San Antonio ExpressNews, September 30, 1997

Report links Mexican police, cardrug ring

By Philip True , ExpressNews Mexico City Bureau

MEXICO CITY Federal authorities have uncovered a
``stolencarsforcocaine'' ring in which Mexican smugglers exchange
South American cocaine for cars stolen here, then send it north for sale
in the United States.

State judicial police officers in the state of Morelos have set up a
network of chop shops that repaint stolen cars and change their serial
numbers, then send them in caravans to the Guatemalan border, the Mexico
City daily Reforma reported on its front page Monday.

There, on a farm that ostensibly grows bananas for export, the cars are
exchanged for cocaine brought overland from South America by Guatemalan
smugglers, the newspaper reported.

Accompanied by highquality false documents, the cars are then sold on
the open market in Guatemala.

At the farm, the cocaine is repacked, hidden among boxed bananas and
shipped in trucks to the United States, sometimes escorted by Mexican
federal highway police.

The discovery last month of more than 130 pounds of cocaine hidden in a
government airplane carrying 19 drugenforcement pilots working for the
federal attorney general's office or PGR by its Spanish initials
could be related to the ring's work, the article said.

A spokesman for the PGR on Monday refused comment on the article, and
U.S. drugenforcement officials working in Mexico couldn't be reached.

Reforma cited newspaper articles from the Morelos capital of Cuernavaca
that said the state judicial police official formerly in charge of
recovering stolen automobiles allegedly headed the ring.

The official, Obet Lopez Rodriguez, who was sacked two months ago after
being discovered riding with a woman near Cuernavaca in a car for which
he had no documentation, has obtained an injunction against his arrest.

Several members of the band, now held by state authorities on car theft
charges, allege that Lopez was their leader.

Lopez couldn't be reached for comment.

The author of the Reforma article, Daniel Lizarraga, made headlines here
when he was kidnapped for several hours Sept. 5 while investigating the
cocaine found in the PGR airplane.

Lizarraga said he thought his kidnappers appeared to be federal judicial
police from the PGR.

He was driven around, beaten, asked about his investigation and told his
family would be harmed if he continued.

(c) 1997, San Antonio ExpressNews