A Mexican Murder Mystery: Chronicle of a Death Foretold?

MEXICO CITY — It was a sunny afternoon last week when Irma Ibarra, a former beauty queen known as a friend to army generals and drug dealers alike, nosed her gray Ram Charger up to a red light near downtown Guadalajara.

A white motorcycle pulled alongside and one of the two men riding the bike suddenly opened fire with a 9-millimeter pistol, hitting Ibarra in the chest, head and neck, a witness said.

The 44-year-old Ibarra died in the emergency room of a nearby hospital, leaving behind a murder mystery that many police and prosecutors here believe holds a key to the depth of drug corruption in the Mexican armed forces. That institution has been increasingly tarnished by the multibillion-dollar drug trade that brings hundreds of tons of cocaine and marijuana into the United States each year.

Authorities have blamed several recent slayings on drug-related disputes. But it is the unsolved killing of Ibarra, a Guadalajara attorney whom the local media have dubbed the “Mexican Mata Hari,” that is the focus of the most intensive probe yet by the nation’s new counter-narcotics squad.

Two days before she was killed, Ibarra had been named in military documents as a key conduit between major drug traffickers and senior officers of the Mexican armed forces. The military has been rocked by drug scandals since former anti-drug czar Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo was charged in February with taking bribes from the Juarez cartel allegedly run by the late Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Carrillo died July 4 after extensive plastic surgery.

In a letter released by the country’s top law enforcement agency Tuesday night, Ibarra appeared to reach out from the dead to finger the person responsible: a top Carrillo lieutenant.

The attorney general’s office said the letter, dated May 9, 1996, was slipped under her brother-in-law’s door five days after her killing. It was signed “Irma Ibarra” and notarized in Guadalajara on May 31, 1996, but the prosecutor’s office communique cautioned that the letter was a photocopy and that handwriting experts are trying to determine if the signature is genuine.

“If something happens to me for no apparent reason, I want to leave behind testimony,” the letter says. It then names two men who are wanted by Mexican authorities on drug trafficking charges as those who would be responsible for any harm that came to her.

The letter, addressed to her three sisters, said she had received numerous death threats and had found evidence that her car had been sabotaged.

One of the men her letter named, Eduardo Gonzalez Quirarte, has been accused by Mexican authorities of being the bag man who allegedly paid bribes to Gutierrez for protection of Carrillo and his operations. And U.S. and Mexican drug enforcement officials say he is among the potential heirs to Carrillo’s cartel.

It was impossible to confirm the authenticity of the letter. The attorney general’s office has been known to fake evidence. But the missive, published by most Mexican newspapers this week, was widely interpreted as another sign of a deep and potentially dangerous nexus between Mexico’s drug trade and the army--the government’s last line of defense against it.