Ex-Tijuana Prosecutor Killed; Drug Cartel Suspected

Another former Tijuana prosecutor has been gunned down--the second in a month--and investigators say they suspect the city’s powerful drug cartel was behind the slaying.

Forensic reports released Monday show that former federal prosecutor Sergio Moreno Perez was shot three times in the back of the head and dumped in a vacant lot in the Mexico City suburb of Naucalpan last week. Investigators said that Moreno’s 19-year-old son, Osmany Moreno Vargas, was slain with him, shot once between the eyes, and that the two had been kidnapped more than a week ago in their home state of Michoacan.

Both bodies were identified Saturday by the Moreno family.

“The bodies were found with watches, rings, even money--the murders were not committed by robbers,” said Lugo Plata, spokesman for the attorney general’s office in the state of Mexico. “The murders are probably tied to drug trafficking.”

Moreno served as chief federal prosecutor in Tijuana--home of the drug-smuggling gang allegedly run by the Arellano Felix brothers--for more than a year until he left office in February.

Arturo Ochoa Palacios, another former federal prosecutor in Tijuana, who held the post at the time of the March 1994 assassination of ruling party presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, was shot to death while jogging in Tijuana on April 17. Ochoa’s slaying is unsolved.

Moreno “was the federal attorney general’s chief in a region with one of the strongest drug-trafficking gangs. . . . Several officials from Baja California have now been eliminated,” Plata said. “So we’re following the trail of a revenge killing.”

Former Mexican investigators and independent analysts of the cross-border drug trade agreed that both prosecutors’ killings appear drug-related.

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“This was clearly a settling of accounts between drug traffickers and public officials,” said Eduardo Valle, who has specialized in drug investigations both before and since he left Mexico’s attorney general’s office for exile in the U.S. “What we’re seeing is a cleansing of the federal attorney general’s office in Tijuana” by drug organizations.

Valle linked Moreno’s killing to a restructuring of the federal prosecutor’s office that is responsible for policing drug trafficking in that border city. Two tough investigators recently were posted in Tijuana to head a campaign against the alleged Arellano Felix drug mafia.

The Arellano Felix brothers are believed to run one of five major Mexican smuggling cartels that U.S. and Mexican officials say have infiltrated law enforcement ranks on both sides of the border.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says cross-border traffic provides up to three-fourths of the cocaine sold in the United States.

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“When a new team . . . arrives in a town as important to drug trafficking as Tijuana, there are going to be very important repercussions,” Valle said.

A spokesman for Mexican Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano, who has promised to break the link between drug traffickers and prosecutors, declined to comment on either the Moreno killing or the continuing investigation into Ochoa’s slaying last month.

An official police report in the Moreno case released by state investigators Monday indicated that Moreno made many enemies during his one-year term in Tijuana. The report stated that one of Moreno’s subordinates filed criminal charges of intimidation against him. The report quoted the subordinate telling investigators, “He [Moreno] had many very powerful people behind him.”

State police reports in Naucalpan indicated that there were no witnesses to the Morenos’ slayings. The prosecutor and his son apparently were kidnapped after they left home May 12.

Police discovered the bodies in Naucalpan the following day, after a private security guard reported hearing four or five gunshots and seeing a car speed away from the vacant lot.

The guard said he could not identify the car or the gunmen.