ALLEGED DRUG KINGPIN BENEFITS FROM MEXICO'S INEPT JUSTICE SYSTEM

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- For nearly a decade, the U.S. government has been
trying to prosecute a Mexican multimillionaire who is accused of running a
cartel that smuggled tons of cocaine into California several years ago.

When U.S. drug agents raided one of his warehouses, it was the largest
single drug bust in history and it remains so today. U.S. agents thought it
was an open and shut case against the suspect, Rafael Munoz Talavera,
because several traffickers who were arrested after the drug seizure
identified him as their leader.

But despite two trials, one conviction, and what U.S. prosecutors say is
overwhelming evidence against him, Munoz is free. Authorities say he is
directing a violent campaign to seize control of a major part of the
Mexican drug trade.

Neither government has ever publicly explained the collapse of the lengthy
effort to convict Munoz. But the story of the investigation, based on
interviews with law enforcement officials, judges who tried Munoz, and an
examination of documents, reveals a Mexican criminal justice system that is
rife with chaos, corruption and mismanagement.

In the first trial, the police and prosecutors, who were later accused of
accepting bribes from the drug cartel that officials say was run by Munoz,
steered a watered-down package of evidence to a friendly judge. A second
trial, bolstered by evidence from investigators in the United States, ended
in a conviction. But a Mexican appeals court freed Munoz, ruling that he
had been illegally tried twice for the same crime.

During the trials, Munoz was lodged in comfortable suites in Mexican
federal prisons, including one that was equipped with a bar.

"We knew he was going to walk from the date of his arrest," said a U.S.
official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "In Mexico the guy with the
biggest pocket book always wins."

Now Munoz is back in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso,
Texas, and U.S. prosecutors are working to assemble yet another case
against him.

Munoz did not respond to requests to discuss his legal fight left at his
Juarez restaurant. But in December, in a newspaper advertisement, he denied
any involvement in drug trafficking and described himself as "simple,
hard-working man."

The lawyer who defended Munoz in his seven-year legal battle, Sergio Roldan
Ramos, was murdered in Ciudad Juarez last October. And Roldan's partners
and other lawyers who have worked for Munoz did not respond to interview
requests.

Munoz's release, and criminal comeback, dramatize the legal crisis
threatening Mexico's modernization. The economy has opened up and
opposition political parties are finding a voice. But criminal syndicates
are casting a widening shadow and the justice system is riddled with graft
and incompetence, mired in archaic procedures and shielded from
accountability.

Mexicans hold every element involved in disrepute -- from the police and
prosecutors to judges and jailers. A 1996 United Nations survey asked
Mexicans how much confidence they had in their judicial system and 80
percent responded "little" or "none," the worst showing of any Latin
American country.

"We have a justice system immersed in the routine violation of every basic
principle," said Eduardo Lopez Betancourt, a law professor at the national
university. "Nothing is respected. Prosecutors rig evidence and judges sell
verdicts according to the highest bidder, without delay, favoring every
kind of criminal from drug traffickers to car thieves."

Confronted with this crisis, U.S. prosecutors routinely press to extradite
traffickers for trial in U.S. courts. Although the extradition of Mexicans
is constitutionally barred, officials in Washington say that Mexico has
recently vowed to honor future extradition requests.

Still, the U.S. government has never successfully extradited a major
Mexican drug dealer.

Four years ago, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo replace the entire
Supreme Court and established a Judicial Council to attack corruption. By
requiring competitive examinations, the reform cleaned up the previous
system of judicial appointments, based on cronyism. But otherwise the
council has been timid.

Mario Melgar, a council member, said that of 1,538 complaint filed against
federal judges, only eight complaints have been forwarded to prosecutors.
Not one Mexican judge has been punished for accepting payments from
traffickers, he said.

"I don't see any way to know if a judge receives a bribe," Melgar said.
"It's practically impossible.

Many of the forces that foiled the prosecution of Munoz are embedded in the
nation's justice system.

- -- Graft is considered rampant. In the Munoz case, only the police and a
prosecutor were accused in U.S. testimony of corruption, , but many judges
are also suspect. In testimony last month, the investigative arm of the
U.S. Congress, the General Accounting Office, told a committee that a
specially vetted Mexican police unit fighting organized crime trusts only
one of Mexico's 500 federal judges and magistrates to authorize wiretaps
without tipping off the suspects.

- -- Judges allow thousands of fugitives to avoid arrest. The police
commander who led the arrest of Munoz was later charged with taking bribes
from the drug cartel. But he was never arrested because he got an amparo,
or writ, barring his detention. Corrupt officials and accused traffickers
can easily buy an amparo from a judge for thousands of dollars amounting to
what one American official likened to a "Get-Out-of-Jail-Free-card."

- -- Court papers are secret, inhibiting accountability or independent
scrutiny. Officials at the five Mexican courts that heard the various
stages of Munoz's case refused to allow reporters to read the trial record,
citing laws that keep documents from scholars and journalists.

- -- The system is poorly managed. The judge in Munoz's second trial found
him guilty, only to be reversed on appeal because he was tried twice for
the same alleged offense. Communications are so poor that the judge said in
an interview that he had never even heard that Munoz had been previously
tried on the same charges.

- -- -The Mexican attorney general's office was in such disorder that 10
successive federal attorneys were assigned to oversee his second 30-month
trial. Some were on the job just weeks. Few stayed long enough even to read
the thousands of pages of documents.

Until late 1989, Munoz, who is 45, was known in Juarez as a sober, even
taciturn restaurateur from a leading local family. Agents for the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Agency were suspicious of a $3 million estate he had built in
El Paso, but he was not known as a major trafficker.

"There was information on him, but not anything where you hit the button
and lights go off," one U.S. official said.

Then drug agents received a tip about suspicious comings and goings at a
warehouse in the Los Angeles suburb of Sylmar. With a search warrant, they
sliced off a $5 padlock and discovered 36 wooden pallets stacked with boxes
of cocaine. The hoard, weighing 21.4 tons, was the size of two school buses.

Ledger books showed billions of dollars of cocaine -- hundreds of tons --
had passed through the warehouse. The seizure caused what a cable from the
American embassy in Mexico called "an earthquake" that redefined
Washington's understanding of the drug war by highlighting the growing role
of Mexican smugglers.

Not only was it clear that Mexican smugglers were significant new players,
but a dozen traffickers arrested at Sylmar identified Munoz as their leader.

"We knew the dope came from Munoz Talavera," said James P. Walsh, the
assistant U.S. attorney who supervised the investigation. As a result, the
clamor for Munoz's detention became intense.

Five weeks later, Mexico's Federal Police arrested him in a dingy Ciudad
Juarez hotel in possession of several rifles and handguns. Police said they
had seized a small bag of cocaine during a raid on one of his houses. He
was initially arraigned on drug possession and weapons violations which
were broadened to include drug trafficking charges. Mexican prosecutors
announced triumphantly that he was facing 60 years in jail.

But his case went before a judge with a reputation for leniency.

From the beginning, the circumstances of Munoz's arrest aroused suspicions
among U.S. officials that the prosecution was rigged.

First, authorities announced his arrest in advance, inviting reporters to
film Munoz as police escorted him handcuffed out of the hotel. Then the
hotel manager said that the room in which Munoz was arrested had been
rented not by Munoz, but by police a week earlier.

"This was one of those deals that appeared to be prearranged," said a Texas
lawyer involved in related proceedings who spoke on the condition of
anonymity. "There was pressure on the Mexican government to do something,
and so they did something. Why arrest him in a hotel? It smacked that he
made an appointment with the authorities so they wouldn't arrest him in
front of his children."

Later, more disturbing information emerged. Two Mexican officials involved
in Munoz's arrest and trial were accused in U.S. court testimony of
receiving huge bribes from Munoz's drug organization.

Elias Ramirez Ruiz was the powerful Federal Police commander in Chihuahua,
the state in which Ciudad Juarez is located, who orchestrated Munoz's
arrest and assembled the initial evidence. Javier Coello Trejo was Mexico's
deputy attorney general, based in Mexico City, who channeled evidence
received from U.S. officials to Mexican prosecutors in Ciudad Juarez, and
supervised the Munoz case.

In late 1990, even before Munoz's first trial ended, Ramirez, the police
commander, and Coello, the deputy attorney general, were driven from office
by a barrage of corruption charges. Since his resignation several witnesses
in at least three federal trials in Texas have detailed how Coello received
suitcases of cash from the Ciudad Juarez and other drug cartels.

Mexican press reports accused Ramirez of staging several phony cocaine
seizures as window dressing for Mexico's anti-drug effort. And two years
later, Ramirez was charged with narcotics smuggling and racketeering.
Federal prosecutors sought his arrest, but he obtained an amparo from a
judge and has never been detained.

A year ago in a Houston courtroom, a former police officer working for
Ramirez in Ciudad Juarez at the time of Munoz's arrest and trial, testified
that both Ramirez and Coello were working with Munoz's organization. Cesar
Dominguez Becerra was asked to describe his duties.

"Sometimes it was to pick up money, and on other occasions it was to pick
up drugs," he testified. "Sometimes it was to help with the sacks that we
got off the planes.

"Did you also do police work?" he was asked by Assistant U.S. Attorney
Jesse Rodriguez.

"Sometimes," Dominguez said.

On whose orders were you operating?

"Elias Ramirez Ruiz," he said.

Later Dominguez testified that he had personally delivered bundles of cash
from the cartel to Coello.

"Where did you deliver this money to Coello Trejo?" he was asked.

"Sometimes in the Federal Police office itself," he said.

In an interview, Coello denied that he had accepted drug bribes, saying "no
trafficker has ever paid me one cent." He scoffed at assertions that U.S.
officials suspected him of corruption, reeling off names of U.S. agents
with whom he had worked closely, and expressed outrage at accusations that
he and his prosecutors had sabotaged the case against Munoz.

"Why say that only prosecutors are corrupt?" Coello asked. "Don't you think
some judges are corrupt too?"

Ramirez did not respond to interview requests made to him by his Ciudad
Juarez lawyer, Francisco Pena Gonzalez.

Mexican and U.S. officials said that U.S. evidence in the Sylmar
investigation was channeled to Mexico for use against Munoz, although what
was provided has never been made public.

Recently, however, a Mexican official who participated directly in the
first prosecution of Munoz described the government's management of the
case as a deliberate farce.

"It was a masquerade," the official said. "It was arranged ahead of time.
They orchestrated a trial in Mexico so that Munoz Talavera couldn't be
extradited to the United States," for prosecution.

The official said that while the charges linked Munoz to the drugs seized
at Sylmar, the evidence presented in the first trial failed to prove the
tie.

"The idea was not to present strong evidence," the official said.

A second official on the Mexican attorney general's staff who has studied
the Munoz case also acknowledged its weakness. The reason, he said, was
that U.S. officials became so suspicious of Coello's ties to the cartel
that they broke off cooperation. The U.S. Justice Department, however, has
refused to discuss the proceedings.

Judge Librado Fuerte Chavez, who presided over the first trial, acquitted
Munoz of all charges in January 1991. Munoz's release triggered a new
problem illustrating the blatant corruption surrounding the justice system.
Mexican authority had seized several Munoz properties, including two
ranches and a mansion.

And during the trial, prosecutors and their families had squatted in the
homes. With the acquittal the judge had to order them out. Efforts to
discuss the case with the judge were unsuccessful.

A year later, a grand jury in El Paso indicted him on trafficking and money
laundering charges, and U.S.authorities later requested his extradition.
Mexican police, acting on a DEA tip, re-arrested him in September 1992 in
Tijuana.

Instead of delivering Munoz to U.S. authorities, however, Mexico mounted a
new trial, again on Sylmar-related charges, this time before a federal
judge in Sonora, the Mexican state south of Arizona. The second trial
lasted nearly more than three years.

Two assistant U.S. attorneys and a team of DEA agents helped gather
evidence, prepare testimony, and translate documents. Half a dozen U.S.
officials traveled to Sonora to testify.

But it was a waste of time. Although the second judge found Munoz guilty in
1995 and sentenced him to 24 years in jail, an appelate tribunal overturned
the conviction ruling that Munoz had already been tried and acquitted in
Ciudad Juarez on the same charges.

Freed from prison, he returned to Ciudad Juarez, but another trafficker,
Amado Carrillo Fuentes, had taken control of the Ciudad Juarez cartel.
Munoz seemed for a time to quietly administer his restaurant. But when
Carrillo died last year, Munoz moved into action, officials from both
countries said.

Francisco Barrio Terrazas, the governor of Chihuahua, said in an interview
that Munoz forged an alliance with exceptionally violent traffickers from
Tijuana, hoping to seize control of the Ciudad Juarez drug trade from
Carrillo's followers. Months of narcotics killings have followed. One
grisly slaughter that Barrio attributed to Munoz and his Tijuana henchmen
came last August, when gunmen sprayed a Ciudad Juarez restaurant with
gunfire, killing six.

In recent weeks, Munoz has appeared to retreat from Ciudad Juarez, a
Mexican official said. But Thomas L. Kennedy, the DEA's special agent in
charge in El Paso, recently told an Austin television station, KTBC, that
he expected the bloody street wars between Munoz and his rivals to
continue. "It's liable to end up in a crescendo of violence, a real blood
bath, before somebody backs down," Kennedy said.

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company