Source: New York Times Contact: By JULIA PRESTON and CRAIG PYES MEXICO CITY When U.S. agents in San Diego arrested two men suspected in the brazen murder of an Mexican antidrug prosecutor, officials in both countries praised the operation as a stellar instance of crossborder cooperation. The arrests came after Mexican authorities gave their U.S. counterparts evidence gleaned from a fastmoving inquiry that pinpointed the suspects' whereabouts to a stylish beach community on the California coast. It was, seemingly, a triumph for Mexican law enforcement officials, who have frequently been criticized for both ineptitude and corrupt ties to drug lords said to spend billions of dollars on payoffs. But as U.S. prosecutors have tried to persuade a federal magistrate to extradite the suspects for trial in Mexico, the case has become a cautionary tale about collaboration between law enforcement systems with vastly different standards for interrogating witnesses and building cases. Some evidence provided by Mexico appears to have been gathered with methods that would not be permitted under U.S. law. Key witnesses interrogated in Mexico have recanted their statements, asserting they were extracted through torture. A Mexican judge acknowledged in court that one of those witnesses had fresh burn marks on his chest. In addition, secret documents from another major Mexican drug investigation contradict some of the evidence Mexico provided U.S. prosecutors to support the extradition. The case has farreaching implications. U.S. officials regard extradition as a vital weapon in their fight against traffickers who frequently evade charges brought in one country by seeking refuge across the border. The United States has tried for years, with limited results, to persuade Mexico to hand over a long list of Mexican citizens charged with crimes in this country. U.S. officials hope that winning the return of the two suspects in San Diego for trial in Mexico will encourage Mexican officials to honor more U.S. extradition requests. The San Diego case is the second time in three years that U.S. prosecutors have found themselves in court defending a highprofile extradition case for Mexico based on evidence that seemed compromised by U.S. standards. In the first case, the U.S. attorney in Newark, N.J., sought in 1995 to extradite Mario Ruiz Massieu, a former highranking Mexican justice official charged in his country with devising a coverup in a political assassination. Two U.S. judges and an appeals panel rejected Ruiz Massieu's extradition, with one judge citing primarily the ground that testimony had been tainted by torture. The assistant U.S. attorney arguing the government's case for extradition in San Diego, Gonzalo P. Curiel, has defended the quality of the evidence provided by Mexico. When Mexico initially withheld the recantations by witnesses, arguing they were not valid under Mexican law, Curiel said that decision was appropriate. He told the judge that the witnesses' torture claims would make the case "needlessly confusing." Curiel acknowledged at a hearing last month that the testimony he was presenting might have been obtained by coercion. But he told Judge Anthony J. Battaglia, the U.S. magistrate hearing the case, that it was up to Mexico to determine that. "The government is not here to deny there is a possibility of torture," Curiel said. "There are serious allegations of torture. But the forum for those allegations to be aired is the government of Mexico." Curiel said he could not comment futher on a continuing case. Alfredo Hodoyan Palacios, 25, and Emilio Valdez Mainero, 32, the men facing extradition, have been linked by Mexican and U.S. investigators to the drug gang headed by Ramon and Benjamin Arellano Felix. A major drug cartel, the Arellano organization has been implicated in dozens of brutal murders, including recent killings of at least four Mexican antidrug officers. Hodoyan, who is known as El Lobo, or The Wolf, is said by U.S. and Mexican officials to have been a gunman for the Arellanos. Valdez was a highranking lieutenant, drug investigators in both countries say, who was responsible for planning executions. The charges against Hodoyan stem from the murder in Mexico City of Ernesto Ibarra Santes, a top federal drug investigator in Tijuana, on Sept. 14, 1996. In contrast to earlier prosecutors, Ibarra vigorously pursued the Arellano brothers and declared brashly that he was on the verge of catching them. He died in a hail of automatic weapons fire after gunmen in two cars ambushed a taxi in which he was riding. Two other federal narcotics agents and the taxi driver died in the attack. Almost immediately, Hodoyan and Valdez became suspects in that and other murders and Mexico provided the tip that led to their arrest Sept. 30 in the United States. To support the extradition, Mexican officials then gave the United States hundreds of pages of detailed testimony from government informants and jailed drug dealers implicating the two men in the murder of Ibarra and others. One witness testified in the United States after barely surviving an assassination attempt at the border. No questions have surfaced about the reliability of his statements, which are mainly secondhand accounts of the murder. But the most compelling Mexican evidence came from three suspects who confessed to being members of the Arellano gang. All have since recanted their statements, saying they were a result of torture. Prosecutors in Mexico City said the claims were baseless, a typical defense tactic in the Mexican system, in which confessions are considered the highest quality evidence and suspects enjoy few protections against selfincrimination. A Mexican justice official involved in preparing the San Diego case said in an interview Monday that about 80 percent of suspects disavow the first statements they give to police and claim they were tortured. "This extradition is as good as won," the official said confidently. "We're talking about murderers. If the United States doesn't send them back, it won't be practicing what it preaches." Defense lawyers in the San Diego case have cited the allegations of torture in their arguments to block extradition, and the magistrate is weighing his decision. But the case may have even deeper problems. Testimony compiled in the Mexican investigation of Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, the Mexican antidrug official arrested this year, is at odds with police reports and other evidence Mexico provided to support the extradition. The courtmartial and criminal case against the general is closed to the public, but a copy of the transcripts was made available to The New York Times. Mexico has not provided any of the material to U.S. prosecutors in San Diego, even though some of it bears on the events at issue in the extradition. One major contradiction between the two cases involves Fausto Soto Miller, a 39yearold called "El Chef" because he was purportedly once a personal cook for the Arellano brothers. According to a Mexican police report presented in court in San Diego, federal police officers and army soldiers arrested Soto last Sept. 27 after a nighttime search in the city of Guadalajara. The official account describes a dramatic scene in which whirring helicopters swooped down to grab him from a safe house used by the Arellano group. Soto, the report asserts, immediately began cooperating with investigators. He told them he had received a telephone call Sept 17 from Hodoyan, who was begging him to hide one of the cars used in the Ibarra killing. But according to three different officers who served under Gutierrez Rebollo and testified for the government in the trials against him, Soto was already in secret military detention by that day and could not have been reached by phone. The officers, who were witnesses to many of events they described, reported in separate statements that a squad of the general's intelligence troops grabbed Soto on Sept. 12 after a foot chase through the streets of Guadalajara. After three days of questioning, they said, Soto became a reluctant informer. The officers took Soto in handcuffs on a trip to northwestern Mexico where he pointed out several safe houses used by the Arellanos. Army troops raided one house, making headlines in local newspapers. On Sept. 27, local television reporters were invited to record the arrest of Soto and the arrival of the helicopters. It appears that this was a staged event intended to conceal Soto's two weeks in military captivity. None of Gutierrez Rebollo's aides described the questioning of Soto. He told a Mexican judge in early October that he had been abducted by the military and that his first statements were made under extreme duress. "They took me to an unknown place where I was tortured for several days until I felt like I was dying, with pain or electric shocks all over my body," Soto said. Another key witness cited in the extradition case, Gerardo Cruz Pacheco, 30, was detained by the Mexican military and, according to his statement, confessed to taking part in the conspiracy to murder the prosecutor. In the statement, he said that burns on his chest resulted from a runin with a hot automobile tail pipe. Cruz, who was nicknamed El Capitan because he had been a lieutenant in the corps of guards who protect the offices of Mexico's president, recanted that testimony as soon as he was out of military custody. At a hearing before a civilian judge, he displayed 16 recent burns on his chest and bruises on his face and legs. He said he had been beaten and burned with cigarettes by army interrogators. The defense lawyer in the extradition case, Michael Pancer, has argued vehemently that the judge should reject evidence whose origin is in question. "By accepting tortured statements, our government is no better than the prosecutors in Mexico who tortured the witnesses to get them," Pancer said in an interview. At an extradition hearing June 30, the prosecutor seemed to be preparing for the possibility that the extradition might fail. Curiel unsealed U.S. indictments against Hodoyan for possession of illegal arms and drugs, and against Valdez for heroine trafficking, both lesser charges than they are facing in Mexico. Alberto Rivas, a former assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey who worked on the failed Ruiz Massieu extradition, recalled in an interview earlier this year how that case soured. "There were minefields galore," Rivas said of the evidence Mexico provided. "There were statements made under torture, documents withheld, appeals that whittled down the charges." He recalled how prosecutors working for U.S. Attorney Faith Hochberg were so disturbed by the quality of evidence provided by Mexico that they appealed to be released from the case. Ms. Hochberg took their request to Attorney General Janet Reno, who agreed after a stormy meeting. The senior Justice officials who took over lost the case.. "There's not a single judge sitting on the bench in the United States who would render a decision relying on evidence obtained under torture," Rivas said. Copyright 1997 The New York Times