MEXICAN AUTHORITIES ARREST ALLEGED TOP DRUG TRAFFICKER

MEXICO CITY -- In Mexico's latest strike against the country's powerful
drug cartels, authorities on Thursday announced that they had arrested a
top trafficker without a shot being fired.

A team of army troops and federal agents seized Adan Medrano Rodriguez
Wednesday afternoon on a street corner in the city of Matamoros, just
across the border from Brownsville, officials of Mexico's justice
department said.

Medrano reportedly was on his way to pick up a new Chevrolet Suburban when
he was confronted by the arresting troops and police. Officials said he was
carrying a .38-caliber handgun but did not put up a fight.

Medrano was considered the No. 2 leader of the Matamoros-based Gulf cartel,
which traffics Colombian cocaine as well as Mexican heroin and marijuana,
across the Mexican border into Texas and points north as far as New York.

The cartel's boss, Osiel Cardenas, a former Mexican federal police agent,
remains a fugitive, and the United States is offering a $2 million reward
for his arrest.

Medrano, alias El Licenciado (The Lawyer), had been wanted by the FBI, the
Drug Enforcement Administration and Interpol. A U.S. indictment handed up
in 2000 charged Medrano and other cartel members with drug trafficking and
the 1999 assault of three U.S. federal agents on the Texas-Mexico border. A
$2 million reward was offered for information leading to his arrest.

John E. Gartland, special agent in charge of the Houston division of the
Drug Enforcement Administration, declined to comment.

Medrano was wanted in Mexico on weapons and cocaine possession charges,
attempted murder and involvement in organized crime. The authorities said
he was locked up in a Mexico City jail and will soon be transferred to the
La Palma maximum security prison, the current home of Mexico's most
notorious drug boss, Benjamin Arellano Felix.

Authorities arrested Arellano Felix on March 9 in the central state of
Puebla. U.S. officials have expressed their desire to extradite Arellano
Felix, said to have been responsible for a third of the drugs flowing into
the United States.

Earlier this week, the FBI confirmed that a man killed during a Feb. 10
shootout with police in the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa was in fact
Arellano Felix's younger brother and the cartel's violent enforcer, Ramon
Arellano Felix.

On March 14, federal agents captured Manuel Herrera Barraza, alias "El
Tarzan," said to be the Arellano Felixes' principal smuggler of marijuana
and cocaine into the western United States.

Mexican special prosecutor Estuardo Bermudez warned this latest arrest
could create a power vacuum in the region, touching off a bloody turf war
among rival cartels. Since the Arellano Felix's arrest, several people in
Tijuana have been killed in gangland-style murders linked to the cartel.

The Gulf cartel burst onto the Mexican drug scene in 1984, quickly becoming
one of the country's biggest cocaine and marijuana smuggling organizations.
The group dominates the drug shipping corridor extending from the southern
Gulf state of Veracruz to the northern border state of Tamaulipas. Drug
seizures linked to the cartel have been made in Houston, Brownsville, San
Antonio, Corpus Christi and Austin.