Ex-Drug Agent With Alleged Cartel Ties Shot in Mexico

MEXICO CITY —  In a hail of gunfire in the heart of the Mexican capital, attackers Thursday wounded a former top anti-drug official whom U.S. authorities recently had accused of aiding narcotics kingpins, local media reported.

The shooting of Cuauhtemoc Herrera Suastegui, along with a recent mysterious death, rocked the Justice Ministry, the main Mexican institution fighting the U.S.-bound drug trade.

Another senior official, Juan Manuel Izabal Villicana, was found shot in the head earlier this month in an apparent suicide. He left letters acknowledging that he had stockpiled a fortune while in office, touching off a corruption scandal.

The attack Thursday occurred shortly after 5 p.m. According to witnesses, a firefight broke out in the turn-of-the-century Hotel Imperial on the bustling Avenida Reforma, one of Mexico City’s main avenues. Herrera Suastegui was hit and another man, apparently a bodyguard, was killed, local television and radio reported. Federal and local prosecutors originally had said Herrera Suastegui was killed, but he was later reported alive in a Mexico City hospital.

Juan Lopez, a 52-year-old newspaper vendor who works outside the hotel, heard the gunfight. “I thought they were fireworks,” he said.

Reporters glimpsed what appeared to be gun casings on the floor of the hotel restaurant. At the entrance, police investigators snapped photos of a body on the floor inside. The investigators declined to comment on the shooting.

Herrera Suastegui worked side by side with U.S. agents in an elite anti-drug squad in the Justice Ministry. The so-called organized crime unit, whose members were handpicked and subject to extensive vetting, received U.S. training and support.

Herrera Suastegui had been head of investigations for the unit until last year, when he was transferred to another investigative job. He stopped working for the Justice Ministry on Jan. 14, the ministry’s press office said, adding that it had no further details.

Last month, a Drug Enforcement Administration official told a U.S. congressional subcommittee that Herrera Suastegui had turned into a symbol of the corruption that plagues Mexico’s anti-drug forces.

William Ledwith, the DEA’s chief of international operations, said in his testimony Feb. 29 that Herrera Suastegui last year “was reassigned to a high-level position within the PGR [Justice Ministry] despite failing a [U.S. government]-administered polygraph examination in 1998.”

“Additionally, there are indications that he provided assistance to the Carrillo Fuentes drug trafficking organization,” Ledwith said, referring to one of the country’s top drug cartels, based in the border city of Ciudad Juarez.

Ledwith’s remarks made headlines in Mexico. In an interview published Thursday in the Mexico City daily Cronica, senior Mexican drug officials said they had planned to interrogate Herrera Suastegui this week.

Mariano Herran Salvatti, the head of the Mexican version of the DEA, told the newspaper that Herrera Suastegui was under investigation. But another senior anti-drug official, Jose Trinidad Larrieta, told the paper that “the evidence from the investigation isn’t sufficient yet to think about pressing charges.”

Herrera Suastegui played a major role in the investigation of the Juarez cartel’s move into the Yucatan peninsula in recent years.

Authorities caught six of the alleged assailants in Thursday’s attack, media reports said.

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Sheridan is a Times staff writer, and Diaz Briseno is a special correspondent.