MEXICO CAPTURES TIJUANA DRUG LORD

Narcotics: The Arrest, And The Recent Death Of Another Arellano Felix
Leader, Could Spark A Power Struggle Within And Outside The Cartel.

MEXICO CITY -- Declaring one of the world's most powerful drug gangs
"dismantled," Mexican authorities announced the capture of Tijuana
drug mobster Benjamin Arellano Felix on Saturday while confirming the
death of his brother Ramon in a police shootout last month.

The blows to the Tijuana cartel are significant because it is thought
to control a quarter of all cocaine entering the United States from
Mexico. Both brothers were on the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration's most-wanted list and carried $2-million bounties for
their arrests.

Both also had eluded justice for a decade, protected by layers of
corrupt police, judges and politicians in Mexico who had been co-opted
by millions of dollars in bribes or intimidated by death threats that
Ramon allegedly enjoyed carrying out. The downfall of the Arellano
Felix brothers will by no means bring the flow of drugs from Mexico to
the United States to a halt. It could in fact raise the curtain on a
bloody new struggle for power both within and outside the gang for the
control of the lucrative Western drug-smuggling corridor.

Crusading Tijuana journalist Jesus Blancornelas said other members of
the numerous Arellano Felix clan may step into the leadership breach.
Brother Eduardo, a 48-year-old doctor, is the most likely to emerge as
the new leader, said Blancornelas, who survived an Arellano Felix-led
assassination attempt in 1997.

But the arrest of Benjamin, 49, the brains and chief executive of the
cartel, and the death of Ramon, a ruthless enforcer responsible for
hundreds of killings, drives a stake into a many-tentacled crime
syndicate. Mexican and U.S. officials lauded the armed forces' arrest
of Benjamin early Saturday as one of the most important blows yet
struck against Mexican narco-traffickers.

"It is a great triumph for justice and for the Mexican army . . . and
just one step in the work we have to do this year," President Vicente
Fox said in a statement. Fox's government has arrested several
mid-level narco-traffickers since taking office 15 months ago, but a
"big fish" had eluded it until Saturday.

In the United States, the arrest of Benjamin, who guided the growth of
the cartel, was seen by many as the clearest sign yet that the Fox
administration is serious about the war on drugs.

In Washington, DEA chief Asa Hutchinson praised Fox in a telephone
interview for "going after this very powerful and very violent
organization. . . . No one thought it could be done. The full credit
goes to the Mexican government."

Charles G. La Bella, a former U.S. attorney in San Diego who helped
lead the government's antidrug efforts there during most of the 1990s,
said the arrest of Benjamin, and of several other drug kingpins over
the last year, represents the biggest burst of "anti-drug activity
from Mexico in the last 30 years."

"But unless there is credible and consistent law enforcement
commitment in Mexico to attack drug trafficking, this is just going to
be a change of names" at the top, said La Bella, now an attorney in
private practice in San Diego.

Mexican Atty. Gen. Rafael Macedo de la Concha and Defense Secretary
Ricardo Vega held an early-morning news conference Saturday to
announce the capture and to declare that evidence points convincingly
to Ramon Arellano Felix's having died in a Feb. 10 police shootout in
the port city of Mazatlan.

Mexican army units captured Benjamin Arellano Felix in a 1 a.m. raid
in the wealthy Escondida neighborhood of Puebla, about 100 miles east
of the capital. Also arrested was associate Manuel Martinez Gonzalez,
alias "La Mojarra," or Big Fish. Arellano Felix's wife and two
children were present during the capture but were not taken into custody.

The arrest capped what officials said was a four-month pursuit.
Arellano Felix was later taken to an unspecified "secure location" and
was scheduled to be jailed at the La Palma prison in suburban Mexico
City.

One of two men killed in the February shootout in a Mazatlan public
square was initially identified as Jorge Perez. But reports soon
emerged that the victim was Ramon Arellano Felix, who had been using
false identification papers during a trip to Mazatlan to settle scores
with a rival trafficker, Ismael Zambada.

Macedo said authorities' confirmation of Ramon's death was based on
fingerprints and on Benjamin's statement after his capture that his
brother indeed had died. The government played a video for reporters
that showed Benjamin responding "Yes" when asked whether his brother
had been killed in the Mazatlan shootout.

Vega said a small altar with a photo of Ramon that was found in the
Puebla house where Benjamin was arrested "makes one assume he died."

Still, DNA analysis of the victim's bloodstained shirt has not been
completed. The body was cremated, and the blood, the morgue photos and
the fingerprints on his 9-millimeter revolver are the only evidence
authorities have to go on.

FBI officials on a special Arellano Felix task force based in San
Diego said they would await the results of DNA tests before being
certain about the victim's identity. Technicians are comparing a blood
sample taken from the body at the scene of the shootout with a sample
believed to be from Ramon's brother Francisco, now in jail.

William Gore, the special agent in charge of the FBI office in San
Diego, said it would be "premature" to dismantle the U.S. task force
formed to target the Arellano Felix cartel six years ago.

"Nobody believes that drugs will stop flowing into the United States
from northern Baja. [The question is] who's going to take over that
turf," Gore said. "Is it going to be a peaceful takeover or a violent
takeover? That's what we're watching."

The Arellano Felix family, including six brothers and at least two
sisters, is thought to have arrived in Tijuana from Sinaloa state in
the mid-1980s, having been given the Baja California liquor and
cigarette smuggling turf by an uncle, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo. The
family soon expanded its trade into marijuana and then cocaine, slowly
consolidating a regional monopoly.

>From the beginning, the Arellano Felixes were adept at melding into
Tijuana's moneyed class and recruiting the wealthy sons of business
and professional elites, dubbed "narco juniors," as hit men. They also
recruited assassins from gangs in the Barrio Logan section of San
Diego, who, among other hits, tried to kill Blancornelas, editor of
the newspaper Zeta.

While bribing police and politicians at the rate of a rumored $1
million a day, they were also building relationships with legitimate
businesses that laundered drug cash. A dozen such Baja businesses were
recently named by the U.S. government as off limits to U.S. trade.

The Arellano Felixes bought political influence by financing
candidates' electoral campaigns, said Jose Luis Perez Canchola, former
Baja California state prosecutor in charge of human rights and now an
attorney with the Mexico City district attorney's office.

"What set the Arellanos apart was their entrepreneurial vision," said
Victor Alfaro Clark, director of the Tijuana-based Binational
Commission on Human Rights and a visiting professor at San Diego State
University.

The family's vicious modus operandi--summed up as "bribes or
bullets"--co-opted the highest levels of Mexican police and
government. Many who didn't accept bribes were killed in brutal fashion.

"You either have to take money from them or die," DEA Special Agent
Donald Thornhill said in San Diego.

Among the hundreds of Arellano Felix victims were federal prosecutors
and local police officials. Although each of the three or four main
Mexican drug cartels was violent in its way, the Arellano Felixes were
especially brutal, often sadistic killers.

They burst into notoriety in May 1993 when gunmen allegedly led by
Ramon and including Barrio Logan thugs killed Mexican Cardinal Juan
Jesus Posadas Ocampo during what is believed to have been a botched
attempt at assassinating a rival drug boss.

That Ramon Arellano Felix would have been present at assassinations,
when he could have easily sent squads of hit men, doesn't surprise
those familiar with his career.

"He was crazy and bloodthirsty," Thornhill said.