Web of deceit widens around House of Death

In late April, Narco News published a major exposé (called “The House of Death”) about an informant for the U.S. government who was implicated in a series of murders in Juárez -- located just across the border from El Paso, Texas.

The informant’s handlers, agents with the El Paso office of the federal Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), were allegedly fully aware of the informant’s complicity in the murders, yet did nothing to stop the killing for fear of jeopardizing the cases they were trying to make with the informant’s help.

The recent story in the Dallas Morning News (ID required) reports the following concerning the ongoing investigation into the case involving that informant, who is known by the alias Lalo: Last January, as the informant's activities came to light, DEA agents tried to persuade ICE to use Lalo to help apprehend Chihuahua state police Cmdr. Miguel Angel Loya and two of his subordinates, all of whom were suspected of working for the Juárez cartel.

The police officers allegedly reported to a suspected top lieutenant in the cartel, Heriberto Santillán Tabares, whom the informant helped apprehend and who is now in prison in El Paso awaiting trial on murder and drug trafficking charges. Mr. Santillán is believed to be the uncle of Cmdr. Loya, the affidavit states. His trial is set for January.

"Having the Mexicans arrest Loya on murder charges would have bolstered the case against Santillán and allowed us to get to the bottom of this mess," said a U.S. government official.

ICE supervisors turned down the request as too risky.

Cmdr. Loya and his associates never were apprehended. They are believed to be in hiding, reunited with the cartel, or dead, U.S. and Mexican authorities have said.

Narco News reported the very same thing -- about four months ago.

The disappearance of Loya occurred shortly after he and his men nearly whacked two DEA agents. The agents had been mistaken for drug dealers who had double crossed Santillán, sources say.

From Narco News’ “House of Death” story:

Mexican state police Commander Miguel Loya ... disappeared in January.

Several of his associates disappeared, too, vexing law enforcement agents who say their mysterious disappearance – and consequent unavailability as potential witnesses to multiple murders – could prove very convenient to U.S. prosecutors and a confidential informant under their protection.

U.S. law enforcement agents, coming forward on the condition of anonymity, believe that the comandante – the U.S. Attorney indicted him in Texas as part of an alleged drug-smuggling organization – was witness to up to nine murders committed by a confidential informant while that informant was on the payroll of the federal Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

... How many murders allegedly occurred under the reign of terror by (Miguel) Loya and his henchman is not known. One law enforcement source contends that the comandante’s brush with the DEA didn’t seem to deter him one bit. He says that the day after the DEA agents were stopped in Juarez, Loya was responsible for “whacking another person and leaving another one near death.”

“God knows how many more murders he and his men committed that we do not know about,” the law enforcement source adds.

Unfortunately, we may never know. Within days of the traffic stop involving the federal agents, DEA officials tried to arrange a meeting between the informant and Loya, to create an opportunity for Mexican federal agents to swoop in and arrest Loya. According to law enforcement sources, someone at ICE or the U.S. Attorney’s Office in El Paso jammed them up and wouldn’t let the informant arrange the meeting.

As a consequence, Loya and three of his associates, “vanished into thin air,” one law enforcement source says.

The plan to snare Loya was undermined, law enforcement sources contend, because Loya would have fingered the informant as a co-conspirator in the murders at the death house. That, in turn, would have blown apart the legal cases against Santillán and the alleged cigarette smuggler Abraham.

Politics also plays a role in keeping the comandante out of the picture. If Loya were to confirm to Mexican interrogators the informant’s active role in the death-house murders, those revelations would fuel an explosive international incident.

As you can see, Narco News, again, was way ahead of the commercial media on this story. Also, Narco News’ analysis of why Loya was allowed to skip differs from that presented by the Dallas Morning News.

The Dallas Morning News quotes an anonymous U.S. government official as saying the apprehension of Loya would have helped U.S. law enforcement “get to the bottom of this mess,” thereby making the case against Santillán stronger.

Narco News reports that DEA was “jammed up” by ICE and/or the U.S. Attorney’s Office in its efforts to snare Loya because the Mexican commandant would have exposed the informant’s murderous complicity, thereby jeopardizing two criminal cases.

Timing is crucial in determining which analysis is more on target. Remember, the attempted apprehension of Loya this past winter occurred just as the lid was being blown off the cover-up of the informant’s role in the Juarez murders.

At the time, according to Narco News sources, the informant’s handlers at ICE and the U.S. Attorney's Office were desperately trying to cover their behinds while also seeking to salvage the criminal cases that were key to bolstering their careers. The last thing they wanted was to have Loya brought in to testify to the fact that the informant was an active participant in the murders that ICE and the U.S. Attorney’s Office were trying to pin on Santillán -- through the testimony of the very same informant.

The El Paso law enforcement officials handling the informant had no incentive to let Loya help them get to the bottom of “this mess,” because those officials were already there. The U.S. law enforcement officials in El Paso, according to sources, had been drawn into a web of deceit that led to their informant participating in up to nine murders and also nearly had caused the death of two DEA agents.

The Dallas Morning News article, however, does advance the story on one front. The newspaper reports that knowledge of the informant’s activities was not limited to just the ICE chain of command in El Paso.

From the Dallas Morning News:

Reports that a paid informant for the U.S. customs and immigration agency participated in the killing of a suspected Mexican drug trafficker reached the agency's Washington headquarters a year ago, said U.S. officials familiar with the case.

Officials at the agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, have maintained that the matter was isolated to the El Paso office and that headquarters in Washington found out about the informant's apparent role in the killings only in January, when the informant's cartel associates apparently tried to kill two DEA agents.

But two U.S. government officials told The Dallas Morning News that a memo was sent to ICE in Washington from the agency's El Paso office immediately after the first killing, in August 2003, of Fernando Reyes Aguado, a Mexican lawyer and suspected drug trafficker.

The fact that higher-ups at ICE, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, were aware of what was happening on the ground in El Paso with respect to the informant’s activities should come as no great surprise, though. ICE officials in Washington, D.C., like their agents in the field, had a huge career stake in this case. Likewise, it should not be a surprise if it comes to light down the road that individuals high up in the U.S. Attorney’s Office also were clued into the sordid details of  “this mess.”

From Narco News’ “House of Death” story:

The “why” in this story is all about drugs and money: D.C.-style. In order for agents and supervisors in the field to get the big money and power to run career-making cases, they have to impress the brass in Washington, D.C. And the brass are impressed by big, headline generating, drug cases -- particularly those connected to heavy narco-syndicates like the infamous Juarez organization (in which Santillán is an alleged ring leader).

So, according to law-enforcement sources, some officials with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and ICE in El Paso went to great lengths to make those connections in both the Santillan and Abraham cases. In that process, the informant became indispensable, as he was the ticket to getting inside both the Santillan and Abraham organizations.

In the Santillan case, it was primarily Mexican drug dealers who were being murdered. The sources contend that made it easier for some within law-enforcement to rationalize the deaths in pursuit of the prize at the end of the game. Honest law enforcers worry that an “institutionalized racism” in U.S. enforcement agencies, a problem that law enforcers have tried to blow the whistle on for years, along the border has now led to officially sanctioned murders.

The payoff for those willing to turn a blind eye to murder was more money for their cases and more juice for their law enforcement careers.

“This is all about power,” one law enforcer explains.