Pubdate: Sat, 17 Oct 2009
Source: New York Times (NY)
Page: A1, Front Page
Copyright: 2009 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Marc Lacey

IN MEXICAN DRUG WAR, INVESTIGATORS ARE FEARFUL

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- The hit men moved in on their target, shot 
him dead and then disappeared in a matter of seconds. It would have 
been a perfect case for Jose Ibarra Limon, one of this violent border 
city's most dogged crime investigators -- had he not been the victim.

Mexico has never been particularly adept at bringing criminals to 
justice, and the drug war has made things worse. Investigators are 
now swamped with homicides and other drug crimes, most of which they 
will never crack. On top of the standard obstacles -- too little 
expertise, too much corruption -- is one that seems to grow by the 
day: outright fear of becoming the next body in the street.

Mr. Ibarra was killed on July 27 in what his bosses at the federal 
attorney general's office consider an assassination related to a case 
he was investigating. As if to prove the point, less than a month 
later, one of the lawyers who had worked for Mr. Ibarra also turned 
up dead. Two days afterward, an investigator named to replace Mr. 
Ibarra insisted on being transferred out of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's 
murder capital.

The current prosecutor investigating Mr. Ibarra's cases is working 
anonymously, his or her name kept secret by the government.

The Mexican government knows that revamping its problem-plagued 
justice system is an essential part of breaking the cartels that 
control vast areas of Mexico. Major efforts are under way to make the 
judiciary faster and fairer, and the United States has contributed 
millions of dollars to help bring more criminals to justice.

But even with training programs by American lawyers and judges, 
American aid to improve forensics and screen more effectively for 
corruption, as well as other cross-border initiatives, the 
traffickers and the cumulative pressures they are putting on the 
judiciary are straining it as never before.

"Obviously what happened affects us," said Hector Garcia Rodriguez, 
the federal prosecutor in Juarez and the supervisor of the slain 
investigator. "We're still working. We can't stop. But we know the 
dangers we face."

President Felipe Calderon points to the arrests of more than 50,000 
people on drug charges since he began his antidrug offensive in 
December 2006. Many of the arrests appear to have come from top-notch 
detective work. Other suspects, though, are quietly released after 
they have been paraded before the news media.

The federal government refused to provide statistics on how many 
arrests had resulted in convictions, how many suspects were still 
under investigation or how many arrests had proved to be mistakes. 
But independent reviews by scholars suggest that only about a quarter 
of crimes in Mexico are ever reported and that only a small fraction 
ever result in convictions.

Compounding matters is the sheer number of crimes, especially 
murders. On a single September night in Ciudad Juarez, 18 men were 
shot to death in a drug treatment center near the border, more than 
the number of killings all year long in El Paso, just across the Texas border.

"Law enforcement is overwhelmed," said David A. Shirk, a professor at 
the University of San Diego and the principal investigator for the 
Justice in Mexico Project, a binational research initiative. "If you 
have murders with 13 bodies one day and then you have 4 more the 
next, there's not a lot of investigation into who pulled the trigger 
specifically."

Fear Gets in the Way

One of the two dozen or so cases that Mr. Ibarra had been 
investigating involved the killing of a journalist, Armando Rodriguez 
Carreon, 40, who had produced a string of scoops as the longtime 
crime reporter for the newspaper El Diario. Mr. Rodriguez was shot to 
death last Nov. 13 as he prepared to take his 8-year-old daughter to 
school. She was at his side and saw her father struck by at least 10 bullets.

"It was similar to hundreds of homicides we've had here," remarked 
Mr. Garcia, Mr. Ibarra's supervisor. "It was an execution."

It is also similar in that the perpetrators remain at large. Fear 
prevents many cases from being solved because investigators hesitate 
to dig too deeply, and witnesses refuse to talk.

"Nobody cooperates with anything," Mr. Garcia complained. "They're 
too afraid. Nobody wants to say what they saw. Nobody wants to give 
you a plate number."

Mexico is promoting confidential telephone lines and rewards to 
encourage witnesses, but resistance lingers, especially when news 
reports circulate about threats made to those who do call in. And 
there is considerable doubt that the reward money is worth the risk.

The attacks on investigators only magnify the problem.

"If you had a difficult case, you went to him and said, 'Ibarra, what 
do you think?' " Mr. Garcia said. Now in trying to solve Mr. Ibarra's 
murder, his colleagues wonder aloud how he might have pursued his 
killers, possibly four men in all, who shot him many times in the 
head with .45-caliber and 9-millimeter weapons.

The slain journalist's wife, Blanca Martinez, said that she had met 
once with Mr. Ibarra, but that she did not think he had been murdered 
for closing in on her husband's killers, despite his reputation for 
solving difficult crimes.

"I don't think he was really investigating," she said. Prosecutors 
had asked once to interview her young daughter, a witness, but had 
never followed up, Ms. Martinez said.

Pedro Torres, Mr. Rodriguez's editor and close friend, was similarly 
unimpressed with the government's effort to find the killers of his 
top police reporter.

Investigators waited for months before visiting the newsroom, 
interviewing some of Mr. Rodriguez's co-workers and getting copies of 
his articles. The government has not yet established whether Mr. 
Rodriguez's killing stemmed from his work as a police reporter, 
infuriating his colleagues, who are convinced that such a connection is clear.

"He's the godfather of my child," Mr. Torres said. "I've known him 
for years. They've never talked to me. What kind of investigation is that?"

Slipshod Investigations

One of the forensic specialists who photograph bodies, lift 
fingerprints and count spent bullets at Juarez homicide scenes 
complained that by the time he arrived at a site, significant 
tampering had already taken place.

"The soldiers come in and walk over everything," complained the 
specialist, who spoke anonymously in an out-of-the-way steak 
restaurant because his supervisors had not authorized him to give an 
interview. "They leave their fingerprints all around. They want to 
know who died, so they move the body. They kick the bullets. They 
don't realize they're contaminating the crime scene."

Thousands of soldiers, deployed by the president in his war against 
the cartels, patrol the streets of Juarez alongside the local police. 
Trained to take on enemy combatants, they are far less familiar with 
the sanctity of crime scenes, the rules of evidence and other basics 
of law enforcement.

Many police officers also meddle with crime scenes, sometimes out of 
incompetence, but sometimes to throw off the investigation or to 
enrich themselves.

"If the victim's watch is missing, that could be important because it 
could mean it was a robbery," the forensic specialist said. "But we 
can't rule out that one of the police officers at the scene took it."

The joint military-police mission now combating traffickers in Juarez 
presents a more positive picture. It cites the recent arrests of 
three men suspected of being hired killers, who in August implicated 
themselves and a fourth suspect in 211 homicides, an eye-popping 
number even in Mexico.

To trumpet the breakthrough, the government took out newspaper ads 
listing all the people the suspects were accused of killing. One man 
alone was linked to 101 murders.

The authorities said the arrests resulted from ballistics 
investigations, which are modern enough here in Chihuahua State that 
the El Paso Police Department used them for years for its own 
investigations. But the men also confessed to the murders, the 
authorities said, and questions were raised in the local news media 
about whether the detainees had been coerced, a frequent problem in Mexico.

"We solve our crimes with evidence, and they solve them with 
confessions," said the El Paso County sheriff, Richard D. Wiles. "We 
have strict rules to follow on how to get confessions. The rules are 
looser over there."

In a recent assessment of Mexico's adherence to human rights, the 
State Department noted that 21 torture complaints and 580 complaints 
of cruel or degrading treatment had been made against the Mexican 
authorities in 2008, a significant increase from the year before.

And yet, the report said: "Since 2007, we are not aware that any 
official has ever been convicted of torture, giving rise to concern 
about impunity. Despite the law's provisions to the contrary, police 
and prosecutors have attempted to justify an arrest by forcibly 
securing a confession of a crime."

Without a Trace

Along the border, many victims are never found, leaving relatives -- 
and investigators -- in a state of limbo.

Fernando Ocegueda Flores, a founder of an advocacy group in Tijuana 
for relatives of the disappeared, felt an odd mixture of despair and 
relief in January, when the police announced that a suspect, Santiago 
Meza Lopez, had admitted to disposing of the remains of 300 bodies 
for a drug cartel by dissolving them in barrels of lye.

Mr. Ocegueda thought that maybe his son, abducted in 2007, had been 
one of the victims of the Pozolero, a nickname for Mr. Meza that 
translates roughly as the stew maker. Mr. Ocegueda thought his years 
of trying to learn his son's fate might end.

Federal authorities took Mr. Meza to Mexico City for questioning and 
began testing some remains. But the bones were so corroded by the lye 
that no DNA was found, the authorities have said.

Mr. Ocegueda contends that the investigators should be doing more, 
like digging up the yard where Mr. Meza said he had disposed of the 
bodies after boiling them, to search for more bones to test. The yard 
is guarded by the federal police, but a human jaw bone with a tooth 
attached and various suspicious mounds of earth were visible inside.

Frustrated, Mr. Ocegueda said that if the site was not properly 
investigated soon, he and other relatives planned to storm the place 
with shovels and begin digging themselves.

But a coroner's investigator who has reviewed some of the remains 
from such barrels in other cases said the traffickers covered their 
tracks well.

"You can't tell by looking that it's a human being," said the 
investigator, who was not authorized to speak publicly. "It's a glob 
of something, and the DNA is gone."

Cross-Border Police Work

Every month, law enforcement officials from both sides of the border, 
whether from the F.B.I. or the Tijuana police, gather to talk shop at 
a chain restaurant in southern California.

"Without cooperation, so many cases would sit still," said the 
California investigator who convenes the sessions, Val Jimenez, 
executive director of the International Law Enforcement Officers 
Association. Cross-border policing has caught child molesters, car 
thieves and murderers.

It also helped solve one particularly grisly missing person case.

Daniel LaPorte, 27, disappeared after heading across the border to 
Baja California from San Diego last year. Eventually, his green 
Cadillac was found south of Tijuana, outside Rosarito Beach, with 
four dead people in and around it. None were Mr. LaPorte.

As the family's private investigator looked into the case with police 
officers from San Diego and Baja California, a Mexican detective 
mentioned that a barrel apparently containing human remains had been 
discovered not far from the location of the quadruple homicide.

Luck played a role in identifying the remains. It had rained heavily 
after the barrel had been abandoned on a remote hillside, 
investigators said. The barrel had fallen over and some of the bones 
had been washed away by the rain, diluting the corrosive solution and 
preventing all the DNA from being stripped away. Laboratory tests 
conducted in Tijuana showed that the remains were Mr. LaPorte's.

Investigators eventually determined that Mr. LaPorte had been 
involved in trafficking marijuana from Mexico to Rhode Island, some 
of it in surfboards. He had probably bought several tons of marijuana 
a year, the family's investigator said.

Mr. Jimenez and some of the other law enforcement officials who work 
on these joint investigations are sympathetic to the policing 
challenges their Mexican counterparts face.

"We don't think we're going to die when we go to work, but over there 
it is a real possibility," Mr. Jimenez said. "A lot of them want to 
do good police work, but there are some cases they can't do because 
of the pressure of the cartels."

Arresting the Wrong People

Alejandra Gonzalez Licea said the only conceivable ties she had ever 
had to drug trafficking were purely academic ones. A linguistics 
professor who wrote her thesis on narcocorridos, the Mexican ballads 
that often extol the exploits of drug bosses, Ms. Gonzalez found 
herself blindfolded and handcuffed by soldiers this year and 
interrogated about which drug cartel was employing her.

Her answer -- the Autonomous University of Baja California -- did not 
impress her interrogators. The professor and her husband endured 
months of detention before the charges were quietly dropped. The 
$28,000 in cash they were caught carrying was a gift from an uncle in 
the United States to help them remodel their home, it was determined, 
not illicit drug profits they were laundering.

After her initial detention, Ms. Gonzalez was led to a news 
conference, where journalists were gathered to photograph her. She 
stood next to her husband and two men she did not know. On the table 
before them, much to her surprise, was nearly half a million dollars.

It turned out that she was being grouped with two money-laundering 
suspects arrested the same night with a much larger amount of cash. 
It would take two and a half months before a judge would throw out 
the case against her and her husband for lack of proof.

Mexico has approved a sweeping overhaul of its judiciary to replace 
its closed-door judicial proceedings with trials in which defendants 
like Ms. Gonzalez are considered innocent until proved guilty. But 
revamping the system is no easy feat. It requires retraining lawyers 
and judges, rebuilding courtrooms and improving forensic technology, 
all while trying to keep on top of a flood of new cases.

Police forces are also getting an overhaul. Officers in Tijuana and 
Juarez, two of the most violence-prone cities, have been fired en 
masse after being linked to organized crime. The two federal police 
agencies have been reorganized under a single commander. Beyond that, 
a new police training institute has been established and the 
government has set up a national database to share information and 
intelligence.

Still, Ms. Gonzalez, now back at her teaching job, shook her head 
when asked about the Mexican government's competence. She doubts the 
official statistics, since she figures she was one of the 50,000 
people that the president cited as drug suspects.

"They didn't even find out that I wrote my thesis on narcocorridos," 
she said of those who were prosecuting her. "Good thing they didn't find out."

Doing What Police Won't

The authorities discourage civilians from investigating their own 
cases because of the obvious dangers involved. But many grow tired of 
waiting for the police and, having no luck with private 
investigators, conduct their own inquiries.

Cristina Palacios, president of the Citizens' Association Against 
Impunity, recounted how one of her members, a Tijuana woman whose 
brother had been kidnapped, offered a reward herself, furious at how 
little had been done to investigate the disappearance.

Shadowy men contacted the woman, and she agreed to be taken away with 
a blindfold, Ms. Palacios said. Soon the woman found herself in a 
room where a man tied to a chair was being beaten by a group of men. 
The man confessed to killing her brother.

The next day, the woman, who declined to speak on the record about 
what occurred, saw in the newspaper that a body had been found. It 
looked like the man in the chair, Ms. Palacios said.

Mr. Ocegueda, in search of his missing son, had a similar experience. 
One night, in the course of his personal investigation, he allowed 
himself to be led away with his eyes covered and driven for about 40 
minutes by a man he met who had links to traffickers.

Eventually, he was led into a home, where he said a gruff man told 
him, "You're very brave to come here."

Apparently impressed by his gumption, the man gave Mr. Ocegueda a 
shot of whiskey and told him that his son had been killed and would 
never be found. His remains had been destroyed in lye, the man said.

But Mr. Ocegueda, continuing to investigate, later found another 
organized crime figure, who led him in another direction. This time, 
he was told his son was alive and working for traffickers. Now, he 
does not know what to think.

"The police are supposed to be doing this, not me," he said. "But 
they don't want to investigate because they don't want to solve these 
crimes. They might be killed if they find the truth. I don't care if 
they kill me." 
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