DRUG FIGURE SENTENCED IN '85 SLAYINGS

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- One of Mexico's more notorious drug traffickers has
been sentenced to 30 years in prison for the 1985 torture slayings of two
U.S. tourists who stumbled into a meeting of drug bosses.

Judge Jaime Gomez told the government's Notimex news agency yesterday that
he had sentenced Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo for the slayings of Albert
Radelat, a 32-year-old dental student from Fort Worth, Texas, and John
Walker, 36, a free-lance writer from Minneapolis.

Fonseca, believed to be about 70, was serving a 30-year sentence for the
murder of U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena and 11 1/2 years for drug
trafficking.

Fonseca and other drug figures, including Rafael Caro Quintero, were
holding a party at La Langosta restaurant in Guadalajara, when Radelat and
Walker entered.

Suspecting the two might be agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration, the traffickers seized the tourists, then took them away
and tortured them to death.

A week later, many of the same traffickers were involved in torturing and
killing Camarena, whose body was buried near those of the tourists. The
cases strained U.S.-Mexico relations for years.

Several other men have been convicted in the Radelat-Walker case.

Radelat was reported missing Jan. 31, 1985, after he failed to make a
flight from Guadalajara to Dallas-Fort Worth. Ten days later, his parents
began a search that ended in a morgue in Guadalajara.

Relatives of both men complained that U.S. officials sometimes overlooked
the case in their zeal to convict the slayers of Camarena.

Fonseca was widely seen as a mentor to his nephew, Amado Carrillo Fuentes,
who may have been Mexico's most important drug trafficker before he died
during surgery to change his appearance in 1997.

In July, Fonseca's daughter Ofelia was sentenced to 16 years in prison for
drug smuggling. Her husband had been sentenced earlier to 21 years.