A Priest and a Crime Caper.(accused murders look to Catholic priest for asylum, Mexico)

In the summer of 1993, not long after a Mexican cardinal was killed at the Guadalajara airport, Father Gerardo Montano was contacted by some old acquaintances. Ramon and Benjamin Arellano Felix, brothers who headed a powerful family drug cartel, had known Father Montano since he was their parish priest in Tijuana in the late 1970s. Now they urged him to send an unusual message to the Roman Catholic pope. Though warrants had been issued for their arrest, the Arellano Felix brothers wanted church leaders to know that they had nothing to do with the murder of Cardinal Juan Posadas Ocampo.

The Posadas murder case is one of the most sensational crimes in recent Mexican history. Official investigations have concluded that the cardinal was a victim of mistaken identity--that hit men for the Arellano Felix brothers confused him with a rival drug lord whom they'd targeted. A new book by Jorge Carpizo, Mexico's attorney general at the time of the killing, and Julian Andrade, supports the official viewpoint. But it contains some new information that opens a window on the complex relationship between church and state. In "Asesinato de un Cardenal," published in April, Carpizo reveals that Montano arranged two meetings between the brothers and Papal Nuncio Girolamo Prigione, then the Vatican's representative in Mexico City. He charges the Catholic priest with being "an accomplice of the Arellano Felix family," and he argues that Montano broke the law by not turning in the brothers when they were wanted by police.

The implication of the accusations reaches beyond the murder mystery. In 1860 Mexico enacted some of the world's strictest laws dividing church and state--and instilled the country with a deep secularism unmatched in most of Latin America. The church, however, largely continued to view itself as self-governing--beholden only to its own laws. It rarely dealt with the justice system. The old attitude was on display this spring when the U.S. pedophile-priest scandal spilled into Mexico. In April the Mexican Conference of Bishops defended the longstanding practice of covering up abuse cases to protect the reputation of the church and the victims. Some clergy members admitted that the church had paid victims "reasonable sums" of money for their silence. "Dirty laundry is best washed at home," Sergio Obespo, a top bishop, told a press conference. The church backed away from that position after a public outcry. "It has taken a long time for the Catholic hierarchy to come to terms with the creation of a higher authority than the church: the state," says Roberto Blancarte, a religion scholar at the Colegio de Mexico.

But it is the slaying of the cardinal that has proved the biggest test of modern church-state relations. Nine years after the event, the government and the church remain at odds over what happened on Monday, May 24, 1993. What's known is that the cardinal's white Grand Marquis arrived at the Guadalajara airport at a very bad time. (He was there to pick up the papal nuncio.) As the prelate stepped out of his car, investigators believe, gunmen mistook him for the enemy drug chief, Joaquin Guzman, or one of his bodyguards, and opened fire. In all, seven people died, none of them drug capos.

Top church officials, including Posadas's successor, Juan Sandoval Iniguez, have never believed the mistaken-identity theory. They've insisted that the cardinal was the target, fueling a popular conspiracy theory that the cardinal must have stumbled upon links between the government and the drug traffickers. Sandoval accuses Carpizo of a cover-up; infuriated, Carpizo once challenged Sandoval to side-by-side lie-detector tests.

It is the 50-year-old Montano--ironically ordained by Posadas--who's become a focal point of the case. He grew up in Tijuana and around 1978 befriended Ruth Corona, who went on to marry Benjamin Arellano ...