Thread: Suspect in Lebanese migrant smuggling ring freed, another em

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/mexi ... freed.html

Suspect in Lebanese migrant smuggling ring freed, another embarrassment for Mexico


By Morgan Lee
ASSOCIATED PRESS

8:45 a.m. July 15, 2005

MEXICO CITY – A judge has freed and cleared a former Mexican consul accused of participating in a ring that smuggled hundreds of Lebanese migrants into the United States, yet another setback for the Mexican Attorney General's office.
The release of Imelda Ortiz Abdala, consul to Lebanon from 1999 through 2001, suggests Mexican officials may have overreached as they went after a smuggling ring first prosecuted in the United States.

The Attorney General's office, which did not respond to requests for comment, has been embarrassed repeatedly by bad arrests in recent months, but often has blamed U.S. intelligence. Just this month, officials arrested a Mexico City architect at a shopping mall and held him for a week on suspicion he might be top drug lord Vicente Carrillo Fuentes.

The office later released the man and blamed information from two U.S. Justice Department witnesses. U.S. officials refused to comment.

Ortiz Abdala was arrested in Mexico City in November of 2003 as Mexican authorities rounded up several suspects linked to an alleged Lebanese migrant-trafficking organization run out of a Tijuana cafe by a man named Salim Boughader.

Boughader was convicted of smuggling about 200 Lebanese compatriots into the United States, including sympathizers of the militant group Hezbollah.

With the arrest of Ortiz Abdala, prosecutors claimed that migrant smugglers had penetrated Mexico's foreign service.

But 15 months after she was arrested with great fanfare, Ortiz Abdala was quietly freed in February after Foreign Relations Department officials testified that she acted properly and was never in a position to authorize visas on her own, according to Mexican court documents.

She just released details of her case recently to The Associated Press.

A daughter of a Mexican woman of Lebanese origin, Ortiz Abdala believes she was singled out within the consulate because of her heritage.

"Why was it only me?" Ortiz Abdala said. "You know why? Because of my last name."

Five detainees testified that they "categorically did not know" Ortiz Abdala, according to court documents.

Mexico's Foreign Relations Department confirmed that Ortiz Abdala remains an employee at the agency, but could not supply more information about her work history.

Mexican prosecutors opened their investigation in May 2003 with a visit from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigator Ramon Romo, who presented testimony against Boughader and several alleged members of his smuggling network.

Romo did not appear after being called to testify in court in Ortiz Abdala's case, according to Ortiz Abdala and her legal adviser, Alfonso Garcia.

A Department of Homeland Security representative in Washington declined to comment on the case, and Romo himself was not available.

The case was Mexico's latest high-profile arrest to fall apart under closer scrutiny.

Mexican prosecutors were embarrassed earlier in the year when a judge threw out charges against the former head of President Vicente Fox's travel office, who had been accused of passing the president's travel plans to drug traffickers.

Last month, Mexican officials arrested a Lebanese man who already had been cleared of terrorism suspicions by U.S. officials. Mexico said the United States failed to notify them the man had been taken off an international alert list.

Such finger-pointing is a marked departure from the cooperative tenor of U.S.-Mexico relations early on in President Fox's administration, when authorities captured Tijuana cartel leader Benjamin Arellano Felix and the alleged leader of the Gulf Cartel, Osiel Cardenas.

But an upswing of killings and kidnappings linked to battles between drug gangs in towns along the Mexico-U.S. border has stoked diplomatic tensions with the United States, which has cautioned American travelers.

"One can say that there is a sense of rising friction, not rupture," said Bruce Bagley, who specializes in drug-trafficking and security issues at the University of Miami. "The Mexican side feels put down. They feel slighted."

But a veteran agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in San Antonio, Texas, said U.S.-Mexico cooperation has continued to improve.

"It's a gradual reform," said Alonzo Pena. "It's finding who you can work with and proceeding in that manner."

The Attorney General's office, which did not respond to requests for comment, has been embarrassed repeatedly by bad arrests in recent months, but often has blamed U.S. intelligence.

On a bad day we have more "intelligence" than Mexico.

Nothing is ever the fault of Mexico.

I guess that is why they have such a great country, full of opportunity for their citizens.