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Headline:Drug czar's trial a tricky case for Mexico

PROBE:'The Mexican government has a tremendous dilemmahow far to take
these investigations,'says a political scientist.

By SAM DILLONThe New York Times

ALMOLOYA DE JUAREZ,MexicoSeveral days a week,Gen. Jesus Gutierrez
Rebollo and two of his former aides file into a courtroom on a windswept
mountain plateau to hear new testimony in the drug trial unfolding
against them.

Gutierrez, the highestranking Mexican official ever tried on narcotics
charges, sits impassively behind a steel grating, listening as the
prosecution's story of his corruption be traffickers is told and retold.
Occasionally, he stands erect in khaki prison garb, pushing his spectacles
up his nose to address the court.

Often he has used these occasions to accuse Mexico's secretary of defense
of persecuting him to protect other corrupt generals. Several times he has
said he holds explosive informationgleaned from his experience as
Mexico's top drugenforcement official linking senior politicians to the
drug trade.

Six months into the proceedings, the charges against Gutierrez involving
narcotics, abuse of authority and arms charges have provoked extraordinary
tensions, both inside the military and out, and are posing a watershed test
for Mexico's simultaneous effort to implant a fledgling democracy and
pursue a troubled was on drugs.

"The Mexican government has a tremendous dilemma how far to take these
investigations," said Jorge Chabat Madrid, a political scientist here. "You
could have half the political class implicated in scandal, and that's a
problem for any society."

The governing party is watching the trial closely. Opposition politicians
are preparing to use newly won congressional powers to investigate
corruption in a government that has been controlled by one party for 68
years. The army's officer corps is unsettled because the trial has focused
a rare spotlight on their secret society, which had hitherto seemed
untouchable.

"Never has there been a trial of such a highranking official, with the
case discussed openly in the press and with official documentation on the
case getting into the hands of the public," said Roderic Camp, a professor
at Tulane University in New Orleans who studies the military.

"There's nothing comparable to this in recent Mexican history."

Hinting at upheaval in the military, a series of Defense Ministry
intelligence files that tie a string of generals to traffickers was
recently obtained and published by the Mexican news magazine Proceso.
Defense Secretary Gen. Enrique Cervantes Aguirre reacted with fury,
courtmartialing an army colonel and a captain accused of purloining the
files.

The revelations appear to have provoked bloodshed. A beauty queen the
erstwhile lover of a former army chief of staff was gunned down hours
after her name appeared in the documents as an agent of traffickers and she
acknowledged to reporters that her intimate knowledge of the military could
damage many generals.

Hours after her killing, military police searched files and other
belongings at her home. Authorities later released a 1996 letter they said
she wrote, suggesting that she feared retribution from Gutierrez or from
traffickers.

Gutierrez is undergoing parallel military and civilian trials on drug,
abuse of authority, and weapons charges. The proceedings appear to have
become a personal showdown between Gutierrez and Cervantes, the defense
secretary, who has barred reporters from the courtmartial and forbidden
military personnel from speaking to reporters. Journalists have been
permitted, intermittently, to attend the civilian proceedings unfolding in
Almoloya penitentiary.

This week, as Gutierrez was to outline his full defense for the first time,
he had promised to fill out his vague accusations against the Mexican elite
by naming names. But minutes before his testimony, authorities abruptly
barred reporters from the proceedings, and defense lawyers postponed his
appearance.

Since Gutierrez's arrest and arraignment six months ago, several of his
former aides have testified that during the general's tenure as drug czar
and earlier as the commander of the fivestate 5th Military Region in
central Mexico he worked closely with the agents and gunmen of one
trafficking organization, headed by Amado Carrillo Fuentes, to undermine
the country's other major smuggling group.The government has failed to
show, however, that Gutierrez protected specific drug shipments, that he
hid his operations from superiors, or although his arrests followed the
discovery that he was living in a $1,300amonth apartment owned by
Carrillo Fuentes that he received any great fortune from traffickers.

The general has testified that he kept the defense secretary informed about
many of the operations cited in the charges against him. He has also
established, by questioning the junior officers testifying against him,
that they were detained and interrogated, illegally, for days before their
public presentation as voluntary prosecution witnesses. That suggests that
Gutierrez, whose agents stand accused of routinely torturing drug suspects,
is facing a case built around coerced witnesses.

Gutierrez's assertion that he is being scapegoated has been supported by
testimony and documents that have emerged during the trial.

One document published in Proceso showed that a 1991 army investigation
revealed extensive collaboration among traffickers and generals, including
the commander of the 5th Region who preceded Gutierrez. None of the
generals named in the document appears to have been prosecuted.
The Defense Ministry responded to the publication of its secret documents
with a statement asserting that this year 34 soldiers have been prosecuted
for narcotics crimes. But the statement gave no names or ranks, and
Gutierrez immediately disputed the claim.