PRI Candidate’s Drug Stance Stirs Doubts

MEXICO CITY —  Francisco Labastida was no stranger to violence. As governor of Sinaloa state, Mexico’s legendary drug capital, he had received the whispered warnings, opened the scribbled death threats. But this new peril was different.

Mexican intelligence agencies had learned of a plot to kill Labastida, who had just left office. And his wife, Maria Teresa Uriarte, was offering a chilling hint of that threat: A mysterious man had snapped pictures of her in an outdoor market and then fled.

For Labastida, it was the last straw. “He said to me, ‘I can live with a threat to my life. I can’t live with a threat to yours. We’re leaving Mexico,’ ” his wife says, recalling that moment in 1993. Labastida took a job as ambassador to Portugal, his political career stalling.

Seven years later, he’s back. Capping a swift rise through the Cabinet, Labastida is the front-runner for the presidential election in July. He could become the first Mexican leader to face the wrath of the drug underworld and survive.

And yet controversy swirls around Labastida’s anti-narcotics actions. Opposition politicians have made drugs a major issue, accusing the candidate and his long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party of having gone easy on traffickers.

Labastida angrily denies such accusations. And indeed, there appears to be no solid evidence that he made deals with narcotics groups. Still, interviews with nearly two dozen politicians, analysts and U.S. and Mexican officials, along with a study of newspaper archives, suggest that Labastida was less than the heroic crusader he has portrayed in his ads.

For American authorities, who blame Mexican traffickers for 70% of the illegal drugs smuggled into the United States, Labastida’s experience is of keen interest. Would it inspire him, if elected, to go after narcotics gangs?

The candidate says it would. But others believe that Labastida’s experience illustrates why it has been so difficult for Mexican authorities to make progress against drug cartels.

“I don’t think any Mexican president is crazy enough to declare an all-out war on drugs. What are the costs? What are the benefits? Add all that up,” said Jorge Castaneda, a political scientist who advises one of Labastida’s rivals. “Society is not clamoring for a war.”

Labastida, an economist, did not set out to be an anti-drug warrior. But when the longtime federal bureaucrat returned to his native Sinaloa in 1986, running for governor on a law-and-order platform, he was thrust onto a landscape of drug violence. One morning he set out for a political event, leaving his car at home. He returned to find it sprayed with bullets. “It was a message,” Labastida recalled in a recent interview on his campaign plane.

In fact, the candidate was entering a narco-nightmare.

Sinaloa is to narcotics what Detroit is to cars. For generations, some of Mexico’s top drug lords have hailed from its poor, scrubby mountains and parched pueblos.

The state was especially chaotic as Labastida prepared to take over as governor in 1987. Gun-toting goons roamed the streets, contributing to a homicide rate of nearly five deaths per day. U.S. officials accused his predecessor, Antonio Toledo Corro, of entertaining drug lords at a ranch, a charge the ex-governor denied.

Today, Labastida points to his actions in Sinaloa as evidence of his commitment to fight traffickers. “No governor has ever done what I did,” the wiry 57-year-old candidate said in the interview.

Efforts to Clean Up Police Force

Labastida’s first targets were state police officers tied to drug traffickers. The new governor fired one-third of the officers in his first two years, founded a state police academy and bought new equipment. But Labastida quickly learned how difficult the anti-drug fight would be.

On April 9, 1989, as Labastida was away on a scuba-diving holiday, the army swept into the state capital, Culiacan. The soldiers detained the entire municipal police force for questioning and arrested local and state police chiefs appointed by Labastida. The charge: protecting Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, at the time Mexico’s top drug lord, who had just been captured in Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco state.

A chagrined Labastida began another purge of the state police. However, the case took an unexpected turn when a federal court freed his police commanders for lack of evidence, say former state officials.

Labastida came to suspect that his chiefs had been set up. “It was to distract attention” from other officials who had been protecting Felix Gallardo, he said in the interview.

That was the first of a series of clashes with federal authorities. Labastida ultimately came to believe that he was not only confronting traffickers but also their protectors in the federal government.

“In reality, the federal police commanders at the time were protecting a strong group of narcos, led by [Hector Luis] ‘El Guero’ Palma,” said Manuel Lazcano Ochoa, Labastida’s first prosecutor. “They were bothered by anything the state government did that could expose this situation.”

Those clashes have left their mark on Labastida. In the recent interview, the candidate struggled to talk about two close aides who died fighting the drug traffickers and their protectors.

“Obviously these are traumatic events,” he muttered, his eyes clouding.

One of the victims was Labastida’s bodyguard, Capt. Adelaido Valverde. On Sept. 17, 1990, the guard and state police officers intercepted a convoy that they believed was protecting Palma, according to Culiacan newspaper reports. But the carloads of armed men were federal police; it was never clear if they were guarding the trafficker. A gunfight broke out between the police forces, and Valverde was killed.

“Here there are two extremes,” Labastida said. “There is the extreme of the people who are corrupt and the extreme of the people who are honest and courageous.”

Underpaid, Poorly Trained Officers

But others say Labastida’s state police were typical of Mexico’s underpaid, poorly trained, officers: susceptible to being corrupted by rivers of drug money.

“Drug traffickers have more power than any governor here,” said Gregorio Urias, the former head of the left-wing Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, in Sinaloa.

He agreed that Labastida’s state police fought Palma, but he alleged that it was not out of duty. Rather, he charged, they were allied with a rival trafficking group loyal to Felix Gallardo.

“There was a war between bands of drug traffickers. The state government openly combated one group,” said Urias, who works in the campaign of one of Labastida’s rivals, PRD candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas.

Labastida acknowledges now that he can’t rule out such a possibility. Corruption was a constant problem in his police force. But, he said: “What is very clear is that the people at the highest levels [should] have a solid profile and be honest and courageous. You can never say that all who are working in a [police] force are on the same side.”

By the end of Labastida’s six-year term, the state was still awash in violence. The number of killings had declined 50% from the previous administration, but it remained among the highest in Mexico. A survey commissioned by a state lawyers’ group found that 93% of respondents felt that the police had improved little or not at all. Drug trafficking flourished.

Labastida’s allies say he made a sincere effort but was sometimes hamstrung by incompetent employees, corruption and a lack of federal support. His rivals in the presidential race are harsher: They contend that he turned a blind eye to the problem.

Labastida “had a lot to do with the fact that they didn’t fight drug trafficking” in Sinaloa, Cardenas declared at a recent news conference.

Vicente Fox, who is running a close second behind Labastida in many polls, has charged that there can be no progress against drug trafficking unless the PRI loses its seven-decade grip on the presidency.

“Drug lords took over the PRI years ago,” Fox, the candidate of the center-right National Action Party, alleged recently to reporters.

In interviews, half a dozen current and former U.S. officials agreed that the American government has no conclusive evidence linking Labastida to drug traffickers. But the officials’ responses about the candidate’s record ranged from complimentary to wary.

U.S. anti-drug czar Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, the only one to speak on the record, said officials had begun to focus on Labastida when the candidate oversaw domestic security as interior minister in 1998 and ’99.

“He came up [to Washington]; we had to agonize over what we thought about him. We concluded he was working to keep drugs out of Mexico,” McCaffrey told foreign correspondents in Mexico earlier this year.

Another U.S. official with access to intelligence information was less sanguine. “We don’t have strong stuff on him. It could go either way. You can’t form a definite opinion,” said the official, who requested anonymity.

Labastida’s anti-drug record has been a source of controversy before. In 1998, the Washington Times quoted a secret CIA document as saying that Labastida had “long-standing ties” to drug dealers, dating to his governorship.

The document reportedly added: “Labastida has denied receiving payoffs but has acknowledged privately that he had to reach unspecified agreements with traffickers and turn a blind eye to some of their activities.”

Mexico furiously demanded a response from U.S. authorities, who did not comment directly on their intelligence information. But the State Department said in a private diplomatic note that it had “no reason to modify” its cooperation with Labastida, according to Mexico’s Foreign Ministry.

Drug Lords With Official Contacts

In Sinaloa, both friends and enemies of Labastida say he did not have a reputation for narcotics corruption. But some analysts maintain that, in a state where trafficking has thrived since the 1920s, it is common for drug lords to have contacts in the government.

“You can’t imagine the governor of a big drug-producing or trafficking state who doesn’t have mediators” to deal with them, said Luis Astorga, a sociologist and Sinaloa native who studies drug trafficking.

Labastida denies that his government had any such relationship.

“I am proud of having done what no one else has in Mexico. I not only cleaned up the police and fought crime, I even put groups of federal judicial police in jail,” Labastida declared in the interview. “I did that so much, that those who reacted later against my people were the [federal] judicial police.”

Indeed, toward the end of his term, Labastida’s fight with the federal police broke into the open. He appointed a hard-charging attorney general, Francisco Rodolfo Alvarez Farber, who went after the notorious commander of the federal anti-drug police in Sinaloa, Mario Alberto Gonzalez Trevino. The commander eventually was convicted in the May 1990 murder of a local human rights activist, Norma Corona Sapien. She had investigated drug-related killings and suggested that the federal anti-drug police were acting as gunmen for Palma.

That case may have cost the prosecutor his life. In April 1993, shortly after Labastida’s term ended, Alvarez Farber was gunned down. A federal police officer and another man were convicted in the slaying.

Labastida’s wife recalls it as the only time she really feared for their lives. The couple had been shot at and received threats before, she says. But the state government’s pursuit of the anti-drug commander prompted a more serious danger: Labastida and his prosecutor “were sentenced to death,” says the candidate’s wife.

In fact, someone was after Labastida.

Jorge Carpizo, Mexico’s attorney general in 1993, recalls that domestic intelligence agencies learned in an intercepted phone message of a plan to kill Labastida.

“It was the Sinaloa cartels” that were behind the plot, Carpizo said recently, adding that it was difficult to pinpoint the group. “I know that’s why he [Labastida] had to go to Portugal.”

In recent interviews with The Times and other media, Labastida alleged that his killing was ordered by the Arellano Felix gang, a Tijuana-based drug cartel currently regarded as one of the most brutal in the country.

But neither Labastida’s wife nor Carpizo, the source cited by Labastida for the allegation, identified the Arellano Felix group as suspects. Based on newspaper accounts and interviews, the drug cartel does not appear to have been very active in Sinaloa during Labastida’s term.

Mariano Herran Salvatti, the head of Mexico’s anti-drug forces, said he has no information that the Arellano Felix cartel is currently targeting Labastida.

Still, Labastida is taking no chances. His security is tight, and aides have even considered bulletproofing his campaign office, according to the Mexico City magazine Proceso. Labastida has not forgotten the harrowing loss of his associates.

How will those experiences affect his policies if he becomes president? Would they motivate Labastida to make the drug fight a priority? Or would the danger, the seemingly intractable corruption and the lack of public outrage over the problem prompt him to be more cautious?

In his campaign, Labastida has vowed an “all-out war” on drugs. Asked for specifics, the candidate snapped, “When I’m president, I’ll tell you.”

He switched off a reporter’s tape recorder and added: “You don’t say in advance what you’re going to do.”