When Mexican anti-drug agents turned suspected drug trafficker Juan Garcia Abrego over for trial in the U.S., Mexico's reform-minded elites were furious. They wanted Abrego tried in Mexico to get information on his alleged bribery of Mexican officials. But equally important to his career was his bribery of U.S. federal agents, documented in earlier federal trials but largely ignored on the U.S. side of the border. PNS associate editor Beatriz Johnston Hernandez is West Coast correspondent for Proceso.

Accused drug trafficker Juan Garcia Abrego, now awaiting trial in Houston, is notorious for bribing high-level Mexican officials to help turn Mexico into a major transshipment point for Colombian cocaine. Less known is his role in bribing federal officials on the U.S. side of the border.

Information gleaned from drug trials and gang insiders reveals that Abrego paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars to Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents and National Guardsmen to drive cocaine and marijuana in their buses past U.S. customs checkpoints on the road between McAllen and Houston.

But Peter Lupsha, a political scientist at the University of New Mexico who has studied drug trafficking on the border for two decades, believes the true extent of Abrego's bribery of U.S. officials may remain hidden behind a "conspiracy of silence" aimed at preventing a meltdown of public trust.

Abrego is being held without bond in the Harris County jail on a 1993 indictment on charges of cocaine trafficking, money laundering and racketeering. His arrest and deportation to the U.S. by Mexican anti-drug agents last month caused an uproar among Mexico's reform-minded elites who want him tried first in Mexico in the hopes of gleaning information on bribed Mexican officials.

Abrego's trial in federal court, due to open on March 11, will focus little attention on corruption in Mexico and still less on corruption in the U.S. On the contrary, at least one star witness for the prosecution -- FBI special agent Claudio de la O -- will testify how he accepted $100,000 and a gold watch from Abrego in September 1987 as part of an undercover scheme to gain the defendant's trust and information on drug dealings.

Transcripts of the 1993 federal trials in Brownsville and Houston of four Abrego underlings, however, reveal how INS drivers would transport undocumented agents caught in Houston south to INS detention centers close to the border. On their way back north, the agents would load the empty buses with Abrego's marijuana and cocaine loads worth millions of dollars.

"Agents were corrupted for brief periods. Once they got enough money, they decided it wasn't worth the risk, so they would stop doing it, but others came in to take their place," Peter Hanna, an FBI agent out of Houston who has focused on Abrego for the last seven years, told PNS in a telephone interview.

INS bus transfers weren't the only incidence of bribery revealed under oath. Jaime Rivas, a cocaine mule for the Abrego organization, was in charge of delivering coke to a safehouse in Harlingen and from there on a convoluted route through Houston and on to New York.

Testifying at a 1991 trial in Corpus Christi of accused Abrego hitman Miguel Botello and again in the 1993 money laundering trial of Maria Lourdes Reategui and Antonio Giraldi in Brownsville, Rivas explained how the gang was able to transport between 1000 and 1400 kilos of cocaine each week past U.S. Customs checkpoints. In the 1993 trial he recalled how one delivery went awry at the Sarita checkpoint between McAllen and Houston.

"Graciel Contreras and Juan Bananas were in the truck ... . The one (agent) at the checkpoint had been paid off, and Juan Bananas was the one who knew him, so he was the one to give the signal so the truck with the coke could pass. " But something went wrong and the shipment was confiscated, said Rivas, who was watching from another car behind the truck.

Although Houston FBI investigators knew that INS agents were involved in the drug trade since early 1991, only one agent has since been tried and sentenced to 10 years without parole. Another, according to a spokesperson at the U.S. attorney's office in Houston, "failed to appear in federal court to stand trial on charges of drug conspiracy, money laundering and bribery."

Abrego's corruption of U.S. officials "goes beyond INS," Lupsha believes. "Customs officials are very sensitive about the Abrego trial because some major corruption schemes could surface implicating former Customs officials ... . And it might go higher than local regional INS agents."

Lupsha surmises many INS agents may have been seduced by women on the Abrego payroll who then would ask the agents to "do a favor for my uncle, or my cousin." Many agents avoided getting caught by applying for early retirement.

"Clearly," Lupsha says, "there is a reluctance within the United States, as in any system, to let the dirty laundry hang out publicly. To do so would mean the drug war has not only failed in the supply side, it's failed on the demand side and in the interdiction side as well. That's very bad for public confidence."