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 Editorials | Issues | March 2007 
U.S. Informants Take Part In Murder And Drug Running in Mexico
 Jesse Hyde - Houston Press
There is one chair in the room and they sit him in it. He pulls out his wallet. He's looking for a number. A phone number, an address. That is why he is here. Fernando the lawyer. Fernando the drug trafficker. He's got a load of marijuana, and they want it.
Fernando thinks he's in the company of friends. He thinks this man standing in front of him, this Lalo, is going to deliver the marijuana for him to New York. That's what the numbers are for. They are contacts. They are the people Lalo will call, the people who are waiting for the load. But this little room with the blinds drawn and the light streaming in from the kitchen window, this is a trap.
Fernando doesn't know that. He doesn't know that two members of the Chihuahua state police are here in this house, hiding. He doesn't know that they are here to kill him.
It is August and these white walls are baking. Outside, a thick layer of dust and smoke hangs over Juárez. It is from the burning garbage in the slums and the steaming factories down here in the valley and the smelters belching their chemicals down along the highway.
Someone asks Fernando for some candy, which is narco slang for personal-use cocaine, and he says, "Of course." And then suddenly, while Fernando's got his head down, one of the cops emerges from the back. Fernando doesn't see him coming, doesn't notice the gun until it is pressed hard up against his face. "No!" he screams. "Why? Please don't kill me."
There had been some talk of using a gun, but they decided it would be too loud. They are in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood, not far from a Radisson hotel, and someone would hear the pop of the gun. But he's screaming now, and they've got to shut him up. The other cop comes across the room in a flash and begins frantically wrapping the tape around Fernando's mouth, trying to stifle the screams. Around and around the tape goes. Now Fernando is fighting with all he's got. He's kicking and his arms are flailing wildly.
So they bring him hard to the floor and he's thrashing about and the three of them, Alex and the two cops, are having a hard time holding him down, and Lalo, with his little mustache and his double chin, he's just standing there, leaning against the television stand. Alex looks up at Lalo with a glare that suggests he better get down there and help. So Lalo does what he can to keep Fernando's legs still while one of the cops wraps an extension cord around Fernando's neck. He's pulling it tight, and the veins in Fernando's neck are bulging and Fernando's kicking for his life and the cord snaps.
"What now?" the cop asks. Lalo looks around the room and notices a plastic bag. The cop grabs it and pulls it over Fernando's head, and Alex winds the duct tape tight around the bag. And then they stand and they watch Fernando kick and twitch and gasp, until finally, he's lying there motionless and someone says, "Are you sure he's dead?"
So one of the cops takes a shovel and whacks Fernando in the back of the neck, and Lalo hears something snap. Maybe they broke his neck. It doesn't matter; he is dead.
They pick him up and hide him under a staircase. They will bury him in the backyard later that night.
Lalo crosses the street and finds Santillan at the little convenience store on the corner. Santillan, known to U.S. intelligence as El Ingeniero, is one of the top bosses in the Juárez cartel. He has thinning dark hair and a mustache and a bit of a gut. When Lalo first met him down in Guadalajara, he dressed like a cowboy, but now he is a big shot, and he wears a Rolex with diamonds.
Lalo tells him it is done. Fernando, Santillan's childhood friend, is dead. They've got his load of marijuana.
Santillan is pleased. He tells Lalo he is now No. 4 in the Juárez cartel. He takes him to the Big Brother House, which is only for high-ranking members of the cartel. Here, you can have anything you want, Lalo is told. Groceries, beer, women, whatever. Soon, you will meet Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, the boss of the cartel.
That evening, Lalo crosses the border into El Paso and tells his handlers at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) what he has seen. They listen to a recording he made of the murder, and they transcribe it. They write memos detailing everything Lalo saw, and eventually, these memos will find their way to Washington.
But they do not arrest him for his part in the murder, or deactivate him as an informant, or prepare to arrest Santillan, their target. Instead, they continue with their investigation, and when all is said and done, there will be 11 more bodies buried in the backyard.
The story of what happened at the House of Death, dubbed as such by the online publication Narco News, has been told in bits and pieces since The Dallas Morning News first broke it three years ago, but the complete story has never been told, at least not by the mainstream press.
In fact, major American media have mostly ignored the story, perhaps because it happened on the other side of the border. But this is more than a border story. This is a story that goes all the way to Washington.
"This is a big deal, a very big deal because of the scope and duration of the activity. For six months, you had members of the U.S. government who knew that a person on their payroll was engaging in murder and they did nothing to stop it," says Bill Weaver, a University of Texas at El Paso law professor who has closely followed the case. "As much as they deny it, they had prior knowledge."
To date, Lalo's handlers at ICE and the U.S. Attorney's Office in El Paso have declined comment. An official report of what happened at the House of Death has been classified for national security reasons. To Weaver's knowledge, that has never before happened with a report of this kind.
"Has there been a cover-up? Absolutely there has been a cover-up," says Sandy Gonzalez, the former head of the DEA in El Paso who blew the whistle on the case. "The executive branch has decided not to investigate this because there is a very real possibility here of government officials committing crimes, and they don't want that to get out."
But the story will not go away. Now, three years later, a wrongful death lawsuit is pending in federal court on behalf of several of the victims. It names Lalo, his handlers at ICE and prosecutors at the El Paso U.S. Attorney's Office as defendants. Within the next three weeks, a judge is expected to decide whether the suit goes to trial. And if it does, the attorney for the plaintiffs -- Dallas lawyer Raul Loya -- says he will call Lalo to take the stand.
"Anyone with half a brain would know there's not a chance in hell [the U.S. government] is ever going to allow this guy to be put on the stand to testify. They're afraid of what he might say," Weaver says. "Now they want him dead. They want him killed."
And that's exactly what will happen, Weaver says, if the U.S. government succeeds in its current bid to deport Lalo back to Mexico.
Lalo has already testified that his handlers at ICE knew about each murder he participated in or witnessed at the House of Death, and that on at least two occasions, they knew beforehand.
If this is true, it reveals a disturbing truth about the way America is waging its War on Drugs -- that agents sometimes look the other way when murder occurs, especially if it means making a case, and especially if the victims are from the other side of the border.
What follows is the first narrative account in the U.S. press of what really happened at the House of Death. The story reveals new information: that in all likelihood, one of the last people killed at the House of Death was a U.S. government informant. Supported by sworn affidavits, court testimony, confidential memos and interviews, this is a journey deep inside America's drug war. It is a story of murder, corruption and the great lengths to which the United States government will sometimes go to cover up the truth.
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