Texas agent indicted as graft sweeps Mexico border
Thu Jun 9, 2005 05:50 PM ET

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By Tim Gaynor

BROWNSVILLE, Texas (Reuters) - A court charged a former Texas county sheriff on Thursday with taking bribes from drug traffickers, the latest in an outbreak of cases of Mexican cartels corrupting law enforcement agents on the border.

Prosecutors and investigators say police, Border Patrol agents, border inspectors and even soldiers are increasingly being bought off by Mexican gangs seeking to ensure cocaine, marijuana and amphetamine shipments make it northward.

There have been more than a score of corruption indictments or convictions this year.

In Thursday's case, former Cameron County Sheriff Conrado Cantu was charged in Brownsville district court with heading a gang of five people who laundered drug money and extorted other drug traffickers, and with taking bribes from them.

Cantu, arrested on Wednesday near his home in San Benito, Texas, and three others were held without bond pending a detention hearing next week, court officials said.

At least three drug graft cases have been recorded in southeast Texas this year. In one last month, a senior Border Patrol agent from Laredo admitted taking $1.5 million from the cartels to wave pot shipments through highway checkpoints.

"Seventy-five percent of all narcotics consumed in the United States cross over the southwest border. That creates a huge economic incentive that lends itself to corruption" said Michael Shelby, the U.S. Attorney for southern Texas.

"The problem is that now the money is so enormous that the temptation associated grows in the same manner," he told Reuters by telephone.

He said there were four cases of corruption of public officials in southern Texas in 2001 and 17 last year, although not all involved bribery by Mexican cartels.

Further west in Arizona, 16 U.S. soldiers and law enforcement officers pleaded guilty in May to taking more than $220,000 in bribes to smuggle more than half a ton of cocaine from Mexico to cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas.

On June 7, prosecutors in San Diego, California, indicted the former head of an anti-corruption unit at the San Ysidro border crossing, accusing her of taking money from an inspector who was himself on the take from Mexican smugglers.

The indictment alleges that Daphiney Cagnap received presents including a "deluxe above-ground spa" valued at $10,000, repairs to her Mercedes-Benz car and cash payments ranging from $20,000 to $30,000.

SEDUCED BY DRUG MONEY

Mexican drug lords have long been accused of corrupting police, judges and politicians in their home country.

Neither prosecutors nor the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has jurisdiction in federal corruption investigations, will comment in detail on cases that are still before the courts.

But the probes leading to several recent convictions shed light on the modus operandi of Mexican drug cartels, who the FBI say often exploit friendships or family ties that reach south of the border.

"If (federal agents or inspectors) have ties to the border and Mexico and go over there frequently, they are going to make it easy for themselves to be pitched," Art Werge, the FBI's spokesman in El Paso, Texas, told Reuters.

Werge said inspectors with cash problems are often more susceptible to approach. Once in the pay of the cartels, they keep in touch with handlers by cell phones and pagers, arranging to run drugs through border checkpoints.

"It typically starts out with small test loads of drugs to see if there's a reaction. As they gain confidence, they start opening up ... and then there's no limit," he said.

The Department of Homeland Security, which has authority over immigration officers, has sought to frustrate graft at the border by switching inspectors between lanes at random, while unannounced searches are carried out by secondary teams using dogs, Werge said.

"This has now moved from being a domestic policy issue to a national security issue," Shelby said. "And that's why we've beefed up our efforts."