Who killed Kiki Camarena.

WHO KILLED KIKI CAMARENA?

WITH THE PRICE of oil and the standard of living falling, and political unrest on the rise, Mexico faces the prospect of serious political instability for the first time in decades. Neither Mexico nor the United States can afford to have any further strain placed on the fragile structure of Mexican politics, or to allow Mexico to be inflamed by outbreaks of anti-Americanism that might assist subversive factions. Yet the Reagan Administration's war on drugs is combining with the incredible corruption of the Mexican government to do both.

Within the past year or so, the Mexican government has arrested several of the country's most powerful drug kings, along with dozens of hired guns, including many Mexican policemen. Yet as welcome as such a development might seem in itself, the circumstances surrounding the crackdown illustrate how costly U.S. efforts to protect Americans from their own drug use can be. It took an especially odious murder in Guadalajara 17 months ago, and relentless pressure from the U.S. Government, to get Mexican authorities to act. Relations between the two countries have grown worse since, as U.S. officials have continued to demand that Mexico act against influential politicians involved in the narcotics traffic. The Mexicans in turn denounce the U.S. for meddling in their internal affairs and point out that what U.S. officials term "Mexico's drug problem" is really the United States' drug problem, created by the insatiable demand of American addicts.

The crime that finally prompted the Mexican government to act was the sadistic murder under prolonged torture of Enrique (Kiki) Camarena Salazar, 37, an agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and his Mexican reconnaissance pilot, Alfredo Zavala Avelar. The killers taped more than nine hours of the torture, ending with Camarena's death. The DEA has a copy of the tape.

On February 7, 1985, Camarena was kidnapped in broad daylight within a block of the American consulate in Guadalajara. U.S. Ambassador John Gavin, aware that another DEA agent had disappeared several months earlier, immediately demanded that the Mexican authorities take action to find Camarena. The Mexican police claimed they saw no cause for alarm. Gavin became more insistent as the days went by. But though Gavin's position was perfectly reasonable, given that American DEA officials work in Mexico with the Mexican government's full consent, his request for help for Camarena seemed only to annoy the relevant Mexican officials.

Operation Camarena

IN THE FACE of Mexican resistance, Washington ordered "Operation Camarena" all along the Mexican border. Every car entering the United States was meticulously searched for the DEA agent, dead or alive, so that the crossing, which usually takes five minutes, took five hours. Travelers fumed, radiators boiled, and business on both sides of the border was throttled for more than a week.

The DEA suspected that Camarena's kidnapping had been engineered by Rafael Caro Quintero, 32, owner of the enormous El Bufalo marijuana ranch in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The ranch had operated for several years, employing hundreds of campesinos, but local and state authorities showed no interest in what El Bufalo produced. Then, three months before Camarena's disappearance, El Bufalo was raided--allegedly at Camarena's instigation. A Mexican army detachment seized and burned an astonishing eight thousand tons of pot, baled and ready to ship to the United states, where the street price at the time was $60 an ounce. The raid cost Caro Quintero several million dollars in lost profits, and ultimately the ranch itself. Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid confiscated El Bufalo and gave it to the campesinos, after it had been looted of its expensive machinery by persons unknown.

Eventually, in response to U.S. pressure, a Mexican court issued an order for Caro Quintero's arrest. Nevertheless, a few days later Caro Quintero and a half-dozen of his pistoleros, all armed and carrying official papers identifying them (falsely) as Mexican police, appeared quite openly at the Guadalajara airport to board the drug king's private plane. While sixty state and federal cops looked on, Caro Quintero consulted briefly with First Comandante Jorge Armando Pavon Reyes, head of the police detail, handed him a check for sixty million pesos (then worth about U.S. $265,000), and flew off to Costa Rica. On the way, Caro Quintero stopped to pick up his teenage paramour, Sara Cristina Cosio Martinez.

In March 1985, the mutilated bodies of Camarena and Zavala were found dumped at the entrance to a ranch sixty miles southwest of Guadalajara. President Reagan phoned President de la Madrid to urge that the killers be apprehended. While U.S. officials made arrangements to fly Camarena's body to Arlington national Cemetery for a hero's burial, Caro Quintero and his gang lived it up in Costa Rica. But his illicit passion for Sara Cristina (he had a wife and four children in Mexico) led to his capture. The DEA picked up the trail through her telephone calls to her parents. In April 1985, Costa Rican police arrested them, and they were flown to jail in Mexico. Sara Cristina, as a minor, was returned to her parents, insisting that she had been kidnapped. Shortly thereafter, another suspect in the Camarena murder, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, sixty, a relative of Caro Quintero and his mentor in the drug business, was arrested in Puerto Vallarta with 23 followers. Fourteen of these turned out to be policemen on his payroll. Fonseca Carrillo and Caro Quintero between them employed more than one hundred cops or ex-cops, according to the DEA.

Through Our Fingers

AFTER THE ARRESTS of Caro Quintero and Fonseca Carrillo, the investigation of the Camarena case was stalled for nearly a year. A third suspect, Juan Jose Esparragoza Morena, was arrested in his Mexico City mansion this March, and a fourth is in custody in the United States. Another prime suspect, Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, described by a DEA official as "one of the most significant cocaine traffickers in the world," was captured last fall in Colombia. But in March he walked out of a model prison wearing a guard's uniform, allegedly with the help of a $2-million bribe.

At the top of the list of suspects still at large is Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, reputed capo di capo of the Mexican narcotic trade and suspected mastermind of the murders. He is one of Mexico's richest men. Although a warrant has been out for him for months, he lives an untroubled life in Culiacan, the crime-ridden capital of the Mexican state of Sinaloa. Mexican newspaper reports claim he is under the protection of Governor Antonio Toledo Corro (who denies it). Minor-party deputies in the Mexican congress say Toledo Corro may also be involved in the drug trade. His term expired in July, but so far he seems to have remained "untouchable."

So, it appears, are other prominent members of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which has ruled Mexico for nearly sixty years. Jose Antonio Zorrilla, former chief of the Federal Security Directorate, signed the bogus police identity papers for Caro Quintero and associates. The DEA thinks Zorrilla not only betrayed Camarena to his killers, but himself conducted the interrogation of the DEA agent under torture. "For political reasons," said the weekly newsletter Accion, "Zorrilla resigned his candidacy for deputy for Hidalgo and was permitted to leave the country."

And therein lies the larger importance of the Camarena murder. The shocking uncooperativeness of Mexican authorities is not explained, at least not entirely, by ordinary bureaucratic neglect or resentment of American interference but by the much more practical consideration that some of those responsible held key positions in Mexico's political power structure, and nearly everyone involved had solid ties to it. The Camarena case is but a particularly painful example of Mexico's real drug problem: The PRI, whatever its faults--and they are legion--has at least brought stability for sixty years. A real war on drugs would entail, if not quite a war on the PRI, then a war against men who hold great power within it. The power of the drug kings is not absolute; a few more have been arrested recently. But the vast sums to be earned from illicit drugs have so corrupted Mexican politics that to request the Mexican establishment to truly declare war on the drug trade would be very like asking it to commit suicide--for the sake of American drug addicts.

Meanwhile the great majority of Mexican citizens have more immediate worries. The financial crisis brought on by the oil-price collapse has Mexico teetering on the brink of hyperinflation and the obliteration of the peso. In a country as poor as Mexico a plunge in living standards has serious implications. There are rumblings of violence in the city slums and hunger-stricken rural areas. The safety valve provided by the flood of illegal immigrants to the United States may be closed by proposed legislation, with unpredictable consequences. And both the U.S. Government and the International Monetary Fund are demanding sweeping political and economic changes before granting the new multibillion-dollar loans Mexico so urgently needs. Sweeping changes are precisely what the PRI, its long reign showing signs of senility, does not want. PRI leaders must feel this is no time to be purging powerful colleagues because they are involved with the drug trade.

These new fears and various ancient rancors combined to form a critical mass in May when U.S. officials including Customs Commissioner William von Raab, went public with harsh criticisms of "massive" and "ingrained" Mexican corruption "up and down the ladder," which they blamed for the failures of joint U.S.-Mexican efforts to stop the drug trade. This blunt testimony, given in hearings before a U.S. Senate subcommittee chaired by Jesse Helms, came as a painful surprise to Mexico, which for many years has been virtually immune to public criticism from the American Government. Mexico issued a strong protest against the testimony, saying that the hearings were "a clear and unacceptable violation of Mexico's sovereignty." The next day, Mexico City newspapers ran display ads in support of the government, and some thirty thousand protestors marched in Mexico City carrying anti-American placards: "Sovereignty Trampled!" The State Department made soothing noises, and the Mexican government quieted down. Both sides seemed anxious to cool things off.

A Losing War

IN THE TUMULT, the most important point to emerge from the hearings was lost: that, so far, all efforts to stop narcotics trafficking have failed. No amount of cooperation seems likely to bring success. Despite prodigious efforts (the U.S. spends $1.4 billion a year in its global war against the drug trade), about $35-billion worth of heroin, marijuana, and cocaine still crosses the Mexican border each year, according to a congressional report. The profits of the global narcotics trade are so huge, and the drugs so easily concealed and moved, that entire armies--even assuming they are free of the narcotics vice themselves--could not prevail.

In the corruption of its political institutions Mexico pays a far higher price in the drug war than does the United States. As Americans begin to consider the consequences of an explosion on our southern border, they may come to decide it is a price we cannot afford to make Mexico pay.