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 Editorials | Issues | March 2007 
U.S. Informants Take Part In Murder And Drug Running in Mexico - 5
 Jesse Hyde - Houston Press
At an immigration removal hearing in Bloomington, Minnesota, the next summer, Lalo is asked what would happen to him if he was sent back to Mexico.
"Well, they will kill me or they will torture me and then they will kill me," he says.
"Who will?"
"Yeah, the police, the cartel, the government, it's all the same people."
"Why do you say it's the same people?"
"Because the police works for the cartel."
He testifies that the power of the Juárez cartel extends all the way to former Mexican President Vicente Fox, and that the cartel once used ships from the Mexican Navy to transport drugs from Colombia to Mexico, and that the PGR, Mexico's federal police, would then fly the drugs to Juárez.
The attorney arguing for Lalo's deportation scoffs at these claims, but the judge rules that it would be a violation of Article 3 of the Convention Against Torture to send him back to Mexico. He orders Lalo deported to any other country. The Board of Immigration Appeals has been fighting that ruling ever since. They want him sent back to Mexico.
"My experience with other informants, it's not incredible at all to me that ICE turned their back on him, because ICE always turns their back on them. I've never ever had one informant client for whom all the promises are fulfilled," says Lalo's attorney, Harlingen immigration lawyer Jodi Goodwin. "What's incredible to me about this is that, despite how helpful he was to ICE and to the U.S. Attorney's Office and the DEA and ATF, despite how much he was paid by them, how many arrests and drug seizures he was able to bring in, they turned their back on him."
As for Sandy Gonzalez, he is out of the DEA. In December, he won an antidiscrimination lawsuit against the Department of Justice. At trial, Karen Tandy, chief administrator for the DEA, testified that Gonzalez was demoted and passed over for promotions after he wrote the memo exposing what happened at the House of Death. "That letter was inexcusable," she said. "...It was like tossing a hand grenade into the middle of a firefight."
"It was such colossally poor, fatal judgment on Sandy's part, to get in the middle of what he knew was a sensitive, established, ongoing process to deal with the issues."
But Gonzalez says he doesn't regret writing the memo.
"Someone had to take a stand. If you're connected to a bunch of murders, what do you do? Not say anything for political correctness? That's basically what they wanted me to do."
Gonzalez says it was never his intention that the memo find its way to the press. "My intent when I wrote the memo was, hey, here's what we found out, and like I said before, this is reprehensible, and here's a courtesy copy for you, U.S. Attorney's Office, because you're a prosecutorial authority, and there may have been crimes committed here."
"What Sandy was convinced was going to happen, because he had seen it time and time again, was that nothing was going to happen," says UTEP law professor Weaver, who is also the senior advisor for the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. "Nobody was going to be called on the carpet. You'd have 12 people dead, 15 if you count the three slaughtered outside the house, you'd have an informant running ICE like a bunch of monkeys, you'd have DEA cut out of communications and you'd almost have the death of a DEA member and his family and nothing was going to occur. No accountability, no nothing."
"It was going to be business as usual, and this whole thing was going to be swept under the rug. And Sandy, I think, made a conscious decision. When he wrote that memo he knew he was putting his career on the line, but he didn't want this thing to go away."
The U.S. Attorney's Office in El Paso did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story, nor did the ICE office in El Paso. The U.S. Attorney's Office in San Antonio referred questions to the U.S. Attorney's Office of Eastern Louisiana, which declined comment. A spokeswoman for DEA administrator Karen Tandy said the agency would have no comment.
The definitive account of what happened at the House of Death may be the report compiled by the Joint Assessment Team, which conducted 44 interviews of U.S. Department of Justice personnel after the House of Death was discovered. To date, the Department of Justice has refused to release this report.
One can speculate, however, that some of the agents who were aware of what was happening at the House of Death allowed it to continue, believing that the end would justify the means. That argument could still be made. Everyone who died at the House of Death was at one time or another involved in drug trafficking. Because of Lalo, Santillan, the boss of the cartel in Juárez, was taken down. Others went into hiding, and the cartel suffered a serious blow. It hasn't been the same since.
Still, none of the killings after the death of Fernando Reyes had to happen, Gonzalez says. Santillan could have been lured to El Paso and arrested after that murder. Why did they wait nine more months to arrest him?
In sworn affidavits, Lalo's handler at ICE, Raul Bencomo; his supervisor, Curtis Compton; and the agent in charge of the El Paso office, Giovanni Gaudioso, all testified that they didn't know about any of the murders that occurred after the first one. Also in a sworn affidavit, Juanita Fielden of the U.S. Attorney's Office in El Paso said she began preparing an indictment against Santillan in November 2003, and that from that moment preparations were being made to arrest him.
Gonzalez has problems with this explanation.
"So through August and September and October and almost all of November, they were planning and gathering stuff for this?" Gonzalez says. "See, I don't think so. You know why? Because they didn't indict him for murder, number one. And the dope case they indicted him for had been done months before. So how long does it take them to put a routine case together?"
Gonzalez thinks ICE delayed arresting Santillan because they wanted to keep using Lalo in another case involving a cigarette smuggler out of New Mexico. According to what Gonzalez has heard, ICE had been chasing the suspect for some time and didn't have enough to take him down. So they brought Lalo in with hopes that he could dirty up the smuggler by convincing him to haul cocaine.
"Why was this allowed to go on? That's the question that needs to be asked by a congressional committee or a special prosecutor," Gonzalez says. "These guys have to answer that question. Because there is no good answer. Do you say, 'Well, we're working on this big case and we're trying to penetrate the organization?' The organization's already been penetrated. You've got a top lieutenant and a good dope case and a murder. What more do you want?"
To date, Gonzalez and Weaver have met twice with U.S. Senate staffers, requesting a congressional hearing to look into the matter. So far they have been ignored.
It is February 2007. Three years have passed since the House of Death was first discovered. Today, the house is abandoned. In place of a doorknob, there is a strand of rusted wire running through an empty hole.
They say the cartel still watches the house, that everywhere you go in Juárez there are little shopkeepers and flower vendors who are paid to be the eyes and ears of the cartel. But others say these are just stories. Yes, Juárez is dangerous, they say, but the violence is contained in the drug world, just like in any other big city.
So yes, it would be fine to go to this house, they tell you. No one is watching it anymore. Just don't stay too long.
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