The Associated Press
EL PASO, Texas (AP) - West Texas law officers have reportedly linked a federal informant who has provided inside information on a Mexican drug cartel with a shooting death last month on the U.S. side of the border, according to a published report Thursday.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency informant earlier this year had led authorities to the bodies of 12 men in a Ciudad Juarez back yard.
The informant, a member of the Vicente Carillo Fuentes drug cartel who also worked for the U.S. government, had witnessed one killing in August 2003, a previous memorandum from ICE officials showed.
Two other documents obtained by the El Paso Times from a source on condition of anonymity show the informant’s involvement in the cartel’s slayings was more extensive than previously reported.
Documents show the man participated in carne asadas, the cartel’s code name for the often brutal killings, by making appointments to lure the victims to locations where they were abducted and by opening the safe house in Juarez where the slayings occurred.
The Dallas Morning News this week also reported on the informant’s activities, as described in an internal agency document.
Police told the El Paso newspaper that the informant sent Abraham Guzman to a Whataburger restaurant to pick up money he was owed and men shot Guzman, possibly mistaking him for the informant. Four of his other associates were also killed recently in Juarez, police said.
The informant is believed to be in U.S. marshals’ custody.
Most of the 12 slaying victims whose bodies were unearthed in January 2004 by federal Mexican police were described as having been tortured and suffocated. The memos showed that the informant gave an ICE agent a key chain with the family picture of one victim, a name he knew only as Chapo, soon after the killing in November 2003.
The informant was scheduled to testify against his boss, Heriberto Santillan Tabares, who was charged with five counts of murder, on Jan. 24 in El Paso. Legal experts say information in the documents could jeopardize the government’s case.
“One of the biggest things you can do with information like that is to attack the credibility of the informant,” Joe Spencer, an El Paso criminal lawyer who defends cases in state and federal court, told the newspaper.