DEADLY MESSAGES TO MEXICO

Some Officials Say The Arellano Felix Drug Gang Has Killed 1,000 People To
Assert Its Control. The Stories Of Two Victims Reveal Its Ruthlessness.

TIJUANA -- Their killings were surgical, their brutality unspeakable,
and their death toll on California's doorstep runs well into the
hundreds. Many of their victims were symbolic, chosen for the message
their slayings would send, and by all official accounts, the killing
was fun.

One victim was Jose "Pepe" Patino Moreno, a notably honest man who
worked amid the corruption of Mexico's counternarcotics squads. The
fearless, soft-spoken prosecutor who had won rare trust from U.S. law
enforcement was found in a steep ravine on the road to Tecate. His
head had been crushed by an industrial press; his 47-year-old body was
so broken it felt like a bag of ice cubes when they lifted it.

The message: No one is beyond the reach of the Arellano Felix
gang.

Alejandro Hodoyan has never been found. His mother watched helplessly
as her eldest son was kidnapped at gunpoint in broad daylight in
downtown Tijuana five years ago. She had been driving him to San
Diego, where Hodoyan was to enter the U.S. federal witness-protection
program.

The message: Don't snitch on the Arellano Felix brothers.

Known as the Arellano Felix Organization, Mexico's most powerful drug
gang has for more than a decade used violence and money to maintain
control of the lucrative Baja peninsula drug-smuggling corridor,
through which a fourth of the cocaine consumed in the United States is
funneled. A federal grand jury indictment filed in November 1999
called the gang a violent criminal enterprise run by two racketeering
brothers.

Other documents and sources uncovered by The Times in recent weeks
provide a rare inside look at the cartel's brutality, its
effectiveness and the ruthlessness of its leaders.

That portrait comes amid new hope that recent setbacks suffered by the
gang may mean its era of terror is nearing an end.

Ramon Arellano Felix, the enforcer who was on the FBI's 10 most wanted
list, is dead, killed in a February shootout with police in Mazatlan.
Brother Benjamin, the "chairman of the board," was arrested in Puebla
weeks later.

Yet the image the Arellano Felixes carved out for themselves remains
so fearsome that, even now, few people seem willing to speak out
against them.

U.S. officials, who are preparing a case to extradite Benjamin, insist
they have secret witnesses.

"We have spent millions of dollars to protect witnesses against the
Arellano Felix Organization," said Errol J. Chavez, head of the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration's San Diego office since 1997. "And
they're hidden throughout the United States. They're not all dead or
afraid to talk."

As yet, though, none have done so publicly, despite dozens of arrests
and prosecutions of the cartel's drug mules, midlevel assassins and
top lieutenants.

But the stories of the victims--pieced together from law enforcement
sources, official records north and south of the border and the
remembrances of family and friends--testify not only to the cartel's
inner workings but also to its corrosion of Mexican life.

"It's difficult to see any limit to the evil," said Patino's sister,
Maria Guadalupe Patino Moreno.

The official list of victims is so lengthy that the members of a
multi-agency U.S. task force set up to target the organization in the
mid-1990s finally gave up on a color-coded "Dead Chart" they had
designed. They had documented about 300 victims when they stopped
counting a few years ago. Some U.S. agents now put the toll as high as
1,000.

Among the dead are nearly two dozen Mexican law enforcement officials,
many of them corrupted by an estimated $1 million a week in bribes the
cartel spread around under a policy of plata o plomo--"silver or
lead"--according to former DEA chief Thomas A. Constantine.

A handful were honest police officers or prosecutors, men such as
Patino and Baja California state prosecutor Hodin Gutierrez Rico, who
was shot more than 120 times in front of his family and then run over
repeatedly by a van.

There were rival, upstart drug traffickers who failed to pay the
Arellano Felixes for transit rights through the Baja corridor.
Authorities say the cartel punished one such group in Ensenada in
September 1998 by lining up 18 men, women and children and executing
them one by one.

Other victims were from the gang's own ranks--suspected embezzlers or
potential informants, cartel lawyers who knew too much, even family.

"It's not just to kill someone. It's terrorism," said William Gore,
who heads the FBI's San Diego office. "It's to intimidate an entire
population.... And that's how they stayed in power so long."

Added Don Thornhill, a DEA veteran of the war on the Arellano Felixes based
in San Diego: "If you know your kids are going to get killed, your mother,
your wife, that helps keep people in line."

Here, based on official documents and sources, is the story of two of
the victims: one an insider who produced the only portrait on record
of the family's methods and moods, the other an outsider, a cartel
hunter whose killing was a catalytic event, several law enforcement
officials say, that paved the way for Benjamin's capture and Ramon's
death.

"To kill is a party. It's fun. No remorse or anything. They smile
after an assassination, and they go eat a lobster in Rosarito. Pure
lawlessness. That's what this thing is."

The words are Alejandro Hodoyan's, describing the network of assassins
loyal to Ramon Arellano Felix. His videotaped comments--made in 1996,
after weeks of torture by the Mexican military, Hodoyan later
alleged--live on, five years after Hodoyan himself vanished.

U.S. and Mexican officials insist that Hodoyan's brother, Alfredo, was
among the Arellano Felix assassins--a young man from a well-off
Tijuana family who was one of the so-called Narco Juniors.

Alfredo, who was extradited from San Diego in 1999, is on trial now in
Mexico City in the killing of a corrupt federal police commander,
Ernesto Ibarra Santes, who allegedly was slain because of his loyalty
to a rival cartel. Ibarra died in early September 1996, the day after
Alejandro Hodoyan was picked up by a military counternarcotics squad.

Military authorities held Alejandro for months until, after what he
later described as constant beatings in documents on file in San Diego
federal court, he agreed to provide an insider's view of the
organization.

Alejandro, a native of San Diego and captain of his Tijuana high
school basketball team, had been friends with Ramon and his top
assassins since they were kids, he said. But throughout months of
interrogation, Hodoyan insisted that he was never directly involved in
the cartel's multi-ton drug deals or its many killings.

Rather, he cast himself as something of a confessor. The gang leaders
and their lieutenants came to his apartment, he told investigators.
They drank beer. And they spun out story after story of how they did
business.

Hodoyan's confessions--some on file in U.S. federal court and the rest
contained in a bootleg copy of his videotaped statement (the official
copy remains under federal court seal)--reveal details of the cartel
and its leaders.

He describes how the group's killing of Guadalajara's Roman Catholic
cardinal, Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo, in 1993 was a rare error, how
Ramon and his assassins mistook the prelate for a rival drug lord who
had tried to kill the brothers at a Puerto Vallarta discotheque the
previous year.

The cardinal's killing catapulted the brothers into the public eye in
Mexico and led to the jailing of Francisco, the eldest, the following
year.

Hodoyan also explained the brothers' Mafia-esque hold on their
followers.

Indeed, despite their recent successes against the two top Arellano
Felix brothers and an apparent resolve to target the cartel after
Patino's death, Mexican authorities have yet to charge anyone
specifically with his killing.

And that too bears a message.

"It's demoralizing for other prosecutors when they see that happen to
the Patinos, to be mistreated by their own government," said Jose Luis
Perez Canchola, a former Baja California state attorney general for
human rights based in Tijuana.

A senior U.S. law enforcement official said: "If that happened to a
U.S. law enforcement officer, we'd leave no stone unturned--legal or
illegal--to find out who did it.

"The real problem is cultural. In Mexico, people don't think people
get killed for doing the right thing."