EX-MEXICAN POLICE OFFICIAL SHOT DEAD IN MCALLEN

McALLEN -- A former Mexican federal police official who played a key role
in busting powerful Mexican drug barons was shot to death Wednesday as he
drove from the parking lot of an attorney's office in McAllen.

Police said Guillermo Gonzalez Calderoni, 54, was killed by a single bullet
to the head and neck area about 11 a.m. A bullet casing was recovered.

The sole passenger in the car told McAllen police that a man approached the
car Gonzalez was in and fired at close range through the tinted driver's
side window. The suspect fled in a car with a Louisiana license plate.

Paramedics were unable to save Gonzalez, who was pronounced dead at McAllen
Medical Center at 12:24 p.m.

McAllen Police Department spokesman Alfonso Cantu said the witness was
uninjured but appeared shaken from the killing.

"He wasn't able to provide much information," Cantu said. "I don't know
what state of mind he's in. He appears a bit traumatized himself."

Gonzalez was a lead officer of the Mexican attorney general's office who
was credited with bringing down the Pablo Acosta Villarreal drug cartel in
1988. Gonzalez was stationed in Juarez at the time.

Former El Paso FBI acting chief Matt Perez was in charge of the U.S. side
of the 1988 operation, which ended with Acosta's dying in a hail of gunfire
during a raid led by Gonzalez on his ranch in Santa Elena, Mexico, south of
the Texas Big Bend area.

"I talked to (Gonzalez) two months ago. ... He knew where all of Mexico's
skeletons were hidden," said Phil Jordan, a former Drug Enforcement
Administration official and former director of the El Paso Intelligence
Center. "He was the only Mexican official who stood by us throughout the
investigation into the 1985 murder of DEA agent Kiki Camarena."

More recently, Gonzalez alleged during a U.S. television interview that a
former Mexican president was behind the murders of two political aides of
Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, a presidential candidate for the Democratic
Revolutionary Party in 1988 and 2000. He also alleged that the Carlos
Salinas administration protected drug traffickers, a charge Salinas denied.

Gonzalez had reportedly been in McAllen under a federal witness protection
program for the past 10 years and had a home there. Several Mexican police
officials who worked under him were assassinated during the past two years.