Disturbing reports say women were tortured and slain as celebration

By ALFREDO CORCHADO and RICARDO SANDOVAL / The Dallas Morning News

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – An organized group of state and local police officers known here as La Línea – The Line – is the target of an expanding Mexican federal investigation into the killings of scores of local women over the last decade.

Informants told authorities at least some of the women appeared to have been abducted, raped and killed to "celebrate" successful drug runs.

U.S. and Mexican officials said they believe at least 20 officers in the Chihuahua state and Ciudad Juárez police departments double as enforcers and traffickers for the Juárez drug cartel, headed by Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, Mexico's most powerful – and most wanted – drug kingpin.

The officers being watched by Mexican federal authorities command a broad network of smugglers along this stretch of the Mexico/Texas border, Mexican investigators said. La Línea's reach is sweeping: from hampering murder investigations in which drug smugglers are suspects to participating in the abduction, rape, torture and killing of women, the investigators said.

"There have been confounding issues of impunity that can only be explained by police corruption, complicity and impunity," said a U.S. law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "This is an explosive issue for Mexico."

Chihuahua state officials have said they will cooperate with federal investigators to root out any corruption. That posture represents "proof that we will not cover up for anyone," said state Attorney General Jesús José Solís.

A former drug dealer familiar with La Línea's activities told The Dallas Morning News that he had seen abducted women at drug traffickers' parties.

"Sometimes, when you cross a shipment of drugs to the United States, adrenaline is so high that you want to celebrate by killing women," the witness said.

He added that because he did not see the women again after the parties, he assumed they had been killed.

"Do we know [police] did it? The answer is until now we do not have sufficient evidence to affirm that," José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, chief of Mexico's organized crime task force, said about a possible connection between local and state police and the Juárez killings. "Do we know it's possible? Yes. A lot of things are possible, and this is one line of investigation we are following.

"As a federal government, we are facing a situation of immense proportions and challenges," Mr. Santiago Vasconcelos said. "It is about ending impunity and establishing a culture of respect for law and order. That's our task in Ciudad Juárez."

Most law enforcement sources declined to openly discuss La Línea by name, usually referring instead to "police corrupted by drug money."

La Línea is run by a local drug boss known as "El Tío," or "El Saddam" to informants whose accounts have fueled the Mexican investigation. The informants have told Mexican investigators that "El Tío" is actually Humberto Portillo, a fugitive Juárez smuggler who faces federal drug charges.

Mexican authorities are investigating informants' allegations that Mr. Portillo directed the actions of police officers now being held as suspects in the slayings of 12 men. The men were killed in drug-smuggling disputes, according to Mexican prosecutors and U.S. officials. Their bodies were dug up Jan. 23 from the back yard of a Juárez house controlled by Humberto Santillán Tabares, described by informants as a Portillo underling.

Mr. Santillán is being held in El Paso. Authorities said there was an outstanding U.S. warrant charging him with drug smuggling. There was no indication of any convictions in his record. Asked if he had cooperated in the investigation, authorities said they could not discuss how they were led to the bodies but pointed out that after his arrest they got information they needed to proceed.

"I'm not going to talk about how," one U.S. official said. "It's dangerous."

'Deadly playground'

La Línea moves large quantities of drugs across the border and also has collected debts and abducted "troublemakers" for the Juárez cartel, according to U.S. and Mexican authorities.

"The Juárez cartel are the cops," said one informant who has spoken with U.S. federal officials about police corruption in the city. "They've turned Juárez into their deadly playground. They make their own rules."

La Línea moves mostly cocaine and marijuana through various border crossings between Juárez and El Paso, and then supervises shipments to Dallas, Houston, New York and other U.S. cities, authorities and informants said. The squad's preferred smuggling method is "flooding the zone," moving relatively small amounts of drugs hidden in vehicles queued up at border crossings, the sources said.

Sometimes the gang recruits so-called mules – teenagers unlikely to be severely punished but who stand to profit handsomely by driving cars north into El Paso and parking them in predetermined locations. The rogue cops also tuck drugs under cars of unsuspecting border crossers, turning them into unwitting traffickers, authorities said.

La Línea is successor to Los Arbolitos – the Little Trees – a gang of local, state and federal police who carried out hits and abductions for the Juárez cartel in the 1990s, informants and investigators said. That unit succumbed to infighting and to arrests by Mexico's attorney general's office.

But the blueprint survived: Federal authorities said they believe police officers in Juárez control street crime and trafficking through affiliated drug dealers, local business owners and operators of up to 1,000 houses, known as picaderos, where users buy and administer quick hits of illegal drugs.

Last week, reporters in Mexico City grilled Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha about a possible link between the discovery in late January of the bodies of 12 men in Juárez and the serial killings of women dating to at least 1993.

"We don't have the data at this moment," Mr. de la Concha said. "We are analyzing all the evidence to see if there is a connection."

The leading suspects in the murders of the men are 17 state and local police officers – mostly homicide detectives – who apparently worked as enforcers for the Juárez cartel, authorities said. Four of those suspects are fugitives; 13 are in federal custody in Mexico City.

More details of La Línea's operations may come from an investigation into the murder of Francisco Minjares, former chief of Chihuahua state's anti-kidnapping task force. Unknown assailants gunned down Mr. Minjares on a Chihuahua City street on Sept. 11, 2003.

Mr. Minjares is believed to have had first-hand knowledge of police corruption in the region and may have joined in the abductions of some of the murdered women in Juárez, according to an investigator and police informants.

Though he had not spoken with police, he may have been killed because drug dealers decided he knew too much, according to the investigator and one informant.

Over the years, La Línea members may have celebrated successful smuggling runs and enforcement operations by kidnapping young women, raping and torturing them, and then killing them and dumping their bodies in deserts that ring Juarez, said witnesses, informants and U.S. officials.

"All you have to do is put together a simple investigative equation of why and how and you get to the who," said the U.S. law enforcement official, citing "raw intelligence."

"Why? Because they can. Because there is a sense of excitement; a sense of an erotic feeling. Sicarios [hit men] fit the profile. There is no limit anymore to what they can do. They enjoy the feeling of ecstasy, the orgies. The women are like trophies for them. They are thrill kills. These guys like the feeling of control. But they need help. And that's where the local and state police come in."

Mexican authorities said they are exploring other theories in the killing of the women, including the possibility that copy-cat thrill killers are at work in Juárez, attracted by the city's shaky legal system; that some women fell victim because their families were embroiled in drug-trafficking disputes; that there may be a connection between some victims and a public school in Chihuahua state; and that an unidentified physician may be involved.

But they said that they expect the richest vein to be the investigation of local police.

If prosecutors can make the case against municipal and state police in Juárez, it would mark a breakthrough in the decade-old mystery for the administration of President Vicente Fox, which is under growing pressure to solve it.

As many as 93 of the more than 320 murder cases of women authorities said, have similarities, including physical resemblances among the young victims and the manner in which they were kidnapped, raped and tortured before being killed and buried in remote desert graves.

It is that method of disposal, along with forensic evidence about how the women died, that keeps leading investigators back to police officers, Mexican and U.S. officials said. Police are best able to transport bodies around Juárez to desert burial sites without fear of being stopped and having their vehicles searched, authorities said.

Mexican authorities said last week that they had established a DNA data bank to help in the investigation.

Last year, Mr. Fox's top prosecutors wrested 14 cases from the jurisdiction of local investigators in Chihuahua state, justifying the move by asserting that the crimes involve possible federal weapons violations.

Line of inquiry

One solid line of inquiry in those cases involves corrupt police officers, investigators said, adding that they are seeking linkages among those cases, the women's murders and police death squads possibly employed by the Juárez cartel.

"When we uncover a possible mass grave, I'm there anticipating that we will find the remains of a woman," a Mexican federal investigator said.

Police have already been implicated in a number of recent killings of women in the Juárez area. Among them:

• Silvia Arce. On March 11, 1998, Ms. Arce, 29, disappeared from a bar in downtown Juárez where she worked as a hostess. At the time she disappeared, witnesses reported seeing Ms. Arce with three men in what looked like a police vehicle.

Evangelina Arce, Ms. Arce's mother, described her life as a nightmare filled with constant threats from police officers. She said she was once beaten by strangers who warned her to keep quiet.

"I will not stay silent until I find my daughter's remains," she said. "She is not a dog that you just throw away. She's my daughter, and the police will be held accountable."

• Verónica Rivera. A week after Ms. Arce disappeared, her co-worker, Ms. Rivera, 19, was abducted, assaulted and tortured for two days before she escaped. She gave authorities a description of the place she had been held: a house later confirmed as belonging to a police officer who has not been seen since.

• Neyra Azucena Cervantes. Ms. Cervantes was 18 when she disappeared in May 2003 from a computer-training school in Chihuahua City. Her body was found in a shallow grave near the Chihuahua state police academy. Her cousin, Miguel David Mesa, is charged with her murder. Her family says he was framed by police, an allegation Chihuahua state police officials deny.

"I'm sick just thinking that we're paying these corrupt assassins to allegedly protect us," Patricia Cervantes, Ms. Cervantes' mother, said. "Police killed my daughter and jailed my nephew. He's a scapegoat."

The Juárez cartel is said to have moved its headquarters to Chihuahua City, 180 miles south of Juárez, in 1999. At about the same time, the mutilated bodies of women began turning up around Chihuahua City. Authorities are investigating a possible link between the two developments.

A police-cartel tie in the case is plausible given long-standing relationships between traffickers and some state and local police, officials on both sides of the border said. A U.S. official likened elements of the Chihuahua state police to a "criminal organization, private security for traffickers."

Mexican authorities noted that a state police commander, Miguel Angel Loya Gallegos, was known as a favorite driver of Mr. Carrillo Fuentes, the drug kingpin. Federal and state authorities have issued a warrant for his arrest and have tacked up wanted posters, in Chihuahua and elsewhere, of him and three other suspects.

Mr. Loya also was known as a "money man" for the Juárez cartel, said authorities, who described his alleged duties as collecting debts from local drug dealers during the night shift he supervised as a state police homicide commander. That unit is implicated in the murders of the 12 men buried in the yard of Mr. Santillán's Juárez home.

Authorities say they believe interrogations of 13 former homicide detectives who reported to Mr. Loya could reveal a clear pattern of police corruption in Juárez and yield clues that link La Línea to some of the rapes and murders of area women.

That 13 state police officers have been detained and four are on the lam "is only the tip of the iceberg," the U.S. law enforcement official said.

"The more they dig, the more dirt they'll find."

Email acorchado@dallasnews.com and rsandoval@dallasnews.com