TOP DRUG TRAFFICKER CAPTURED IN MEXICO, GOVERNMENT SAYS

Alcides Ramon Magana Allegedly Worked With A Former Governor To Move 200
Tons Of Cocaine.

MEXICO CITY - Police and soldiers captured a top Mexican drug suspect as
he used a pay phone, the government announced yesterday, the same day
U.S. prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging that he and a former
governor moved 200 tons of cocaine through Mexico's Caribbean coast.

Authorities say Alcides Ramon Magana was the chief drug runner in the
Caribbean state of Quintana Roo, allegedly aided by the state's former
governor, Mario Villanueva.

Magana - described by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration as "one
of the most significant drug traffickers in Mexico" - and Villanueva
were named in the indictment unsealed yesterday in New York's Southern
District Federal Court.

Police had been hunting Magana for years. He was using a pay phone in
the eastern city of Villahermosa on Tuesday when authorities surrounded
him.

"As soon as he saw them, Magana took out a pistol. But when he realized
he was surrounded, he dropped it and surrendered," said a press
statement by Attorney General Rafael Macedo and Defense Secretary
Ricardo Vega.

"This is an important blow. The question is, what is their organization
going to do to replace Magana?" said Luis Astorga, a sociologist at the
National Autonomous University who studies the drug trade.

Villanueva, who disappeared two years ago after police started tailing
him, was arrested May 24 in the Quintana Roo resort of Cancun.

"Should he [Magana] decide to talk, and break the drug traffickers' rule
of silence, he could sink Mario Villanueva," Astorga said.

While U.S. prosecutors want to try Villanueva in the United States,
there is no current extradition request for Magana.

The Mexican air force flew Magana to the high-security La Palma prison
in Almoloya, west of Mexico City. He faces charges in Mexico of
organized crime, drug trafficking, illegal weapons possession and money
laundering. In the United States, he is charged with conspiracy to
import and distribute cocaine.

Investigators say Magana was a lieutenant of Ciudad Juarez drug lord
Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who died in 1997 after a plastic-surgery
operation to change his appearance.

Magana allegedly set up operations on Mexico's Caribbean coast to move
cocaine through Mexico to the U.S. border. As authorities describe it,
Colombian cocaine was dropped from light planes into the shallow waters
of the Caribbean. The bales of drugs were picked up by speedboats, taken
to land, and packed into trucks for the trip overland to the U.S.
border.

According to U.S. prosecutors who filed drug-trafficking charges against
Villanueva, Magana paid Villanueva protection money on each cocaine
shipment
through his state.