Conroy: U.S. Prosecutors Cut Deal to Bury "House of Death"

April 21, 2005
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Dear Colleague,

Bill Conroy posts another update on the "House of Death" case today in the Narcosphere. Conroy reports that prosecutors accepted a plea bargain from accused Juárez drug lieutenant Heriberto Santillan-Tabares, which drops murder charges despite his known involvement in a series of gristly killings in the Mexican border city. The deal goes a long way towards covering up the mass murder that took place in a Juárez house, with the help of a paid U.S. customs informant, last year.

Conroy writes:

"This whole case is a blatant miscarriage of justice because it essentially allows people to get away with murder. We have to keep in mind what happened here.

"A DEA supervisor in El Paso, Sandalio Gonzalez, drew the first blood from the monster when he fired off a letter in February 2005 to ICE officials in El Paso, Texas. Gonzalez' letter blew the whistle on the alleged cover-up of the ICE agents' complicity in multiple murders in El Paso's sister city of Ciudad Juárez.

"An informant by the name of Jesus Contreras, also known as 'Lalo,' played a critical role in snaring Santillan. Between August 2003 and mid-January 2004, a dozen people were tortured, murdered and then buried in the yard of a house in Ciudad Juárez. Contreras, according to law-enforcement sources, participated in many of those murders.

The informant's handlers, agents and supervisors with the El Paso office of ICE, were allegedly fully aware of Contreras' complicity in the murders, yet did nothing to stop the killing for fear of jeopardizing the Santillan case and a separate cigarette-smuggling case that they were trying to make with the informant's help."

Read the full report in the Narcosphere:

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2005/4/20/234352/486

From somewhere in a country called América,

Dan Feder
Managing Editor, Narco News
http://www.narconews.com
webmaster@narconews.com