IN NOGALES, SONORA, LIFE IMITATES DRUG MOVIE VIOLENCE

NOGALES, Sonora - Advance scouts from Hollywood chose this border city as a
safer alternative to Tijuana for the filming of "Traffic," the drug-war
movie that opens today.

But in the two weeks leading up to the opening, real-world crimes
apparently related to drug trafficking have proliferated, turning Nogales
into a city like the Tijuana pictured in the movie.

The local tally: 11,000 pounds of marijuana seized, one near-execution
foiled, three murders including one by torture, and one state police
officer arrested.

In other words, life has imitated art imitating life.

Nogales' approximation to Tijuana is not coincidental nor tremendously
worrisome to municipal police chief Andres Alvarez Elizalde.

"In every border area these things happen," Alvarez said. "These are pretty
much problems between traffickers."

The recent problems in the city of about 350,000, 65 miles south of Tucson,
started Dec. 22. That day, soldiers and Federal Judicial Police officers
stopped a truck loaded with 4,906 pounds of marijuana, headed for the
border. The officers went to the house the truck had left and found 6,092
pounds more of marijuana.

The seizure was the largest in Nogales in years, said Federal Judicial
Police commander Eduardo Acosta Michel, and it was tied to one of the most
notorious murders in recent years - the killing of U.S. Border Patrol Agent
Alexander Kirpnick.

It turns out the house where the officers found the marijuana is the same
house where Bernardo Velarde Lopez was living in 1998 when he led a group
of smugglers across the border, and shot Kirpnick, killing him. Among those
arrested at the house last month were at least three relatives of the
murderer: Maria Velarde Lopez, who is Bernardo's sister, plus Juana and
Carla Arvizu Velarde, who apparently are nieces.

Bernardo Velarde Lopez is in federal prison in Arizona awaiting sentencing
for the murder of the agent.

Five days after the seizure at the Velarde Lopez home, municipal police
stopped a GMC Yukon with seven people aboard, driven by a Sonoran Judicial
Police officer. In the back of the vehicle, they found a blindfolded man
with his hands tied behind his back. Several of the men on board were
armed, the police officer with an AR-15 automatic rifle.

"It appears they had their sights set on executing him," Alvarez said.

The men involved told police that they were planning to punish the abducted
man, Cruz Paredes Valenzuela, for the loss of some drugs, Acosta said. The
police officer involved, Jesus Cortes Cervantes, was arrested and charged
with kidnapping, as were the others.

After that, however, the crimes took a turn for the worse. Early Sunday,
officers working at the tollbooth on the highway around Nogales heard
gunshots and found the body of Adolfo Carrillo Zamora, who had been shot in
the back of the head.

On Monday, officers found the body of Mireya Castro Coronel, who had been
murdered in her house with a shot in the mouth.

And on Tuesday, officers discovered the most gruesome of the three murders,
that of Oscar Moreno Rubio. Moreno's killers bound him up with wire and
hanged him before sending him off a cliff in a Dodge Spirit and burning the
car.

Nogales, Sonora, police at all levels have developed information on the
murders and consider drug trafficking a possible reason for the crimes, but
they are being cagey about releasing the information they have.

State prosecutor Guadalupe Rodriguez Armendariz said all three of the
murder victims knew one another and were murdered about the same time,
perhaps on Saturday. The motive for the murders appeared to be the paying
of a debt, Rodriguez said, but it's unclear whether the debt was of drugs,
money or other merchandise - and if money, whether it was clean or dirty.

At least one of the victims had been charged with drug crimes before,
federal police commander Acosta said. He declined to say which one.

Rodriguez added that Sonoran Judicial Police are searching for a suspected
mastermind around Sonora, but he would not identify the man. The suspect
owed a debt to one of the victims, Rodriguez said, and the murders appeared
aimed at preventing collection of the debt.

The Federal Judicial Police doubt the three murders relate to their
11,000-pound seizure.

"We know more or less to whom those drugs belong, and it isn't the same
people," Acosta said.

But he acknowledged watching the state investigation of the murders
carefully for evidence of drug involvement, and he anticipated more crimes
of the same sort.

"There are many crimes like this. Why? Because they live by their own
code," he said. "The traffic lasts all year."