Thread: Johnny Sutton and The House of Death Case

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/st ... 43,00.html

The House of Death


When 12 bodies were found buried in the garden of a Mexican house, it seemed like a case of drug-linked killings. But the trail led to Washington and a cover-up that went right to the top. David Rose reports from El Paso

Sunday December 3, 2006
The Observer

The following apology was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday December 10 2006

The article below says 'the US media have virtually ignored this story', yet editing had removed a reference to narconews.com reporter Bill Conroy, who has reported it extensively. Apologies.


Janet Padilla's first inkling that something might be wrong came when she phoned her husband at lunchtime. His mobile phone was switched off. On 14 January, 2004, Luis had, as usual, left for work at 6am, and when he did not answer the first call Janet made, after taking the children to school, she assumed he was busy. Two weeks later she would learn the truth.

Article continues
'It was love at first sight for Luis and me, and that's how it stayed, after two years dating at school and eight years of marriage,' says Janet. 'We always spoke a couple of times during the day and he always kept his phone on. So I called my dad, who owns the truckyard where he worked and he told me, "he hasn't been here". I called my in-laws and they hadn't seen him either, and they were already worried because his car was outside their house with the windows open and the keys in the ignition. He would never normally leave it like that.'

Luis Padilla, 29, father of three, had been kidnapped, driven across the Mexican border from El Paso, Texas, to a house in Ciudad Juarez, the lawless city ruled by drug lords that lies across the Rio Grande. As his wife tried frantically to locate him, he was being stripped, tortured and buried in a mass grave in the garden - what the people of Juarez call a narco-fossa, a narco-smugglers' tomb.

Just another casualty of Mexico's drug wars? Perhaps. But Padilla had no connection with the drugs trade; he seems to have been the victim of a case of mistaken identity. Now, as a result of documents disclosed in three separate court cases, it is becoming clear that his murder, along with at least 11 further brutal killings, at the Juarez 'House of Death', is part of a gruesome scandal, a web of connivance and cover-up stretching from the wild Texas borderland to top Washington officials close to President Bush.

These documents, which form a dossier several inches thick, are the main source for the facts in this article. They suggest that while the eyes of the world have been largely averted, America's 'war on drugs' has moved to a new phase of cynicism and amorality, in which the loss of human life has lost all importance - especially if the victims are Hispanic. The US agencies and officials in this saga - all of which refused to comment, citing pending lawsuits - appear to have thought it more important to get information about drugs trafficking than to stop its perpetrators killing people.

The US media have virtually ignored this story. The Observer is the first newspaper to have spoken to Janet Padilla, and this is the first narrative account to appear in print. The story turns on one extraordinary fact: playing a central role in the House of Death was a US government informant, Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, known as Lalo, who was paid more than $220,000 (£110,000) by US law enforcement bodies to work as a spy inside the Juarez cartel. In August 2003 Lalo bought the quicklime used to dissolve the flesh of the first victim, Mexican lawyer Fernando Reyes, and then helped to kill him; he recorded the murder secretly with a bug supplied by his handlers - agents from the Immigration and Customs Executive (Ice), part of the Department of Homeland Security. That first killing threw the Ice staff in El Paso into a panic. Their informant had helped to commit first-degree murder, and they feared they would have to end his contract and abort the operations for which he was being used. But the Department of Justice told them to proceed.

Lalo's cartel bosses told him whenever they were planning another killing, using a grisly codeword - carne asada, 'barbecue'. In the six months after Reyes's death, they used it on many occasions. Each time, says Lalo, he informed his handlers in Ice. They did not intervene.

El Paso, population 700,000, lies in Texas's far west. It is a V-shaped city almost bisected by the Franklin mountains, lashed by desert winds. Houston and Dallas are more than 600 miles away. Much closer, across a guarded fence and the river, here little wider than a stream, is Juarez. On the western side of the Mexican city are the barrios - dirt streets of ramshackle huts without sanitation, built from discarded wood and tyres, whose inhabitants live in sight of the gleaming offices of downtown El Paso.

Eastern Juarez is very different. There, in the campestre, the country club district, lie gated developments patrolled by security guards, armoured palaces of marble, with columns, fountains and huge golden domes. Most of the money comes from drugs. Los narcos control not only Juarez but the wider state of Chihuahua, ruling through corruption and fear. One organisation is paramount - the Juarez cartel led by Vicente Carrillo Fuentes. The US State Department claims he is responsible for shipping cocaine and marijuana worth billions of dollars a year and protects his business by killing. America is offering a $5m reward for his arrest.

His cartel has penetrated Mexican law enforcement at all levels. Like many of its operatives, Lalo began as a policeman - in his case in the Mexican highway police. Having resigned from the force in 1995, he began transporting cocaine by the ton for a gang based in Guadalajara. Professing disgust at his criminal associates, he started working for the US government in February 2000, supplying information not only to Ice (then known as US Customs) but also the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco, and the FBI. A few months later, with his handlers' encouragement, he was recruited into the Juarez cartel by Il Ingeniero, the Engineer, one of Fuentes's key lieutenants and a man notorious for acts of savage violence. His real name was Heriberto Santillan-Tabares.

'The money I got from the Americans I invested in business,' says Lalo, 36. 'I had a used-car lot, a furniture store and a cellphone accessory place.' He settled with his wife and three children on the US side of the border. 'I spoke to my handlers three or four times a day. But when I went across the bridge to Juarez, I had no back-up. I was on my own.'

Lalo claims to have facilitated numerous drug seizures and arrests. But on 28 June, 2003, his loyalty came under suspicion when he was arrested by the DEA in New Mexico, driving a truck he had brought across the border containing 102lb of marijuana. He had not told his handlers about this shipment and, in accordance with its normal procedures, the DEA 'deactivated' him as a source.

Ice took a different view. Agents in its El Paso office were trying to use Lalo to build a case against Santillan, and to nail a separate cigarette-smuggling investigation. At a meeting with federal prosecutors the week after Lalo's arrest, Ice tried to persuade assistant US attorney Juanita Fielden that, if Lalo were closely monitored, he would continue to be effective. Fielden agreed. She says in an affidavit that she called the New Mexico prosecutor and got him to drop the charges. Lalo was released.

A month later, on 5 August, Santillan asked Lalo to meet him at a cartel safe house at 3633 Calle Parsonieros, in an affluent neighbourhood of Juarez. The Mexican lawyer Reyes would be there too, Santillan said, and with the help of some members of the Juarez judicial police - the local detective force - they were going to kill him.

When Lalo arrived, two cops were already there. He went out to buy the quicklime and duct tape, and when he returned Santillan turned up with Reyes. The policemen jumped on the lawyer, beating him and trying to put duct tape over his mouth. Lalo, wearing his hidden wire supplied by Ice, recorded Reyes's desperate pleas for mercy. 'They [the police] asked me to help them get him to the floor,' reads a statement he made later. 'They tried to choke him with an extension cord, but this broke and I gave them a plastic bag and they put it on his head and suffocated him.' Even then, they were not sure Reyes was dead. One of the officers took a shovel 'and hit him many times on the head'.

When Lalo returned to El Paso on the day of Reyes's murder and told his Ice employers what had happened they were understandably worried. They knew that, if they were to continue using Lalo as an informant, they would need high-level authorisation. That afternoon and evening he was debriefed at length by his main handler, Special Agent Raul Bencomo, and his supervisor. Then he was allowed to go back to Juarez - Santillan had given him $2,000 to pay two cartel members to dig Reyes's grave, cover his body with quicklime and bury it.

Meanwhile the El Paso Ice office reported the matter to headquarters in Washington. The information went up the chain of command, eventually reaching America's Deputy Assistant Attorney General, John G. Malcolm. It passed through the office of Johnny Sutton, the US Attorney for Western Texas - a close associate of George W. Bush. When Bush was Texas governor, Sutton spent five years as his director of criminal justice policy. After Bush became President, Sutton became legal policy co-ordinator in the White House transition team, working with another Bush Texas colleague, Alberto Gonzalez, the present US Attorney General.

Earlier this year Sutton was appointed chairman of the Attorney General's advisory committee which, says the official website, 'plays a significant role in determining policies and programmes of the department and in carrying out the national goals set by the President and the Attorney General'. Sutton's position as US Attorney for Western Texas is further evidence of his long friendship with the President - falling into his jurisdiction is Midland, the town where Bush grew up, and Crawford, the site of Bush's beloved ranch.

'Sutton could and should have shut down the case, there and then,' says Bill Weaver, a law professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who has made a detailed study of the affair. 'He could have told Ice and the lawyers "go with what you have, and let's try to bring Santillan to justice". That neither he nor anyone else decided to take that action invites an obvious inference: that because the only people likely to get killed were Mexicans, they thought it didn't much matter.'

In the days after Reyes's death, officials in Texas and Washington held a series of meetings. Finally word came back from headquarters - despite the risk that Lalo might become involved with further murders, Ice could continue to use and pay him as an informant. And although Santillan had already been caught on tape directing a merciless killing and might well kill again, no attempt would be made to arrest him.

Lalo's statement, made in Dallas in February 2004, is a record of cruelty and violence, the words of a man who thought himself untouchable because of his relationship with Ice. In the months after Washington decided not to move on Santillan, the garden of the house at 3633 Calle Parsonieros began to fill with bodies. One day in September 2003, 'Santillan called to ask me to bury a guy who had apparently died of a heart attack at the moment he was kidnapped', Lalo's statement says. 'Another execution I remember was on 23 November... Santillan ordered me to have these drug mules meet him in the little Parsonieros house ... Loya [a corrupt police commander] put tape around their heads, but they could still breathe and one of them began to moan loudly, so Loya shot him in the head... but he didn't die immediately.' They were killed because they were careless in their smuggling work.

Then, and on other occasions, Santillan told Lalo in advance he was going to hold a carne asada. The deposition gives details of 13 murders, all but one of whose victims were later found buried at Number 3633. Each time Lalo crossed into Mexico his Ice handlers sought and obtained formal clearance from headquarters to allow their source to travel to a foreign country while working for a US agency. Throughout the period, Lalo says, he continued to talk to his handler Bencomo up to four times a day - usually in person, at the Ice El Paso office. He says his meetings with Santillan were all covertly recorded, while documents show that Ice had arranged for Lalo's phone to be bugged.

Curtis Compton, Bencomo's Ice supervisor, insisted in an affidavit that it did not know of any murders before they occurred: 'We only learned about the murders through interviews of Lalo after the fact. I acted in good faith that all my actions were legal and proper.'

Lalo's last country clearance was issued on 13 January, 2004. Once again Santillan had called him, asking him to come to Juarez to unlock the Parsonieros house for a carne asada. Next morning Luis Padilla disappeared.

Although the Padillas had attended Socorro high school in El Paso and lived in the US from childhood, both remained Mexican citizens, resident aliens with green-card work permits. Their children, Luis jnr, Jacqueline and Jasmine, were born in the US. Luis snr was two years ahead of Janet at school and they did not speak to each other until they attended a mutual friend's quinceria, a 15th birthday party.

Janet smiles at the memory: 'I liked everything about Luis straight away. He was silly, funny, a popular guy; he played a lot of sports. He was very religious and I started going to the same church, where he was president of the youth section.' For their first date he took her to a Mexican restaurant, and then a children's park: 'We just sat there on the swings, talking as if we'd known each other for years.' In 1996, when Janet was 16, they got married. They spent their wedding night in Juarez.

By 4pm on 14 January, Janet was on the point of phoning El Paso police when she received a call from a friend in Juarez. 'She told me, "I've just seen Luis over here. He was with some cops - they were putting him in a truck". I couldn't figure it out. He shouldn't have been in Mexico at all. At 8 o'clock I couldn't stand it any longer and I went over there myself. I went to all the different police stations. Nobody had him. Nobody knew where he was.'

Since they married Janet and Luis had only ever spent a night apart - when Luis junior was born; they had been living in Dallas, but she wanted to give birth in El Paso, in order to be near her family. In the fortnight after his disappearance, Janet and the children stayed with relatives. 'I couldn't go home. I couldn't be on my own. When he was lost, not knowing what had happened drove me crazy. When at last I heard something, at first I felt relief. A lot of people disappear in Juarez and you never know what happened to them.'

On 26 January, Janet got a call. Juarez police told her they had found some bodies. She was to meet them at the city mortuary. First, she was shown some photographs, but none was of Luis, 'I had to do it in person. I went in there and they had four bodies at that time. There were still ropes around their heads and their eyes were sticking out because they had been suffocated. It was horrible, horrible. One of them had a tattoo, one had silver teeth, another was too fat.'

Janet still did not believe this could have anything to do with Luis. 'He never took drugs and he never drank, beyond the odd beer. He never got into fights. He was still really into the church and he'd just been asked to coach middle-school sports. How could he be narco-fossa?' The police phoned again. This time they asked her to meet them at 3633 Calle Parsonieros. The place looked familiar. 'The hotel where we spent our honeymoon night backed on to the garden.

'I saw his shoes and his jacket. I went into the garden and they were probing the ground with a pole. That's when they found his body.' The police exhumed him, 'but it was hard to ID him because he was so decomposed. I looked at his hands and touched them. The flesh fell off.'

Two other men had been murdered on 14 January, both of them from Juarez. The next day Santillan told Lalo he had been asked to kill them as a favour for some associates of Vicente Carrillo Fuentes - Santillan had nothing against them personally. In such circumstances, murderers can make mistakes.

While Santillan and Lalo went on killing, Bencomo, his Ice colleagues and Assistant US Attorney Fielden were assembling their case. In December 2003 Fielden drew up a sealed indictment against Santillan. But although there was already some evidence of his involvement in killings, the indictment was only for trafficking, not murder. Before they could lure him to America and arrest him, they needed permission from the DoJ. They got it on 15 January, a day after Luis Padilla died.

But this did not bring the House of Death killings to an end. Under torture, one of Santillan's victims had revealed the address of Homer Glen McBrayer - a DEA special agent resident in Juarez who operated under diplomatic cover. At 6pm on 14 January, two men rang his doorbell continuously for 10 minutes. Afraid, his wife phoned him at work. McBrayer rushed home and ushered his wife and daughters into their car. As soon as they left the estate where they lived, they were stopped by a Mexican police car. Two civilian vehicles hemmed McBrayer's car in. Their occupants got out and waited while McBrayer talked to the cops. They were Santillan's men.

Having showed his diplomatic passport, McBrayer phoned a DEA colleague, who arrived within minutes. Unwilling, perhaps, to abduct two US agents, a woman and two children on a busy street, the cartel men backed off. As the standoff unfolded, Santillan twice called Lalo. He asked him to find out what he could about an American called Homer Glen - the corrupt police had not given McBrayer's surname. Santillan, claimed Lalo, said he thought he worked for the tres letras - code for the DEA - and intended to blow up his house.

The McBrayers were lucky to be alive, and the DEA, kept in the dark about the continued use of Lalo after the first murder six months earlier, reacted with fury. Even as Ice debriefed Lalo, it refused the DEA access to him and to recordings of the events of 14 January. Every principle governing informant handling and inter-agency co-operation appeared to have been flouted, and the Mexican government was not told of the carnage taking place on - and under - its soil.

Ice got Lalo to arrange a meeting with Santillan in El Paso and on 15 January Il Ingeniero was arrested. Two days later, Ice finally told the Mexicans that the garden at 3633 Calle Parsonieros was a mass grave. After bureaucratic delays, digging began on 23 January. On 18 February, Johnny Sutton filed a new indictment against Santillan, charging him with trafficking and five murders - including those of Reyes and Padilla.

The House Of Death suddenly seemed set to become a major national scandal. Bill Conroy, a reporter who works for an investigative website, Narconews.com, was about to publish an article about it. On 24 February, Sandy Gonzalez, the Special Agent in Charge of the DEA office in El Paso, one of the most senior and highly decorated Hispanic law enforcement officers in America, wrote to his Ice counterpart, John Gaudioso.

'I am writing to express to you my frustration and outrage at the mishandling of investigation that has resulted in unnecessary loss of human life,' he began, 'and endangered the lives of special agents of the DEA and their immediate families. There is no excuse for the events that culminated during the evening of 14 January... and I have no choice but to hold you responsible.' Ice, Gonzalez wrote, had gone to 'extreme lengths' to protect an informant who was, in reality, a 'homicidal maniac... this situation is so bizarre that, even as I'm writing to you, it is difficult for me to believe it'.

But Ice and its allies in the DoJ were covering up their actions, helped by the US media - aside from the Dallas Morning News, not one major newspaper or TV network has covered the story. The first signs came in the response to Gonzalez's letter to Gaudioso - not from Ice, but from Johnny Sutton.

He reacted not to the discovery of corpses at Calle Parsonieros, but with concern Gonzalez might talk to the media. He communicated his fears to a senior official in Washington - Catherine O'Neil, director of the DoJ's Organised Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. Describing Gonzalez's letter as 'inflammatory,' she passed on Sutton's fears to the then Attorney General, John Ashcroft, and to Karen Tandy, the head of the DEA, another Texan lawyer.

Tandy was horrified by Gonzalez's letter. 'I apologised to Johnny Sutton last night and he and I agreed on a "no comment" to the press,' she replied on 5 March. Gonzalez would have no further involvement with the House of Death case and was ordered to report to Washington for 'performance discussions to further address this officially'.

Gonzalez was told that Sutton was 'extremely upset'. Gonzalez, who had enjoyed glittering appraisals throughout his 30-year career, was told he would be downgraded. On 4 May, DEA managers in Washington sent him a letter. It said that, if he quietly retired before 30 June, he would be given a 'positive' reference for future employers. If he refused, a reference would dwell on his 'lapse'. Gonzalez resigned, and launched a lawsuit - part of which is due to come to court tomorrow.

'I've been written off,' he says. 'They dismiss my complaints, saying I'm just a disgruntled employee. But once they knew about the carne asadas, they were legally and morally obligated to do something. They already had a solid case against Santillan for drugs and murder. What the **** else did they need? As for the DEA, they held my feet to the fire and joined the cover-up.' He had been neutralised, but there remained the danger that details of Ice's relationship with Lalo would surface at Santillan's trial.

Janet Padilla had also been dealt with. Ice has no legal responsibility for investigating murder, but after her husband's funeral Lalo's former handler, Bencomo, came calling. 'He told me that he was going to help me find my husband's killers and bring them to justice,' Janet says. 'He said to tell him anything I knew, because he would be in charge of the case. I saw him three or four times, and later I also met Juanita Fielden.' It did not occur to Janet that she ought to contact the police or other agencies.

For Janet, Santillan's indictment for murder was a moment of hope: 'I thought I was going to get justice for Luis.' But on 19 April Sutton announced a deal with Santillan - in return for his pleading guilty to trafficking and acceptance of a 25-year sentence the murder charges were dropped. 'All of the murders were committed in Juarez, by Mexican citizens, and all of the victims were citizens of Mexico,' Sutton said.

No one had any further use for Lalo. In August 2004 someone tried to shoot him at an El Paso restaurant - instead killing an innocent bystander. After that, he was taken into protective custody. And then, on 9 May 2005, Ice, the agency that had cherished him, decided that his US visa was irregular and began legal proceedings to deport him to Mexico - without doubt a death sentence. He is now in a maximum-security jail in the Midwest, fighting his former employers through the courts. In October The Observer won clearance to visit him with his lawyer, Jodi Goodwin. On the eve of the interview he was abruptly moved to a different facility where officials said a visit was impossible. Goodwin passed on a message: 'I'm not mad, I'm sad and disillusioned. Every time I did a job and brought them information, I was congratulated. Now they want to deliver me to my death.'

'If Congress and the media start to look at this properly, they will be horrified,' Sandy Gonzalez says. 'It needs a special prosecutor, as with the case of Valerie Plame [the CIA agent whose name was leaked to the media when her diplomat husband criticised Bush over Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction]. But Valerie is a nice-looking white person and the victims here are brown. Nobody gives a shit.'

For the three children who lost their father, and their mother, now struggling to make ends meet, it is difficult to cope. 'It's worst at night, when I put them to bed,' Janet Padilla says. 'I guess that's when it hits them. I tell them, "come on you guys, we got to make a prayer. Don't worry. Your daddy's watching you." But you know, it's very hard to make it as a dad as well as a mom.'

Who's who

· Sandy Gonzalez Special Agent in charge of the DEA in El Paso who was forced to resign after complaining about the official handling of the House of Death case

· Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Believed to lead the Juarez drug cartel. The US has a $5m bounty on his head.

· Heriberto Santillan-Tabares Known as 'the Engineer', he is a key henchman of the Juarez gang and the man who arranged the killings at the House of Death.

· Guillermo Ramirez Peyro Known as Lalo, he is a US government informant who worked as a henchman inside the Juarez drug cartel. Now in a maximum-security US jail.

· Fernando Reyes A Mexican lawyer, murdered at the House of Death. His killing was tape-recorded by Lalo

.· Johnny Sutton US Attorney for Western Texas and ex-adviser to Bush. Approved indictments against Santillan.

· Raul Bencomo The Ice Special Agent who was Lalo's main handler.

My God! Can this really be true?

Read like a story right from the Twilight Zone. The way they are willing just to cover it up makes me very suspicious of even the way they are handling the two border agents' case who recently went to jail. The AG has still not handed over the information that some senators are demanding.

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/ ... 221728/531

Appeals court ruling in House of Death case puts U.S. government in a pickle
By Bill Conroy,
Posted on Wed Feb 28th, 2007 at 10:17:28 PM EST
The House of Death informant’s odyssey through the U.S. Justice system has taken yet another turn.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has ruled that the informant’s deportation case should be returned to the Justice Department-controlled Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) for further proceedings.

The ruling is not unexpected, but the consequences for the government could be troublesome, since further proceedings may well result in additional embarrassing information surfacing about the House of Death mass murder and the pretense of the so-called war on drugs.



The informant, Guillermo Eduardo Ramirez Peyro, was on the payroll of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when he assisted in carrying out about a dozen murders between August 2003 and mid-January 2004 at the House of Death in Ciudad Juarez. Ramirez Peyro had attained high status in a Juarez-based narco-trafficking gang headed by Heriberto Santillan-Tabares, who himself was a capo in the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Juarez drug organization.
ICE’s complicity in Ramirez-Peyro’s murderous activities was reported to U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton by DEA whistleblower Sandy Gonzalez. However, Sutton chose to retaliate against Gonzalez rather than investigate his charges and take action against the ICE agents and a U.S. prosecutor who oversaw the informant — and who had allowed the murder spree to continue in order to make a drug case.

Sutton is a golden boy of the U.S. Justice Department and previously worked with U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as part of George W. Bush’s staff while Bush was governor of Texas. Since that time, Sutton has ridden the coattails of his “mentors” to the powerful position of U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas and also currently serves as chairman of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys, which helps set policy for the Justice Department.

After the House of Death murders became public knowledge through media reports, Ramirez-Peyro became a thorn in the side of Sutton and the Justice Department as well as the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE. That's because Ramirez Peyro could illuminate the complicity of U.S. government agents in the House of Death mass murder.

So once his role as an informant was deemed more of a liability than an asset, the Department of Homeland Security initiated deportation proceedings against him, with the goal of sending Ramirez Peyro back to Mexico, where he claimed he would be murdered by the narco-traffickers he betrayed.

Ramirez Peyro also, importantly, claimed that Mexican officials, including law enforcement at all levels of the Mexican government, were in league with narco-traffickers and as a result he would not be safe anywhere in Mexico, even if the Mexican government promised him protection.

Ramirez Peyro successfully convinced a U.S. immigration judge that he should be granted protection under Article III of the United Nations Convention Against Torture, or CAT. The U.S. government appealed that decision to the BIA, whose judges are appointed by and serve at the pleasure of the U.S. Attorney General. Not surprisingly, the BIA reversed the immigration judge’s ruling and order that Ramirez Peyro be returned to Mexico to face the music.

Ramriez Peyro’s attorney, Jodi Goodwin, appealed the BIA’s decision to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which recently issued its ruling. That court ordered that the case be returned to the BIA.

The legal maneuvering in this case is technical in nature, but one important point of the Eighth Circuit’s ruling is that the court made clear that the BIA is not to make findings of fact with respect to Ramirez Peyro’s case. In fact, if the BIA questions the immigration judge’s ruling on factual matters, it must return the case to the immigration judge for further proceedings. This is key, because at that level, Goodwin would likely have the opportunity to introduce even more evidence on her client’s behalf that is embarrassing and damaging to the U.S. government.

From the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling:


Nowhere did the Board [BIA] conclude that there was clear error in the IJ's [immigration judge’s] express finding that Ramirez was likely to be tortured by Mexican officials. Nor did the Board squarely address the evidence on which the IJ based this finding, including the concededly credible testimony of Ramirez about what he witnessed. Instead it cited isolated instances where the Mexican government has recently attempted to redress the major police corruption problem.
The Board also appears to have engaged in its own factfinding in contravention of its regulations by determining that any threat to Ramirez would be restricted to the northern part of Mexico, making it possible for him to relocate elsewhere. The IJ made no specific findings about the geographic reach of the Juarez Cartel or other major drug trafficking networks, although it did note that Ramirez appeared to be in danger even within parts of the United States. If the Board concluded that the IJ erred in not specifically addressing the possibility that police involvement in drug trafficking was a problem confined to the north of Mexico or that the cartel would not be able to reach Ramirez in other parts of the country, it should have remanded the case to the IJ for further factfinding.

… Although we conclude that the Board did not appear to apply the proper standard of review and engaged in its own factfinding, we nevertheless decline Ramirez's invitation to engage in our own analysis of the facts and their implications for his claim.

… The Board should be given the opportunity to discharge its statutory duty to review the IJ's factual findings for clear error and remand to the IJ for further proceedings if appropriate.

The Eighth Circuit’s instructions seem to put the BIA and the Department of Justice in an awkward position.

If the BIA upholds the immigration judge’s original findings, it also upholds that judge’s findings of fact with respect to the complicity of the Mexican government in drug trafficking. Given Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s much publicized recent “crack down” on narco-traffickers in his country, such a finding by the BIA might be seen as a diplomatic slap in the face and leave Calderon’s hard line on narco-trafficking open to international ridicule. Such a finding by the BIA would clearly imply that nothing of real substance could be accomplished in suppressing the narco-trafficking trade absent a wholesale bloodletting within Calederon’s own government. In essence, it would expose the hypocrisy of Calederon’s drug-war policies.

If, on the other hand, the BIA takes issue with the immigration judge’s findings of fact, then it should, per the appeals court's instructions, send Ramirez Peyro’s case back to the lower court for a review of those facts, which allows Goodwin the opportunity to introduce new evidence exposing the hypocrisy of the U.S. government’s war on drugs. That evidence could further illuminate the high-level nature of the House of Death cover-up and bring more public attention to the complicity of U.S. officials in mass murder.

Finally, if the BIA chooses to go the route of ruling that there is some technical legal error with the immigration judge's findings as a pretext for ruling against Ramirez Peyro, then the whole case will once again wind up back on the doorstep of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which might not look favorably on such a choice of tactics. After all, if there was really a solid leg to stand on with that approach, the BIA should have played that card in the first place.

It seems like the U.S. government is caught in a game of pickle, to use a baseball metaphor; only in this game, whichever base the government runs for will lead to an almost certain out for its side — assuming the umpires don't completely throw the game.

Now, couple that pickle with the highly embarrassing details of the pretense of the drug war that are now in the public record of one of the highest courts in the land, and you begin to see why the Department of Justice has gone to such great lengths to silence the informant Ramirez Peyro.

As evidence of that reality, following are excerpts from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in the Ramirez Peyro case:


Ramirez … filed an application for asylum, withholding of removal, and relief under the Convention Against Torture, claiming that he feared torture and death at the hands of the Juarez Cartel and Mexican law enforcement acting on the cartel's behalf. Ramirez had an interview with an asylum officer who found that he had a credible fear of persecution from the Mexican government based on his own testimony and a 2004 Department of State report that described the involvement of Mexican police officers in criminal activity, including acts of violence, on behalf of drug cartels.
… Ramirez claimed that he would be tortured and killed if he were removed to Mexico and that he feared retaliation not only from members of the Jaurez Cartel but also from members of the police force who worked on their behalf, alleging that all levels of the Mexican police had illicit connections to drug trafficking. He testified that while working as an ICE informant he witnessed police officers murder individuals at the behest of Santillan and other members of the Juarez Cartel, and that he saw many other bodies of individuals killed in a similar fashion. He also testified that Mexican authorities would often alert the cartel about informants, and that on at least one occasion Mexico's Federal Agency of Investigation (AFI) provided information to the cartel about a possible informant, leading to his murder.

… Ramirez further testified that ICE agents warned him that his life was in danger and that two attempts had already been made on his life in connection with his work for ICE. He stated that he and his family, which had been relocated to the United States for their protection and at the federal government's expense, had already been paid some $220,000 by the United States government for his work as an informant but that ICE had also orally agreed to give him resident status in this country. He testified that he was surprised when he was placed into removal proceedings. Ramirez was the only witness to testify at the hearing, but both parties submitted documentary evidence, including country reports from the Department of State confirming the close relationship between Mexican law enforcement and drug cartels, records detailing Ramirez's relationship with ICE, evidence that United States government officials were concerned for his safety, and newspaper accounts of his role as an ICE informant. Some of these news reports suggested that Ramirez's relationship with ICE had become a source of embarrassment for the federal government, since he had been present when cartel members murdered several rival drug traffickers and was alleged to have some role in those killings and or their cover-up.

… In an oral decision on August 11, 2005, the immigration judge (IJ) concluded that relief was "clearly" warranted under CAT, credited Ramirez's testimony, and noted that the documentary evidence indicated that "there are U.S. law enforcement officials who believe that this cartel would be most interested in having the respondent killed." The IJ found that the threat to Ramirez came not just from members of the cartel, but also from parts of the Mexican government:

“Mexican law enforcement, to a great extent, has carried out various crimes on behalf of the narco-traffickers in Mexico. And there really does not seem to be much dispute with the respondent's testimony that the Mexican police were involved in some of the killings he witnessed. Further, there is information that high-ranking national police officials in Mexico turned over information on informants to the cartel.”

The IJ determined that "it is more likely than not that [Ramirez] would be subjected to torture or worse were he returned to Mexico at this time" and granted his application for deferral of removal to Mexico.

Maybe the drug war has finally met its match in Ramirez Peyro, who, through his struggle to remain alive, is peeling back the layers of that pretense to reveal that it is rotten to its core.

The full ruling of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals can be found at this link.

Stay tuned….