Ex-Police Official Probed in Tijuana Drug War Slaying

In the latest chapter in the saga of Tijuana’s narcotics wars, a former federal police commander is under investigation in the Jan. 3 assassination of a popular prosecutor who had ordered his arrest in a drug-linked murder, Mexican officials said Tuesday.

The assassinated prosecutor, Hodin Gutierrez Rico, 29, was an aggressive, respected investigator who conducted a yearlong probe of the April 1994 assassination of a reform-minded Tijuana municipal police chief.

Gutierrez had moved to arrest former Baja federal police commander Rodolfo Garcia Gaxiola in the killing of the chief, but a Mazatlan judge canceled the arrest warrant in October.

Prosecutors investigating the Gutierrez murder have formally identified Garcia as “one of the people being investigated for the Gutierrez murder,” said Teodoro Gonzalez Luna, the spokesman of the state attorney general’s office in Mexicali. “He is among those who could have had a motive to kill him.”

Prosecutors have not issued an arrest warrant for Garcia, officials said.

“People say he was in Tijuana over Christmas, but we have not yet found a witness willing to corroborate that,” said Guillermo Uribe, another spokesman. “Everyone is afraid. You can’t issue an arrest warrant without proof.”

Gutierrez was the eighth ranking prosecutor from Baja California to be killed in the last year after dealing with cases that crossed Tijuana’s notorious narcotics cartel, and some analysts see the Tijuana intrigues as a symbol of the threat traffickers pose to Mexico.

“Narcotics bands present judges, prosecutors and police with the same metallic dilemma, silver or lead,” wrote nationally syndicated columnist Miguel Angel Granados Chapa, using the popular expression for “bribes or bullets.”

“They must choose between payoffs . . . or assassination at the hands of slaughterers who are sometimes members of the public security forces,” Granados said in a column on the Gutierrez killing, published in La Cronica of Mexicali.

Gutierrez had a reputation for marching in fearlessly where others backed off--or were bought off. He even dared to name a reputed cartel lieutenant in connection with the murder of Federico Benitez Lopez, the Tijuana municipal police chief. The killing took place a week after Benitez reported turning down a $100,000 bribe from narcotics traffickers.

Gutierrez’s murder triggered shock and outrage that resonated widely. The prosecutor was a handsome, well-liked native son made good, and his killers demonstrated a grisly attention to detail.

The men who murdered Gutierrez waited for his wife and infant to get out of the car on a Friday night, shot him with more than 100 rounds, and ran him over several times.

“Of all the murders in Tijuana, it was the most sadistic,” said Elvira Ruiz, the police commander of Playas de Tijuana, where some of the city’s worst drug-related murders have taken place.