THE BORDER REPORT

The bodyguard for a Mexican border town narco-trafficker who also happened to be the police chief was sentenced this morning in U.S. District Court today and will be deported to Mexico next week.

Julio Cesar Lozano Lopez, 29, was arrested in March 2005 after his boss, Sonoyta public safety director Ramon Robles Cota, was accused of trying to bribe a U.S. Border Patrol agent with $80,020.

Lozano Lopez was a municipal police officer working under Robles Cota when both men were arrested in Gila Bend, Ariz.

The case started in January 2005.

The organization Robles Cota worked for had a tractor-trailer full of marijuana they needed to move across the border.

He contacted the agent, and they agreed to set up a meeting in the United States to discuss his offer.

On Feb. 17, Robles Cota and Lozano Lopez traveled to Gila Bend. They didn’t know they was about to meet with a federal agency sting.

Robles Cota tried to bribe the agent to allow vehicles loaded with marijuana to cross the border near Menagers Dam on the Tohono O’odham Nation. He also agreed to set up a future meeting in Tucson to negotiate a final bribe.

About 10 days later, the two met with the agent in Tucson. Robles Cota told the agent the organization he works for moves about 60 carloads of marijuana across the border every month.

The organization had a tractor-trailer rig filled with pot and asked the agent to clear the border for two hours so “they could send in three to four vehicles with marijuana every couple of minutes,” the criminal complaint against him states. In exchange, Robles Cota said that the organization was willing to pay $25,000 for every vehicle the agent protects.

Then the police chief agreed to pay the agent a $100,000 advance on the bribe. Other U.S. agents were monitoring the meeting.

On March 15, the two men met in a Tucson parking lot with the agent. Robles Cota carried a plastic shopping bag holding the $80,020 and handed it off to the agent. He also supplied him with a radio to communicate with the drug traffickers.

Wiretaps recorded their subsequent phone conversations. Robles Cota agreed to meet with the agent in Gila Bend to deliver a new radio and discuss the crossings.

Just before the meeting, an Arizona Department of Public Safety officer pulled the men’s pickup truck over and the federal agents moved in to arrest him.

Mr. Lozano agreed to plead guilty earlier this year and was sentenced to time served in prison. His lawyer, Sean Chapman, said the Naco, Sonora, man is a former schoolteacher who will probably be deported next Monday and return to Naco. Sixteen members of his family attended the sentencing today but declined to be interviewed.

The United States prosecutor, Mary Sue Feldmeier, agreed to a time served sentence because Lozano Lopez never knew he was being used as a bodyguard while Robles Cota tried to negotiate a bribe. He only found out what Robles Cota was up to once they approached the agent.

But, he soon found out after the first visit and continued to come in anyway, she said.

“He betrayed the trust of the people of Mexico,” she said.

U.S. District Court Judge John M. Roll said Lozano Lopez could have faced a 4 to 10 month sentence plus a fine and 12 months probation. But he has already served 14 months since he was first arrested.

Wearing a wrinkled orange jumpsuits, shackled at the wrists and ankles, Lozano Lopez apologized to the judge and pleaded for a fair sentence.

Curiously, the United States has never said which agency the agent Robles Cota tried to bribe worked for. In court files, the person is only identified as an agent.

It was the missing Hermosillo, Sonora, reporter, Alfredo Jiménez Mota, who uncovered that the agent worked for the U.S. Border Patrol.

He also made connections that Robles Cota worked for a shadowy Sonora drug gang, Los Numeros, aka Los Gueritos (the little blondes).

Jiménez Mota tied him back to the Navojoa-based gang and questioned how a 29-year-old police chief who made about $13,000 a year, was able to afford a swank home in tiny Sonoyta.

He also tied him back to the leader of Los Numeros, Raul Enriquez Parra, a Navojoa, Sonora, drug trafficker and his main nemesis.

It was the last story he wrote. Alfredo disappeared a week later.

After his April 2 disappearance, a collaborative team of reporters throughout Mexico produced its report into the case, naming Enriquez Parra as a key suspect in the Mexico Attorney General’s Office investigation.

We may never know; Enriquez Parra was killed in October last year, shot in the head, his body wrapped in an American flag and tossed out of an airplane.

Disappeared reporters aside, the case is a bit more audacious than typical corruption stories in Mexico. In this case, a Mexican officer pleads guilty after going on a weapons buying spree.

The case is interesting but less so than a renegade police chief with a semi-truck full of weed.

Robles Cota has a trial date set for August.