Pubdate:82297 Source:Orange County Headline:Drug czar's trial a tricky case for Mexico PROBE:'The Mexican government has a tremendous dilemmahow far to take these investigations,'says a political scientist. By SAM DILLONThe New York Times ALMOLOYA DE JUAREZ,MexicoSeveral days a week,Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo and two of his former aides file into a courtroom on a windswept mountain plateau to hear new testimony in the drug trial unfolding against them. Gutierrez, the highestranking Mexican official ever tried on narcotics charges, sits impassively behind a steel grating, listening as the prosecution's story of his corruption be traffickers is told and retold. Occasionally, he stands erect in khaki prison garb, pushing his spectacles up his nose to address the court. Often he has used these occasions to accuse Mexico's secretary of defense of persecuting him to protect other corrupt generals. Several times he has said he holds explosive informationgleaned from his experience as Mexico's top drugenforcement official linking senior politicians to the drug trade. Six months into the proceedings, the charges against Gutierrez involving narcotics, abuse of authority and arms charges have provoked extraordinary tensions, both inside the military and out, and are posing a watershed test for Mexico's simultaneous effort to implant a fledgling democracy and pursue a troubled was on drugs. "The Mexican government has a tremendous dilemma how far to take these investigations," said Jorge Chabat Madrid, a political scientist here. "You could have half the political class implicated in scandal, and that's a problem for any society." The governing party is watching the trial closely. Opposition politicians are preparing to use newly won congressional powers to investigate corruption in a government that has been controlled by one party for 68 years. The army's officer corps is unsettled because the trial has focused a rare spotlight on their secret society, which had hitherto seemed untouchable. "Never has there been a trial of such a highranking official, with the case discussed openly in the press and with official documentation on the case getting into the hands of the public," said Roderic Camp, a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans who studies the military. "There's nothing comparable to this in recent Mexican history." Hinting at upheaval in the military, a series of Defense Ministry intelligence files that tie a string of generals to traffickers was recently obtained and published by the Mexican news magazine Proceso. Defense Secretary Gen. Enrique Cervantes Aguirre reacted with fury, courtmartialing an army colonel and a captain accused of purloining the files. The revelations appear to have provoked bloodshed. A beauty queen the erstwhile lover of a former army chief of staff was gunned down hours after her name appeared in the documents as an agent of traffickers and she acknowledged to reporters that her intimate knowledge of the military could damage many generals. Hours after her killing, military police searched files and other belongings at her home. Authorities later released a 1996 letter they said she wrote, suggesting that she feared retribution from Gutierrez or from traffickers. Gutierrez is undergoing parallel military and civilian trials on drug, abuse of authority, and weapons charges. The proceedings appear to have become a personal showdown between Gutierrez and Cervantes, the defense secretary, who has barred reporters from the courtmartial and forbidden military personnel from speaking to reporters. Journalists have been permitted, intermittently, to attend the civilian proceedings unfolding in Almoloya penitentiary. This week, as Gutierrez was to outline his full defense for the first time, he had promised to fill out his vague accusations against the Mexican elite by naming names. But minutes before his testimony, authorities abruptly barred reporters from the proceedings, and defense lawyers postponed his appearance. Since Gutierrez's arrest and arraignment six months ago, several of his former aides have testified that during the general's tenure as drug czar and earlier as the commander of the fivestate 5th Military Region in central Mexico he worked closely with the agents and gunmen of one trafficking organization, headed by Amado Carrillo Fuentes, to undermine the country's other major smuggling group.The government has failed to show, however, that Gutierrez protected specific drug shipments, that he hid his operations from superiors, or although his arrests followed the discovery that he was living in a $1,300amonth apartment owned by Carrillo Fuentes that he received any great fortune from traffickers. The general has testified that he kept the defense secretary informed about many of the operations cited in the charges against him. He has also established, by questioning the junior officers testifying against him, that they were detained and interrogated, illegally, for days before their public presentation as voluntary prosecution witnesses. That suggests that Gutierrez, whose agents stand accused of routinely torturing drug suspects, is facing a case built around coerced witnesses. Gutierrez's assertion that he is being scapegoated has been supported by testimony and documents that have emerged during the trial. One document published in Proceso showed that a 1991 army investigation revealed extensive collaboration among traffickers and generals, including the commander of the 5th Region who preceded Gutierrez. None of the generals named in the document appears to have been prosecuted. The Defense Ministry responded to the publication of its secret documents with a statement asserting that this year 34 soldiers have been prosecuted for narcotics crimes. But the statement gave no names or ranks, and Gutierrez immediately disputed the claim.