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 News from Around the Americas | April 2007 
Cross-Border Collaboration Landing US Suspects in Mexican Courts
 Juliana Barbassa - Associated Press
San Francisco — Criminals have long fled across borders to escape prosecution, but growing cross-border collaboration between California and Mexico is landing more of these fugitives in court in their native country.
In the past, criminal suspects like Alvaro Gudino, charged in the shooting deaths of two men in Santa Rosa would have fallen through the cracks. Instead, the increased international cooperation has landed him in a Mexican jail, where he waits to be tried for the 1995 murders.
Since 1980, California has led the nation in pursuing cases that rely on a little-known Mexican law that allows the American justice system to seek prosecution in Mexico of citizens suspected of committing crimes in the United States. State and local authorities have sought convictions in 277 cases with help from prosecutors in Mexico.
“It’s something that’s been recognized by both governments,” said Val R. Jimenez, special agent in charge of foreign prosecution and law enforcement for the California Attorney General’s Office. “You can’t share a border and not be able to communicate and work together.”
Although the law has been on the books since the 1930s, experts agree the number of prosecutions based on Article 4 of the Mexican penal code has been going up. With a growing immigrant population lending a transnational dimension to crimes ranging from drug trafficking to murder, U.S. law enforcement authorities have found that relying on their counterparts across the border makes sense.
Extraditions of Mexicans to the U.S. and vice versa are also up, but there can be advantages to eschewing that route in favor of trying a Mexican citizen in a Mexican court, authorities said.
Other countries, for example, sometimes balk at extraditing suspects to the United States, where they might be exposed to the death penalty. Extradition and the trials that follow, with their need for translators and other services, can also be much more expensive than a trial in Mexico, said Jimenez.
And the Mexican system can function just as well, said Jimenez, who was in Mexico City on Monday with an eight-member team of California law enforcement officials meeting with their Mexican counterparts.
“We’re pretty confident that when someone gets convicted here, justice will be served,” he said.
Relationships such as they ones they were in Mexico to forge have made not only joint Article 4 prosecutions, but international child abduction cases, drug trafficking investigations and other crimes with a cross-border component increasingly successful.
Gudino was one of the fugitives caught with the help of this kind of purposeful cooperation. After he was arrested in Guadalajara for allegedly assaulting his father, the contact with the Mexican criminal system triggered the long-standing case against him in the United States.
Now he’s in jail in Morelia, the capital of his native state of Michoacan, awaiting a trial date in the deaths of Hernandez and Cuevas about 12 years ago.
“It’s a great avenue to have,” said Sonoma County Sheriff’s Sgt. Dennis O’Leary. “Otherwise the suspect may never be brought to justice, and the case may never be heard.”
The system has its critics. Among them are the families of two people Gudino is charged with killing, Tony Hernandez, 17, and Marcos Cuevas, 20. They are glad Gudino is being brought to justice, but would prefer it were happening in an American court.
“It’s better than nothing,” said Jose Rivera, Cuevas’ cousin and Hernandez’s best friend at the time of his death. “But the right thing would be for him to go through court here, and be punished here, so he could pay for what he did where he did it.”
Rivera is preparing to go to Mexico as soon as he gets called to testify. He witnessed the shooting, and described it as a case of bad blood among former friends that turned deadly when the suspect lost his temper.
Two days later, the Sheriff’s Department issued a warrant for Gudino’s arrest. When it was suspected he’d returned to Mexico, they issued a warrant meant to prevent his flight, but it was too late, said O’Leary.
Gudino’s mother and brother live in Santa Rosa, but their phone number is unlisted and they could not be reached for comment.
Gudino “hid like a rat in Mexico, and never had to answer for what he did,” said Hernandez’s mother, Guadalupe Guisar, a farmworker who picks grapes in Sonoma. She remembers her 17-year-old son as a hardworking teenager who worked alongside her during school vacations and dreamed of being a car mechanic.
The victims’ family members in the United States are afraid that Gudino’s family could spend a lot of money — both on a top lawyer and possibly on bribes — to get him off on a lighter sentence than he would receive in an American court.
But experts who have observed the increased use of Article 4, and the better ties between Mexican and American said the fact that Gudino’s case is proceeding represents a victory.
Investigations with international ramifications can be hampered by differences in language and criminal codes or a lack of mutual trust. But networks such as the one built by Jimenez and others in California’s criminal justice system have helped overcome such hurdles, said David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute and the Justice in Mexico Project at the University of San Diego.
“For police anywhere in the country there are some lessons to be learned about how to deal with crime that ties back to Mexico, Vietnam, El Salvador,” he said. “This is a unique prosecutorial mechanism that is especially relied on in California, but is beginning to be used in other parts of the country as the information gets out and other prosecutors become aware of this possibility.”
Guisar, whose world fell apart when her youngest son was killed, said she would prefer to see Gudino tried in California, where she could follow the proceedings closely.
But most important is that the culprit spend years in jail — many years, hopefully a lifetime, so he can reflect on what he did, she said.
“I want the Mexican government to not let him out,” she said of Gudino. “I want him in jail. He killed my baby, my youngest son, and I will never be completely happy again.” |
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