Last week a brief story appeared in the United States and Mexican media reporting the September 19 death of Ruben Zuno Arce, brother-in-law of former Mexican President Luis Echeverria Alvarez and son of a former JaIisco Institutional Revolutionary Party governor, Jose Guadalupe Zuno. Zuno Arce was 82 years old and died of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease at the U.S. federal prison in Coleman, Florida.
Zuno Arce was presidente municipal of the nearby municipality of Mascota. One Guadalajara newspaper reported, “The brother-in-law of President Luis Echeverria Alvarez (1970-1976) embedded his political power in the (Mascota) municipio located (in) the western mountains of Jalisco, where he exercised total control until his detention.”
Zuno Arce, according to members of the United States judicial system, became fatefully embroiled in the 1985 kidnapping, torture and death of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique (Kiki) Camarena Salazar, and his pilot Alfredo Zavala Avelar, both headquartered in Guadalajara. Zuno Arce was eventually convicted for a series of felonies and received consecutive sentences that amounted to life in prison.
Mascota, a rural municipality known for its rich soil, was very isolated until the 1990s. This was a time when a new generation of Sinaloa drug traffickers had discovered the advantages of Guadalajara: international communications and banking facilities, a self-satisfied wealthy business community easy to penetrate with the purchase of hotels, car agencies, mansions and isolated undeveloped land. The Jalisco capital also furnished a seemingly endless supply of young women and, more important, malleable political, economic and law enforcement communities.Mascota, in the highlands southwest of Lake Chapala, fell into the isolated, productive land category that the drug traffickers were seeking, local ranchers and farmers would later say. Thus, Zuno Arce’s fateful involvement with a ruthless set drug lords, principally the merciless Rafael Caro Quintero.
Yet Zuno Arce’s brother this past weekend told a Guadalajara newspaper that his sibling was merely a wealthy pueblo resident. The scarcity of properties and land owned by Ruben was proof that he had no connection with such “celebrated” narcotraficantes as Caro Quintero, and his fellow drug lord, Ernesto Fonseca, who were convicted of planning and executing the kidnapping, torture and killing of Camarena.
In the municipality of Mascota, the “testimony” given to the press by “friends and enemies” of the man widely known as a traditional Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) cacique (political strongman) coincided regarding several facts: 1) Ruben Zuno Arce’s “word was law, 2) he ruled his modest-seeming lucrative fiefdom severely for 15 years, brooking no serious opposition, and 3) during that time of “territorial control,” his gendarmes could not have avoided running into “colonizers of Caro Quintero,” who not only brought truck loads of Cannabis indica seeds, but “bettered the quality of life (in such pueblos as La Alcihuatl, Villa Purificacion and Bramador) bringing in water and workers.” “All of the ranchos engaged in the cultivation of marijuana and poppies, and no one bothered them, until the army came in 1985 ...” a resident of Bramador said in a 2004 interview.
But when Camarena arrived at the DEA office in Guadalajara’s U.S. Consulate in 1980, agents were becoming more aggressive, particularly in their use of Mexican informants. Of all the agents, Kiki seemed the most driven. His discovery of 220 irrigated acres of bright green marijuana in the middle of the central Mexican desert in the state San Luis Potosi, should have moved his superiors at the Mexico City embassy in Mexico City and in the U.S. to do something to stop the surge in Mexican drug production. It didn’t. But it moved Caro Quintereo when a couple of his pot plantations were burned – through immense pressure on the Mexican government at the highest levels.
Even though that cooperation was temporary, Caro Quintero & Co. sought revenge, and Mexican police told them who was to blame.
Camarena was kidnapped Thursday afternoon February 7, 1985, on his way to a have lunch with his wife. He was never seen alive again, nor was his pilot, who was kidnapped at the Guadalajara airport. Kiki was taken to a “mansion” where he was tortured for two days, then killed.
Once the bodies of Camarena and pilot Alfredo Zavala were found, organizing a U.S. trial began. During the investigation of the murders both by U.S. authorities (as much as they legally could) and Mexican’s law enforcement apparatus, along with several government branches and high-level government figures, a circus of lies flourished. Mexico was embarrassed and outraged at accusations of total government corruption, which mounting evidence revealed. Led by Camarena’s friends, the DEA went into action, along with other U.S. law enforcement and justice authorities. DEA agents in Guadalajara rolled out reams of evidence demonstrating the collusion of officials at nearly every level of the Mexican government, excepting the president, Miguel de la Madrid. But it got close, with serious accusations against Manuel Bartlett Diaz, the head of the Ministry of Gobernacion, the second most powerful man in the Mexico.
Ambassador John Gavin warned DEA agents that some witness testimony could be suspect. But after years of being lied to, harassed, and threatened by corrupt — and immune – Mexican police and officials, DEA agents cut the reins of caution. So did their superiors and U.S. prosecutors. Key Mexican witnesses were suborned, many being paid during a string of trials, some openly, some secretly, infecting the U.S. case.
Unfortunately for Ruben Zuno Arce, he had sold his Guadalajara mansion to Caro Quintero just days before it was used to interrogate, torture and kill Camarena, One key witness, Hector Cervantes Santos, accused Zuno Arce of being one of the planners of this series of crimes. Cervantes, who on the record was being paid 3,000 dollars a month, was actually secretively promised more than 500,000 dollars over six years, which prosecutors told him not to reveal. Between the testimony and accusations on the Mexican side and misconduct on the U.S. side, the trial to find the true killers of a of a brave man who believed in justice was being tarnished by people who clearly did not have his courage, canniness or loyalty. Cervantes changed his story several times. Zuno Arce changed his three times. He was given a second trial in 1992, though this time Cervantes was not called for testimony. The testimony of two other former Mexican police officers, who had become drug cartel bodyguards, placed Zuno and his co-defendants at the scene where Camarena’s kidnapping was planned. They never changed their testimony.