Lawyers in drug cases are risking death in Mexico

By ANDREW DOWNIE
Copyright 1997 Special to the Chronicle

MAZATLAN, Mexico She cannot remember much, but she does recall the shots.

"One, two, three, four ... " Clara Lizarraga de Osuna said, calmly counting
the rounds that killed her husband, a former prosecutor in Sinaloa state.
"There were eight. I don't remember much else."

She can recollect that the killers were young, but she cannot picture their
faces. She can remember the two men looked ordinary, but she cannot recall
what they were wearing. She can describe them standing over her husband's
bulletridden body, but she cannot imagine why anyone would want to kill him.

The truth is that more and more people want to kill lawyers like Raul
Osuna, who was gunned down as he and his wife took their morning walk along
the Pacific Ocean.

Attorneys have been slain at an astonishing rate in Mexico during the past
few years, and if the last few weeks are a guide, the trend is
accelerating. In the past six weeks, three lawyers in Sinaloa, including
Osuna, have been killed or have disappeared.

Most of the slayings are drugrelated, and many of them were ordered by
clients unhappy that the lawyers failed to free them from jail or deliver
on other promises, experts said.

"Being a lawyer here is a highly dangerous (profession) due to the drug
trafficking," said Ramiro Flores, president of the Mazatlan College of
Lawyers. "There are no threats. There are executions."

Across Mexico, "the legal profession is on the verge of becoming extinct,"
said Fernando Cervantes, the secretarygeneral of the Mexican Federation of
Lawyers Organization.

The body of one Sinaloa lawyer, Amando Moreno Camacho, was found floating
in a pool of sewage last week. His hands were tied behind his back and he
had been shot, according to local news reports. Moreno and a colleague,
Jose Antonio Guerrero, were kidnapped at the state capital of Culiacan in
June. Guerrero has not been seen since and is presumed dead.

It is a similar story in other parts of the country. Two lawyers were
kidnapped last month in the northern city of Torreon, while just last week
two law students were gunned down in Guadalajara, apparently because of
their role in a wideranging narcotics scandal.

While nationwide figures are hard to come by no one organization in
Mexico monitors attacks on lawyers the statistics in Sinaloa tell a grim
story. At least 40 attorneys have been killed in the state in the last 10
years, according to independent lawyers associations and the state's human
rights commission. In this small tourist resort in the southern part of the
state, seven lawyers have been slain in the last three years.

Although police have not formally said so, it seems Osuna was also targeted
for drugrelated reasons. One former colleague said the 49yearold
attorney had taken drug cases since leaving the state prosecutor's office
in 1986. People close to law enforcement said other crimes committed in the
city lead them to believe that Osuna ran afoul of a drug gang leader while
he served as an assistant attorney general.

The attacks on lawyers occurred as members of Mexico's legal profession
come under increasing scrutiny over their performance, particularly in
cases connected with the drug world.

At least one of the two lawyers kidnapped in Culiacan was believed to have
dealt with drug cases, while the two taken in Torreon were both from Ciudad
Juarez, the home of the drug smuggling gang led by the late Amado Carrillo
Fuentes. Of the seven gunned down in Mazatlan, all but one were trial
lawyers who specialized in criminal law, said Cervantes of the national
lawyers organization.

The judges and lawyers under attack in Sinaloa were invariably targeted
because of their involvement in drugrelated cases, experts said. The state
is where almost all of Mexico's most ruthless drug lords grew up and
learned their trade.

A former policeman in the pay of one drug gang leader has been imprisoned
for killing a young Culiacan human rights attorney who gained fame in the
early 1990s with her criticism of corrupt police who were linked to drug
gangs.

The young lawyer, Norma Corona, received a box of black roses and scrawled
letters describing the homicide, apparently sent by men working for Hector
Luis Palma, one of the state's leading drug gangsters. A state judicial
police officer working as an enforcer for Palma is now in prison for the
1991 murder of Corona.

Palma, the former head of the Sinaloa drug cartel, has been at the center
of many of the judicial controversies in recent months. The controversies
have further sullied Mexico's legal profession, specifically the nation's
federal judges, many of whom have been accused of improperly helping Palma
beat charges ranging from murder to drug trafficking.

The Sinaloa native was jailed in 1995 after his private jet crashed and
soldiers traced his battered body to the home of a senior judicial official
who was shielding him and his contingent of bodyguards while he recuperated.

But even from jail, the heavyset man known as El Guero, or Blondie, because
of his light skin and fair hair, has managed to exert a staggering
influence over the judicial process.

In July 1995, a Jalisco state judge dismissed charges that Palma was
involved in the murder of six people at a Puerto Vallarta disco, citing a
lack of evidence. Later that year, another Jalisco judge cleared Palma of
involvement in the 1993 Guadalajara airport shootout in which the city's
Roman Catholic cardinal and six others were killed.

Palma has also been cleared of a number of drug trafficking charges and of
involvement in the murder of nine friends and lawyers of a rival drug
leader in Guerrero state in 1992.

In one controversial case earlier this year, a judge in Guadalajara cleared
Palma of criminal association charges on the grounds that the prosecution
did not prove his bodyguards were paid for protecting their boss. The same
judge cleared Palma of drug charges because, he said, prosecutors did not
prove that the cocaine and marijuana found near him at the time of his
arrest belonged to him.

Three more charges of murder, drug trafficking and criminal association
against Palma are still pending, a spokeswoman for the Federal Attorney
General's Office said. The spokeswoman said she did not know where Palma
faced the charges or when the trials would take place.

Federal officials have been unable to prove Palma, or any other major drug
trafficker, threatened or bought off judges, but rulings like those in his
favor have become common enough for critics to accuse the judicial system
of widespread corruption. The Attorney General's Office is investigating
six judges suspected of improper rulings, one senior judicial official
recently said, although none for supposed links to drug traffickers.

"The procuration of justice in Mexico today is going through a critical
stage," Federal Attorney General Jorge Madrazo acknowledged recently. "The
dearth of credibility, the lack of depth in investigations, corruption and
the lack of human, technical and economic resources are just some of the
most significant problems facing our judicial and law enforcement
institutions."

U.S. officials said last year that the crisis in Mexico's judiciary was so
bad that the Mexican government was considering the use of "faceless"
judges in drug cases, an idea used with some success in Colombia where
judges were frequently targeted by narcoterrorists.

But the proposal to include the measure in an organized crime bill passed
earlier this year was shelved, the senior judicial official said. Threats
against judges were not so serious as to warrant such a move, he added.
Nobody from the Federal Attorney General's Office, the office charged with
implementing the bill, would agree to be interviewed on the subject.

That attitude of indifference angers lawyers and judges in Mazatlan, where
authorities have solved only one of the decade's more than 40 killings of
attorneys.

Few lawyers in the resort hold out hope that anything will change, and
black humor has become the norm in legal circles.

"Shakespeare said we have to first kill all the lawyers," said Flores, the
head of the Mazatlan legal association. "But that was for a different reason."

Andrew Downie is a freelance journalist based in Mexico City.