THE BORDER MONSTERS

Mexico's Top Druglords, The Bloodthirsty Arellano Felix Brothers,
Horrify Even Tijuana

There are two ways to get a piece of the action at any of the big drug
markets along the border: pay off--or kill off--anyone who stands in
your way. But to gain exclusive control of the most lucrative gateway of
all, says a veteran U.S. drug cop, a drug cartel has to pay and kill
"beyond where any have ever gone before."

And so few boundaries--national, moral, legal--constrain the border's
worst bad guys: Benjamin Arellano Felix, 49, and his kid brother Ramon,
36. The two baby-faced playboys head the Tijuana cartel, which sits atop
Mexico's $ 30 billion drug-trafficking underworld and may be the most
powerful organization in the country of any kind. Each year they smuggle
to the U.S. hundreds of tons of cocaine, plus marijuana, heroin and
methamphetamine, ferried on ships, on planes and inside truckloads of
legitimate merchandise. The Arellanos are thought to have hundreds of
millions of dollars stashed away, and that's after bribing Mexican
officials, cops and generals to the tune of some $75 million a year.

As for murder, it has evolved from the cartel's last-ditch way to
protect market share into its preferred means of communication. "They
rule by terror," says Errol Chavez, special agent in charge of the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration's San Diego office. According to
testimony from former associates, Ramon often rises in the morning
announcing, "I feel like killing somebody today," then satisfies the
urge in ways designed to build the legend, feed the fear. Trademarks
include "the Colombian necktie"--cutting an informant's throat below the
chin, then pulling his tongue through the wound as he bleeds to death.
Or suffocating a rival with a clear plastic bag over his head while a
henchman named El Gordo (the Fat Man) bounces on his chest. But perhaps
Ramon's favorite ritual is carne asada--barbecue--executing entire
families and tossing their corpses on a bed of flaming tires, as he and
his goons celebrate with tequila and cocaine.

But if the Arellanos have a weakness, it may be their failure to see
that even the border's notorious criminal culture eventually has its
limits. It's true that since the Wild West days, when Billy the Kid
wintered in El Paso and Juarez, border natives have often been a law
unto themselves--a product of their historic, and justified, resentment
of racist gringos to the north and haughty chilangos (Mexico City
residents) to the south, who sneered at the border for being neither
American nor Mexican enough. "That identity crisis and alienation grew
into the violent face of the border," says sociologist Jose Manuel
Valenzuela of Tijuana's Colegio de la Frontera Norte. Coupled with the
region's poverty, it spawned a subculture of toughs, often called
pachucos and cholos.

Though the Arellanos are the heirs to that world, they are also a
ghastly mutation. Their uncle Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, an ex-cop
from the violent Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa, was the first Mexican
drug capo to link up with Colombia's cocaine cartels in the 1980s. He
and other druglords shared the Tijuana corridor, but after they savagely
murdered DEA agent Enrique Camarena in 1985, in league with senior
police and political figures, Mexican authorities put them in jail. Into
Tijuana roared the seven Arellano brothers, including the handsome
Benjamin, their CEO; chubby Ramon, the enforcer; finance-whiz Eduardo,
44, the money launderer; and the eldest, Francisco, 51, the gregarious,
cross-dressing pitchman who, say officials, cemented the clan's
top-drawer political and police alliances, usually out of his Mazatlan
discotheque, Frankie O's.

Via a multimillion-dollar monthly graft payroll and a string of chilling
murders--including that of a key rival's wife, whose head was reportedly
severed and delivered in a box of dry ice--the Arellanos realized their
audacious goal: to own the coveted stretch of desert from Tijuana to
Mexicali. During a 1992 summit of Mexican druglords at a Sinaloa ranch,
they raised the fees charged to others for using their turf. In
response, rival druglord Joaquin (Chapo) Guzman sent gunmen to kill the
Arellanos at a Puerto Vallarta disco. As bullets rained, the brothers
escaped through a bathroom skylight (after struggling to shove Ramon
through it). To retaliate, they targeted Chapo the following year at the
Guadalajara airport--and mistakenly killed Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas
Ocampo, who arrived in a car similar to Chapo's.

For a time, it looked as if the Arellanos had gone over the line. But
after offering confession and begging forgiveness in a secret meeting
with the papal nuncio, they simply stepped up the violence. They
recruited hardened gang members from San Diego, as well as the bored
sons of affluent Tijuana families--a trigger-happy cadre known as "los
narco-juniors." Mexican ex-military and police officers filled out their
ranks of assassins and helped train new members. They imported not only
guns but also heavy weapons from U.S. arms traffickers (they once
threatened to fire rocket-propelled grenades at U.S. drug czar Barry
McCaffrey during a border visit) and assembled enough state-of-the-art
surveillance equipment to know when even the lowliest dope trafficker is
cutting a free-lance deal on his cell phone.

Or when a good Mexican cop is working with the DEA. A few years ago,
Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo sent an earnest young police reformer,
Jose (Pepe) Patino, to help clean up Tijuana's corrupt police force. "Of
all the [Mexican police] I've ever worked with, he's the only one I ever
felt was honest," says a DEA agent who has investigated the cartel for
years. For his safety, Patino lived in San Diego. But in April 2000, two
Mexican federal police comandantes--who had been polygraphed, vetted and
trained by the U.S. to serve in a "clean" new antidrug unit--allegedly
lured Patino and two aides into a trap in Tijuana. Patino's head was
crushed in a pneumatic press, agents say, and the mutilated bodies were
found in a ditch the next day. (One of the crooked comandantes has been
arrested; the other is still a fugitive.) The cartel's message was
clear: challenge us and die.

So, how do you fight an enemy who has both more money and more firepower
than anyone else and fewer scruples about using both ruthlessly? Some
fear President Vicente Fox might not live out his term--largely because
he has shown signs of being ready to take down the cartel. His dreams of
a united hemisphere will never be realized so long as the Mexican
justice system is viewed by U.S. officials as addicted to drug money.

U.S. drug cops were encouraged by the extradition last month of one of
the cartel's top bosses, distribution maestro Everardo (Kiti) Paez
Martinez, whom Mexican police had arrested nearly four years ago. The
extradition--the first ever of a Mexican citizen to the U.S.--caused
celebration among jaded U.S. agents because Paez is a potential gold
mine of cartel intelligence. Coming one year after the arrest of Ramon's
partner in gore, Ismael Higuera Guerrero, who carried a special knife
for his stylized mutilations, the Paez extradition makes it harder for
the Arellano brothers to circulate freely through the streets,
nightclubs and boxing matches of Tijuana and Southern California.
"That's what really upsets them," says Chavez. "They can't go out and
party anymore."

Trapping Benjamin and Ramon is still almost impossible to imagine, short
of all-out war. Mexican authorities, however, "know where the brothers
are," insists Jesus Blancornelas, 65, editor of the Tijuana weekly Zeta.
Because of his reporting on the cartel--which included publishing
letters from mothers of Ramon's victims calling Ramon a
coward--Blancornelas was shot four times in broad daylight in 1997 by a
group that included Ramon's main hitman, David Barron Corona (a San
Diego gang member who was himself killed by a stray bullet between the
eyes during the botched assault). "If the will is there, and I think it
is," says Blancornelas, "it could happen soon."

But most Mexicans believe that U.S. customs agents are also on the take
and permit some vehicles to cruise through border inspection stations in
exchange for money. Just last month Jose Antonio Olvera, a U.S.
Immigration and Naturalization Service inspector at Tijuana-San Ysidro
border crossings, pleaded guilty to taking almost $90,000 in bribes to
let drug shipments through. (Olvera claims he did it because the cartel
had threatened to kidnap his five-year-old son.) "If relatively
well-paid U.S. agents aren't immune to it," says one Mexican prosecutor,
"how can we expect Mexican police to be?"

Still, Patino's murder may have bolstered Mexican government resolve.
Soon afterward, the Mexican army, acting on CIA as well as DEA tips,
arrested Ramon's buddy Higuera at one of his houses south of Tijuana as
he partied drunk and naked with two Colombian women. And patience with
the Arellanos may be wearing thin among the Colombian cartels, which are
often led by cultured narco-dons who view their Mexican allies as sloppy
and uncouth nacos, or hicks--a gang, U.S. agents say, that had to bury a
DC-7 in the Baja desert six years ago because it had failed to tell the
Colombian pilots, who were delivering 20 tons of cocaine, that landing
in the sand would wreck the jet engines.

The Colombians also grouse about the cartel's recent inability to make
payments, according to Mexican informants, a sign of weakening revenues.
Another indication: new competition from "grasshoppers," who are
circumventing Tijuana and going right to Los Angeles without paying the
Arellanos' fee--as proved by last month's record U.S. seizure of 13 tons
of cocaine being ferried overseas by Ukrainians. No one is suggesting
that the era of the Tijuana cartel is over, but as DEA agent Chavez
says, "We're definitely pushing back."