The entire federal police detachment in the state of Baja California Sur has been transferred after failing to intercept - and possibly even helping - narcotics traffickers who landed a passenger jet loaded with tons of cocaine on a dry lake bed, the authorities said.
Witnesses said 20 men wearing the black windbreakers of the federal police helped unload the $100 million cargo from the French-made Caravelle jet at an airstrip less than a mile from the Pacific Ocean near the southern tip of Baja California Sur.The federal police commander in Baja California Sur and his 29 officers were transferred to headquarters in Mexico City on Saturday but were not arrested, Hector Cruz Solorzano, the top federal prosecutor in the state, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.
Mexican and U.S. officials said investigators had retrieved serial numbers from the jet's turbines and traced its ownership to the Cali cocaine cartel.
The landing on Nov. 5 underlined the Colombian cartel's continuing ability to organize large narcotics shipments despite the arrest of most of its top leadership earlier this year, the Mexican and U.S. authorities said.
The landing of the Caravelle, near the Baja village of Todos Santos, was first reported in The Los Angeles Times. In a hard landing well before dawn, the plane damaged its nose gear and was immediately surrounded by armed men in federal police uni-forms, who arrived at the site in a convoy of four-wheel-drive vehicles, fishermen who witnessed the landing told investigators. The uniformed men unloaded the cargo, which has disappeared.
The men then went to work trying to conceal the crippled plane, Cruz said.
Witnesses, including the state police commander, who viewed the state's 30 federal police officers in a lineup last week, did not identify any of them as the armed men at the landing strip, Cruz said. He called the 30 agents' sudden transfer to Mexico City "a routine rotation."
A Mexican government official disagreed. "This was an attempt to clean up a bad situation," he said.