Camarena Court Case Near End : Drugs: Defense lawyers tell jury the government relied on lies, smoke screens.

Prosecution witnesses fabricated testimony and government lawyers tried to create a political smoke screen to obtain convictions in the high-profile Enrique Camarena murder trial, three defense lawyers asserted Thursday in closing arguments in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

Attorneys for Javier Vasquez Velasco, Ruben Zuno Arce and Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros all mounted blistering attacks on Hector Cervantes Santos, a government-paid witness who gave incriminating testimony against all four defendants in the case.

A fourth attorney, representing defendant Juan Jose Bernabe Ramirez, was scheduled to present her final arguments today, after which prosecutors will be permitted rebuttal arguments.

Vasquez’s lawyer, Gregory Nicolaysen, and Zuno’s lawyer, Edward Medvene, called Cervantes “a made-up man.” And they both said that if someone could be convicted on the testimony of a witness like Cervantes, then “none of us is safe.”

Matta’s lawyer, Martin Stolar, spoke last and he called Cervantes, a former Guadalajara riot policeman, “a liar.”

Cervantes was on the witness for four days earlier in the trial and was cross-examined at length. He said that he had attended several meetings at a suburban Guadalajara house in late 1984 and early 1985 where major Mexican drug traffickers and their law enforcement allies planned the kidnaping of Camarena, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent.

Camarena was kidnaped off a Guadalajara street on Feb. 7, 1985, taken to a house owned by drug kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero, interrogated and tortured. His mutilated body was found about a month later at a ranch 60 miles from Guadalajara.

Cervantes said the meetings occurred at the home of his boss, Javier Barba Hernandez, also a Mexican drug lord. But all three defense lawyers contended that nothing Cervantes said should be believed because he had contradicted himself on numerous occasions and was rebutted both by the testimony of other witnesses and by documentary evidence.

The three lawyers who spoke Thursday emphasized that Cervantes had testified that he had received phone calls at Barba’s house. But each attorney brandished a report from the national telephone company of Mexico, showing that not only was there no telephone at the house but there was no telephone service in the locality at the time in question.

“That is a serious problem in the government case,” Nicolaysen said. He and Medvene also noted that two witnesses said they had been at the house on numerous occasions and there was no telephone there.

Medvene also chided the government for not introducing any evidence that a baptism or a wedding had occurred at Barba’s house in 1984. Cervantes testified that two of the meetings on the planning of Camarena’s kidnaping occurred at parties accompanying the September, 1984, baptism of Barba’s daughter, Yuremi, and the October, 1984, wedding of his brother, Jorge Barba Hernandez. Other witnesses said these events did not occur.

“Wouldn’t you think the government could give you some evidence, someone who attended the wedding, a priest who performed the baptism, a picture of the baby?” Medvene asked.

Medvene said there was no documentary evidence to implicate Zuno in any wrongdoing, nor was there any evidence that he had any financial interest in drug crops raided by the DEA. Several major raids of huge Mexican marijuana fields in 1984, which cost traffickers more than $5 billion, precipitated the retaliatory kidnaping and murder of Camarena, according to prosecutors.

Medvene, a veteran Century City trial lawyer, employed 38 charts in making his case to the jury. One illustrated all the contradictions in Cervantes’ testimony, while another listed all the government’s payments--about $36,000--to Cervantes since last November. The latter chart was decorated with drawings of dollar bills.

A third chart presented an instruction that will be read to the jurors, telling them that they are to apply greater scrutiny to the testimony of paid government informants.

At the same time, Medvene referred to drug dealers as “animals,” and told the jurors he he had cried when prosecutors played a tape of Camarena being interrogated and tortured.

“Sure we’re against drugs, sure we’re for the DEA, but gosh darn, you have to present evidence,” Medvene said.

Nicolaysen, Vasquez’s attorney, reminded the jurors that his client was not accused of any involvement in the Camarena murder. He is charged with murdering John Walker and Alberto Radelat, two men who apparently were mistaken for DEA agents when they walked into a party of drug traffickers at a Guadalajara restaurant on Jan. 30, 1985--one week before Camarena was kidnaped. U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie has consolidated the two murder cases, saying there was a significant connection between them.

Nicolaysen spent considerable time attacking the primary witness against his client, Enrique Plascencia Aguilar, a former Guadalajara riot squad policeman and a paid government witness. He argued that Plascencia did not deserve “one shred of credibility,” saying the witness’s testimony was contradicted by other evidence.

Stolar, Matta’s lawyer, started his presentation with a dramatic touch: He set a fake hand grenade on the podium and used it as a visual aid as he explained the theory of presumption of innocence. While the grenade looked dangerous, he told the jurors, a closer, careful examination showed otherwise.

Stolar all but admitted that his client, a convicted Honduran drug kingpin, was a major cocaine dealer and attempted to turn that fact to his advantage.

He cited the testimony of a prosecution witness who said that during 1984 he transported $150 million in cash from cocaine sales from the United States to Mexico for delivery to a drug organization run by his cousin, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, and Matta. Stolar said that because such huge, steady profits were pouring in, Matta had no motive for wanting to kill Camarena and bring the wrath of the DEA upon him.

Stolar also contended that the prosecution’s broad-scale assertions of widespread corruption in the Mexican government throughout the trial were “a major smoke screen,” an attempt to deflect attention from a lack of evidence.