Former antidrug chief accused of kidnap, torture

BY ANITA SNOW
Associated Press

MEXICO CITY Mexico's former head of antidrug intelligence has been
accused of kidnapping and torturing a member of the Tijuana drug cartel to
extract information for a rival gang, news reports said Wednesday.

Newspaper and TV reports said that Ignacio Weber Rodriguez, of the
nowdefunct National Institute for the Combat of Drugs, was charged Tuesday
at a highsecurity prison outside the nation's capital. It was unclear when
he was arrested.

Weber Rodriguez's arrest was the latest twist in the story of Mexico's
former drug czar, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, charged in February with
being on the payroll of the late drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

It backs up investigators' claims that the general used his power to help
Carrillo in his multibilliondollar smuggling enterprise.

Weber Rodriguez, who was director of intelligence at the institute, is
accused of kidnapping Alejandro Hodoyan in September 1996 and holding him
for several months to extract information about reputed drug lords, the
Arellano Felix brothers of Tijuana.

Hodoyan was kidnapped a second time, in Tijuana last March, and remains
missing.

``Yes, that's him! I remember him perfectly,'' Hodoyan's mother, Cristina
Hodoyan de Palacios, referring to Weber Rodriguez, told authorities on
Tuesday during a hearing at the prison. Mexican antidrug agents flew Mrs.
Hodoyan from Tijuana for the hearing.

Mrs. Hodoyan has said that she visited her son last fall at a military
installation in the western state capital of Guadalajara, where she said he
was being held secretly by the general's men.

In a sworn statement before his second disappearance, Hodoyan, 35, wrote
that he met the general during his interrogation in Guadalajara, and that
he was tortured there.

Hodoyan's old bosses the Arellano Felix brothers are believed to
control almost all drug trafficking along the CaliforniaMexico border,
transporting tons of cocaine and marijuana into the United States. Carrillo
was considered Mexico's No. 1 cocaine smuggler before his July 4 death.

When Gutierrez Rebollo became head of the country's antidrug effort on
Dec. 6, Hodoyan agreed to work as his bodyguard in return for protection.

Shortly before the general's arrest, American law officers allegedly
approached Hodoyan.

Hodoyan wrote that on Feb. 11, a U.S. government plane flew him from
suburban Mexico City to San Diego. The government put him up at a hotel,
where he talked with federal agents and prosecutors.

Worried about incriminating his younger brother, Alejandro Hodoyan left a
few days later without telling his hosts and returned to Tijuana.

Alfredo Hodoyan, 25, and a childhood friend have been jailed in San Diego
for a year on a Mexican warrant charging them with helping the Arellano
Felix brothers kill the federal police commander of Baja California. Mexico
hopes to have him extradited to face trial.

Alejandro Hodoyan vanished a second and apparently last time on March
5 when two men with automatic rifles jumped out of a van in a Tijuana
parking lot, tossed him inside, and screeched away.

He is still missing and presumed dead.

Posted at 9:35 p.m. PDT Wednesday, September 3, 1997