ORGANIZED CRIME FIGHTERS ACCUSED OF EXTORTION THEMSELVES

by Michael S. Clifford, Managing Editor

An incident in which journalists caught a member of a special anti-organized crime task force on video tape counting money, allegedly a bribe extorted from a person who allegedly smuggled people over the border, led to the firing of one member of the task force and the transfer of three others in March.

Although earlier reports named José Manuel Barajas Flores as the agent who appeared on tape, Miguel Angel Diaz Guzmán, of the Tactical Force of the East (Fuerza Táctica de Oriente, known as Fortac) was fired March 24. Diaz Guzmán was the agent that Canal 5 (Channel 5) in Juárez caught on camera counting money, head of the General Directorate of Police (DGP), José Luis Reygadas Seyffert told El Diario.

The other agents under investigation were Manuel Barajas Flores, Elsa Escobedo Bustillo, and Edgar Joel Acosta, according to Diario.

Although reports named the alleged victim of the extorsion, Rodolfo Aguilera, who initial reports called Rodolfo Aguilar Salazar, as a "pasamojado" or smuggler of undocumented immigrants from Mexico to the U.S. Aguilera denied the charges and said he was only a bartender.

The Fortac members came to Aguilera the afternoon of March 18 and allegedly extorted $1500 from him, he said. They said that they required more money, and set up a rendezvous at a gas station for the afternoon of March 20, according to Aguilera. That was when reporter Rubén Rosas and a camera operator from Canal 5's "Noticinco" (News Five) caught the agent counting $300 on tape.

Initial reports named Barajas Flores as the agent counting the money, but he was only fueling the agents' vehicle at the time, according to Reygadas Seyffert. Press accounts did not report how the camera crew happened to be at the meeting or whether Aguilera had contacted the station to set up the taping. Canal 5 aired the tape the night of March 20.

The city Department of Internal Affairs and the Office of Previous Investigations were both investigating the incident. The case would continue against those allegedly responsible as it would in similar cases, acting Mayor Enrique Flores Almeida, of the National Action Party (PAN), told El Diario.

"This municipal administration will not tolerate a sole act of corruption and we invite all the citizens, when they have knowledge of an abuse of authority or deviations of public servants, to present their denunciation, to proceed to record those presumed responsible," Flores Almeida told the paper.

Legislators Ramón Ortiz (of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI) and Martha Adriana Dúran (of the PAN) both called the need to investigate such acts laborious, they also called for the community to come forward if they had been the victims of similar extortion. Nevertheless, their two political parties sparred over the issue.

"We have seen in these last five years how the corruption facts have been multiplied, not only in the police corporations, but in the diverse levels of government," Sergio Vázquez Olivas, president of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), told El Diario, referring to the time his opposition, the PAN, has controlled Juárez city government.

Meanwhile, the president of the PAN, José Márquez Puentes, said that levels of corruption had greatly diminished while his party was in power.

"But the problem stays latent by the same position of which the police can exert authority in a direct way on an individual and is in risk of abusing that authority," Márquez Puentes said.

Lieutenant Benjamin Lopez headed the Fortac group and did not receive any sanctions for the actions of his officers. Lopez apparently had family ties with DGP head Reygadas Seyffert, El Diario reported. The paper did not name sources for this claim or detail the alleged relationship, and Reygadas Seyffert denied it.

"Signaling that seems of very bad faith to me, of that the lieutenant is a relative of mine, I can say to him that luckily I do not have uncomfortable brothers or scandalous families," Reygadas Seyffert told El Diario. He also defended Lopez.

"If Lieutenant Benjamin Lopez is in charge of that group it is because he has demonstrated that he is a reliable element and in just a short time that he has within the corporation" had shown excellent and extraordinary results in the pedestrian police, Reygadas Seyffert said.

Source: El Diario