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Boston Globe 3/16/1997
letter@globe.com

Jury ties Mexican to drug funds:
Former official found to have
taken millions

By From Staff and Wire Services, Globe Staff,
03/16/97

HOUSTON Mexico's former top drug prosecutor,
Mario Ruiz Massieu, took millions of dollars in bribes
from drug traffickers, a civil court jury ruled yesterday.
The ruling authorized a US seizure of $7.9 million.

The jury said Ruiz Massieu legally obtained the other
$1.1 million in a $9 million account and thus may keep it.

Ruiz Massieu, 46, was not charged with a crime. He was
asked in the civil trial to prove that the money had been
earned legally. To determine which side got the money,
jurors decided whose evidence was more credible.

Federal prosecutors had said the money in the Texas
Commerce Bank account in Houston was payoffs from
drug traffickers trying to avoid prosecution.

Ruiz Massieu, a former Mexican deputy attorney general,
denied ever taking a bribe as a prosecutor and said he
was not working to protect drug traffickers.

He testified he obtained the money legally from bonuses
from former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de
Gortari, his government salary and his family. Ruiz
Massieu said he contributed $5 million to the account,
and his father added another $2 million. He said he put in
$600,000 and another brother, Arturo, contributed $1
million.

Ruiz Massieu's father testified that $1.1 million had come
from the sale of a house in Mexico.

The key witness was a bodyguard who testified he
placed two suitcases filled with money thought to be
drug proceeds in the trunk of a navy blue Grand
Marquis in front of Mexico's attorney general's offices in
August 1994.

Raul Macias testified that in the 10 seconds it took him to
unload the suitcases, he spotted Ruiz Massieu in the
passenger seat. Ruiz Massieu denied owning a navy
Grand Marquis or riding in such a vehicle in August
1994. When a lawyer produced documents showing he
owned a 1995 black Grand Marquis, Ruiz Massieu said:
``The color blue is different.''

Last week, a US antinarcotics agent testified that on a
summer evening in 1994, dozens of Mexican police
unloaded 10 tons of cocaine from a hollowedout
jetliner, sold the drugs to narcotics traffickers, then used
part of the money to pay off a deputy attorney general.

The testimony represented a turn in Mexico's drug
problem. It meant that Mexican authorities were not only
protecting the traffickers who have turned the country
into the conduit for narcotics entering the United States,
but also were trafficking themselves.

In the civil trial, the US government had wanted to to
seize the $9 million on grounds that it had come from
drug payoffs. The trial has been watched because of
expectations that witnesses would link family members of
Salinas with narcotics.

Such revelations did not surface. Instead, the trial has
given a sense not of the height of Mexico's corruption but
of its depth. Witnesses described how cops and
quasicops tortured prisoners, how they burned fake
cocaine to keep the real stuff for themselves, how they
airlifted bribes to officials to ensure the transport of tons
of narcotics.

``The government's strategy is to show us that everyone
in Mexico is corrupt,'' said a Ruiz Massieu lawyer, Cathy
Fleming.

The stories were so outrageous that they sometimes had
to be repeated. As Robert Rutt, a special investigator
with the US Customs Service, was explaining how
Mexican highway patrolmen had driven off with two tons
of cocaine, only to have the drugs taken back by the
Federal Judicial Police, US District Judge Nancy F.
Atlas interrupted:

``I'm confused,'' she said. ``You're saying members of
the highway patrol stole cocaine?''

``Yes, Judge,'' Rutt said.

``And then,'' members of the Mexican Federal Judicial
Police ``stole the cocaine from the highway patrol?''

``Yes, Judge.''

The government left unexplained why it had decided not
to detonate its biggest potential bombshell: witnesses
whose pretrial statements about the Salinas family had
created headlines in the United States and Mexico and
had packed the trial with reporters from both countries.

Without an explanation, speculation grew around several
theories.

One was that the government did not want to use the
witnesses in a civil trial in which it was going after Ruiz
Massieu's money, but not after Ruiz Massieu himself.
Another was that the government did not want to risk the
disclosures while Congress was trying to overturn the
Clinton administration's decision to certify Mexico as an
ally in the drug war.

Regardless, the government instead relied upon a
strategy of demonstrating the extent to which
drugrelated corruption has contaminated Mexico's
justice system. As an example, it used a seminal event in
the evolution of Mexican drug trafficking: the 1994
landing of a Frenchmade Caravelle jet at a rural airstrip
in the northern Mexican state of Zacatecas.

The plane contained 10 tons of cocaine, worth about
$200 million, and was part of traffickers' strategy of using
old Boeing 727s and Caravelle jets to transport the drug
from Colombia. US officials traced the jet to the reputed
drug baron Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who is known in
Mexico as the ``Lord of the Heavens'' for the cocaine
flights he has engineered.

It had been known, largely through a New York Times
reporter, Tim Golden, that agents helped to unload the
cargo. But the trial elicited testimony from Macias that
police guarded and delivered the suitcases to Ruiz
Massieu.

Material from Steve Fainaru of the Globe staff, Reuters
and the Associated Press was used for this report.

This story ran on page a2 of the Boston Globe on
03/16/97.

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