiting children played on run-down swings amid young, tattooed 
inmates in baggy clothes and baseball caps.

Reyes, like the other convicted truckers in Cieneguillas who swear by 
their innocence, said he was not present when the drugs were removed 
from his vehicle - the police moved him more than 100 feet away 
before conducting their search.

Reyes said he was held overnight and made to pose for photographs 
beside the packs of marijuana the next day.

Without a lawyer, he also signed documents that were later used to 
affirm his guilt.

"You are worth nothing," he said in describing what facing the 
Mexican justice system is like.

In an interview weeks before he died in a helicopter crash in 
September with seven senior Mexican law enforcement officials, Jose 
Antonio Bernal Guerrero, a top-level investigator at Mexico's 
National Human Rights Commission, said drug mules are treated too 
harshly under Mexican law.

As a public defender in Mexico City in the 1990s, Bernal said, he 
rarely saw accused truckers win acquittals.

"It is truly unjust that they are given the minimum sentence of 10 
years," he said. "They ... aren't dangerous, and they are given 
penalties that are the same as those given to the big drug traffickers."

Bernal, court officer Garcia and UNAM's Diaz agreed that truckers who 
were moving goods for trucking companies should be able to win acquittals.

That did little good for a number of Cieneguillas-confined truckers, 
including Rosales, whose wife, Maria Leticia, says she is appealing 
his case because police said he was moving his own cargo, when, in 
fact, he was moving pottery for a shipping company.

Daniel Galvez, a trucker for a major Guadalajara-based trucking 
company, similarly moved a load of fake-bottom clay jars containing a 
metric ton of marijuana. He said his company tried to help him.

"The boss told the cops to throw him in jail because he sent me to 
fill the order," Galvez said.

Despite a well-funded company-backed defense, Galvez was sentenced to 
15 years in Cieneguillas. He appealed his sentence and was given 13 
years instead.

Transporte Rodeli, the trucking company, declined numerous interview requests.

Law professor Diaz said judges claim to be free from government 
pressure to jail people caught on drug offenses, noting it is police 
departments that are under pressure to rack up numbers in Mexico's 
war on drugs.

"Evidently, just because the judge convicts doesn't necessarily mean 
the judge was right," he said.

But Mexicans in general don't believe their judges are themselves 
immune to external pressure, at least when it comes in monetary form.

In a 2004 report by Latinobarometro, a Chilean-based organization 
that measures public opinion in Latin America, 58 percent of Mexicans 
in a survey said they believe there are "high" or "fair" 
probabilities that you can bribe a judge in Mexico.

It was the highest perception of judicial corruption the study found 
anywhere in Latin America.
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