STILL AT LARGE

Within the past year, two presidents of Mexico have vowed to break the
Tijuana-based narcotics-trafficking cartel known as the Arellano Felix
Organization and arrest its leaders. On this side of the border, U.S. law
enforcement, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, lists bringing the Arellanos to justice and
combating their massive narcotics smuggling as top priorities.

Yet, the Mexican presidents' announced deadlines for breaking the Tijuana
cartel's power and apprehending its leaders come and go without effect.
U.S. law enforcement, while achieving some successes against the AFO and
helping Mexico to accomplish several others over the past year, has also
failed to score anything close to a knockout blow.

Errol J. Chavez, chief of the DEA's San Diego office and a veteran
narcotics officer, says he believes that recent efforts "have the AFO on
the run." Chavez lists several indicators suggesting that the Tijuana
cartel's drug smuggling, narcotics production, financial and security
operations have all been disrupted.

But Chavez's optimistic assessment stops short of claiming any decisive
victories over the cartel.

William D. Gore, special agent in charge of the FBI's San Diego office,
says he is "cautiously optimistic" that Mexico's new government under
reformist President Vicente Fox will, in fact, prove a tougher foe of
narcotics trafficking than past Mexican administrations.

"I truly believe that he (Fox) would like very much to eliminate that
cartel," Gore says.

Citing several recent arrests in Mexico of suspected AFO operatives, plus
the pending extradition to the United States of alleged AFO lieutenant
"Kitti" Paez, Gore muses that "they're looking over their shoulders now."

Nonetheless, there is still an undercurrent of discouragement running
through the ranks of others enlisted here in the U.S. government's campaign
against the Arellano Felix cartel. Privately, some paint a rather more
bleak picture than that sketched by Chavez and Gore.

They describe a flagging effort in the long, frustrating campaign to defeat
the Tijuana cartel. They complain that neither U.S. law enforcement
agencies here nor their Washington superiors have a specific strategy for
defeating the AFO. And some grumble about what they see as a lack of
aggressive overall leadership among the welter of federal agencies -- DEA,
FBI, U.S. Customs and the Justice Department's U.S. Attorney's Office in
San Diego, among others -- that share responsibility for countering the
Tijuana cartel's myriad criminal activities.

"There's no local strategy and no national strategy. There's just too
little being done," says one knowledgeable source who spoke on condition of
anonymity.

What is undisputed by anyone is that the Arellano Felix Organization
remains very much in business. It continues shipping annually literally
tons of cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine, plus Mexican black-tar
heroin, across the Southwest border into the United States. The AFO is
believed to supply more than a fifth of all cocaine consumed in the United
States.

The Tijuana cartel's profits from this illicit trade in addiction, misery
and death still reach into the billions of dollars each year.

Cartel leaders Benjamin and Ramon Arellano Felix, despite being
international fugitives wanted by the U.S. and Mexican governments,
defiantly retain their headquarters and principal residences in Tijuana or
the northern Baja California area, according to U.S. law enforcement officials.

Their continued operations and seeming impunity mock the law enforcement
campaigns against them.

Ramon Arellano Felix has been on the FBI's 10-Most Wanted List since 1997,
when he was first indicted by a federal grand jury in San Diego on drug
trafficking and related charges. Benjamin and Ramon were indicted last May
by another San Diego federal grand jury on 10 counts of drug trafficking,
money laundering and aiding and abetting crimes of violence.

The U.S. State Department has authorized $4 million in rewards for
information leading to the arrest or conviction of the brothers.

So why are the apparently determined efforts of two governments still not
sufficient to break a notorious drug ring operating under their noses along
their mutual border?

On Mexico's side of that border, the reasons remain drearily familiar.

The State Department's recent report on Mexico's drug-fighting efforts
provided this summary analysis:

"Chronic problems of corruption, weak police and criminal justice
institutions, budget constraints, and severe poverty in rural areas where
drug crops are cultivated hamper Mexico's ability to combat drug trafficking."

Of these deficiencies, corruption is by far the most ruinous to effective
action against the powerful, wealthy Arellano Felix Organization.

Billions of dollars in drug profits allow the AFO to buy protection at
every level of Mexico's government. Notwithstanding President Vicente Fox's
evident sincerity and determination to attack corruption in Mexican law
enforcement, no one expects that he can succeed quickly, and perhaps not at
all, in nullifying the corrupting influence the AFO has been buying since
the 1980s.

For an object lesson, President Fox might review the latest evidence of how
insidiously and effectively this corruption shields the cartel.

Almost exactly one year ago, a highly promising investigation of the
Arellano Felix Organization by the Mexican attorney general's office ended
in grisly tragedy. The mangled bodies of Mexican drug prosecutors Jose
"Pepe" Patino Moreno, Oscar Pompa Plaza and Rafael Torres Bernal were found
last April 11 in a ravine off the Tijuana-Mexicali highway.

They were victims of unspeakable torture. Their killers were presumed to be
from the Arellano Felix Organization they had been investigating on special
assignment from Mexico's then-attorney general, Jorge Madrazo Cuellar, and
the head of his anti-narcotics task force, Mariano Herran Salvatti.

There was widespread speculation at the time that Patino and his team had
to have been betrayed by someone inside the attorney general's
organization. How else could the killers have known of the Patino team's
unpublicized assignment? And how else could they have learned the details
of a work schedule kept confidential by a team so security conscious that
Patino, Pompa and Torres spent nights sleeping at a safe house in the San
Diego area?

Now investigators in Mexico and the United States say they know.

Pepe Patino's team was betrayed by officials of the Mexican attorney
general's elite anti-narcotics task force, known by its Spanish acronym,
FEADS. The chief suspect cited in the U.S. State Department's annual report
on Mexico's drug certification is identified as Cesar Jimenez, a senior
FEADS commander formerly assigned to Tijuana.

"It's clear that Mexican law enforcement viewed him as a suspect in the
abduction and murder of Pepe Patino," the FBI's Gore said in an interview
last week.

Other U.S. law enforcement sources echo Gore's comments. On at least two
occasions, a source said, Jimenez's superiors were warned by U.S. officials
that their Tijuana comandante was cooperating with the Arellano Felix
Organization.

Jimenez was finally relieved of duty and recalled to Mexico City following
the murders of Patino, Pompa and Torres, according to U.S. officials.
Placed under active investigation and questioned about the Patino team's
demise, Jimenez disappeared and is now a fugitive, these sources report.

U.S. investigators believe Jimenez and a second FEADS comandante in Tijuana
were on the AFO's payroll. Jimenez, sources say, answered to the Tijuana
cartel's powerful and ruthless chief of operations, Ismael Higuera
Guerrero, a.k.a. "El Mayel."

Patino and his two deputies were intercepted just as they crossed into
Mexico at the Otay Mesa border checkpoint on the morning of April 9. Their
apparent abductors were described as heavily armed members of Mexico's
Federal Judicial Police, who serve under the jurisdiction of Mexico's
attorney general. Sources say Patino's car was probably boxed in and
stopped by two or more vehicles whose occupants abducted Patino's team only
a few blocks from the Otay Mesa checkpoint.

Some 48 hours later, the three hideously tortured bodies were found dumped
in the ravine. Presumably, their interrogator/torturers extracted
everything that Patino, Pompa and Torres had learned and reported about
their investigation of the AFO. Patino and his two deputies also presumably
confessed their close collaboration on the AFO investigation with the DEA
and FBI.

Corruption is one half of the bribery-or-death choice commonly offered
those who might threaten the AFO. The other half is savage and lethal
retribution.

There is reason to suspect that the cartel recently turned its killers
loose on several of its own family members, possibly to protect the
organization from a perceived threat.

As reported in The San Diego Union-Tribune last October, two unidentified
women and a child were abducted at gunpoint by eight armed men at a busy
intersection in Tijuana. Little more was known publicly and the case faded
from view when, according to sources, relatives of the kidnap victims
declined to cooperate with police.

But a member of U.S. law enforcement's local task force on the Arellano
Felix Organization says that the two women were the mother-in-law and
sister-in-law of Eduardo Arellano Felix. Eduardo is the brother of cartel
leaders, Benjamin and Ramon, and is considered a lesser cartel figure by
U.S. officials. The child was identified as Eduardo's six-year-old
daughter, now reportedly in her father's custody.

Sonia Martinez, Eduardo's common-law wife, and her mother and sister have
disappeared, the task force source reported. All are feared dead, other
sources say, presumed victims of the Arellanos' deadly paranoia.

Sonia and her two small children were badly burned in a propane cooker
explosion in Tijuana in November 1998. They received extended treatment at
UCSD Medical Center's Regional Burn Center in San Diego. Last year,
according to sources, Sonia's infant son died in Tijuana of his injuries
and Sonia's relationship with Eduardo apparently dissolved.

Law enforcement sources theorize that the security-obsessed Arellanos may
then have decided that an embittered and burn-disfigured Sonia, angry over
the failure of her marriage and grieving for an infant son whose death she
may have blamed on Eduardo and the underground life they led, presented a
threat of betrayal to the authorities.

Their brutally cold answer, sources speculate, may well have been to
dispose of Sonia and her mother and sister permanently.

If so, it would demonstrate yet again that the Arellano Felix
Organization's ruthlessness and brutality recognize no limits.

But, then, that comes as no surprise.

A cartel conservatively estimated to have committed perhaps 500 murders
keeps killing on a regular basis.

Drug-linked murders in Baja California alone (just one of the six Mexican
states where the Arellanos operate) are currently running at about 20 or so
per month. That's counting only the numbers officially reported, which may
be well below the actual totals. Most of these Baja killings are in the
Tijuana area and most, it's safe to assume, are the day-to-day work of the
Arellano Felix Organization.

Mexican President Vicente Fox vowed bravely last December to defeat the
Arellanos and restore "peace" to Tijuana within six months.

"There is absolutely no doubt that we can and will defeat them. The problem
is that they are hidden by the society they live in. They are hiding with
their laundered narco-trafficking money, and the challenge is to find them.
That is why we need to saturate the city (with law enforcement
authorities)," said Fox.

The highly publicized subsequent sweep of Tijuana by 750 paramilitary
Federal Judicial Police, like past such efforts, proved largely an exercise
in public relations. That isn't how the Arellanos are ever likely to be caught.

What Fox and his government need is more of the patient intelligence and
investigative work and, reportedly, the close collaboration with U.S.
intelligence that resulted in two spectacular successes against the
Arellanos last spring.

The arrest of Jesus "Chuy" Labra Aviles, reputedly the Arellanos' chief
financial adviser and money launderer, was an undoubted shock and a serious
setback to the Tijuana cartel.

An even bigger success was the spectacular capture near Ensenada last May
of Ismael Higuera Guerrero, the infamous "El Mayel." Higuera allegedly ran
all of the cartel's daily operations. He reportedly answered directly to
Benjamin and Ramon and was the cartel's third-most-important figure.

Bagging Higuera ranks with the 1997 arrest in Tijuana of alleged Arellano
lieutenant Everardo Arturo Paez Martinez.

If, as U.S. officials earnestly hope, Paez becomes the first Mexican drug
kingpin extradited to the United States to face trial here, the potential
adverse consequences for the Arellano Felix Organization could be immense.

For all this to work, Washington needs to help, too.

What's been lacking in recent years in efforts against the AFO are strong
direction and priority emphasis from the White House, Justice Department
and State Department, plus the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies.

The Bush White House recognizes that only reducing the demand for drugs in
this country offers any hope of "winning" the war against drugs.

But, in the meantime, the AFO and Mexico's other drug cartels threaten to
destabilize that country.

In the Baja region, the Arellano Felix Organization continues to operate as
a de facto state within a state. It usurps the authority of legitimate
government in Tijuana, Baja and beyond. It challenges and mocks the rule of
law without which the historic reforms now under way in Mexico cannot
ultimately succeed.

For Mexico and the United States alike, failure to defeat the Arellano
Felix Organization must not be an option.

Caldwell is editor of the Insight section.