THE ARELLANO FELIX ORGANIZATION RULES TIJUANA BY RUTHLESS TERROR

Josee "Pepe" Patino Moreno, a special prosecuctor for the Mexican attorney
general's elite anti-narcotics unit, and two fellow drug agents were
running an hour late last April 10th for a scheduled meeting at a
prosecutors' office in Tijuana. Patino had called ahead twice on his
cellphone. "I'll be there in a minute," he said in the second call.

He never made it.

Patino's mangled body, together with those of special prosecutor Oscar
Pompa Plaza and Mexican army captain Rafael Torres Bernal, was found a day
and a half later. The three bodies lay near the wreck of Patino' s newly
purchased Chevrolet Lumina 200 yards down the steep slope of a ravine along
the mountain highway between Tecate and Mexicali.

Shortly after the bodies were said to have been discovered, a Mexican
Highway Patrol deputy commander in Mexicali promptly described the deaths
as "a lamentable traffic incident."

But the clumsy attempt to make the three deaths appear accidental proved
unconvincing.

Autopsies showed conclusively that the three Mexican agents did not die in
any automobile crash or traffic mishap. In fact, they had been abducted,
savagely tortured and murdered.

In the months since, these three murders have remained officially unsolved.
Yet, U.S. law enforcement officials note that certain presumptions are
obvious. Whoever betrayed Pepe Patino and his two deputies to the drug
traffickers they were investigating had to know what secret work the agents
were doing, what schedules they kept and where they were going that fateful
Monday morning.

Clearly, say these sources, that suggests a betrayal from within the ranks
of Mexican law enforcement. Late last month, Mexican authorities arrested
four federal drug agents affiliated with the national anti-narcotics unit
known by its Spanish acronym as FEADS. Mexican officials aren't saying
publicly whether the four are believed linked to the abduction or
torture-murder of Patino' s team. But U.S. law enforcement sources rate
such a connection as likely.

What isn't in any doubt is the ghastly ordeal that Patino, Pompa and Torres
suffered at the hands of their captors before they died. Their battered
corpses told a grisly tale.

A U.S. prosecutor was told by his Mexican counterpart that Patin's wife
could not identify her husband's remains, even by his feet. A veteran
investigator who saw photographs of the bodies said of one: "They told me
it was a body. I've never seen anything like that." A third investigator
said Patino's corpse was "like a bag of ice cubes, every bone broken."

The Mexican autopsy reports were more precise.

The cause of death for all three agents was listed as "cranialencephalic
trauma." Essentially, their faces had been battered to pulp, after which
their heads were crushed. Their other injuries, including arm and leg
fractures, broken ribs and skin ripped from their limbs, were additional
evidence of severe and prolonged torture.

Who could have committed such vile, horrendous crimes?

No secret there. From Mexican Attorney General Jorge Madrazo Cuellar and
Mexico's anti-drug chief, Mariano Herran Salvatti, to U.S. law enforcement
officials and investigators, the consensus culprit is the narco-trafficking
Arellano Felix Organization, a.k.a. the Tijuana cartel.

Patino and his team had been personally assigned by Madrazo and Herran to
target the Arellano Felix cartel's leadership. Patino reportedly played an
investigative role in the arrest in Tijuana last March of Jesus "Chuy"
Labra Aviles, the alleged financial mastermind of the Arellano syndicate
and an uncle by marriage to the Arellano brothers. Moreover, Patino had
been working directly with U.S. authorities, including officials and agents
from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement
Administration offices in San Diego, on the Arellano cases.

So dangerous was their mission that Patino, Pompa, Torres and several other
Mexican drug agents developing evidence against the Arellanos had been
spending nights at a safe house in the San Diego area. That highly unusual
precaution was deemed necessary for their protection from Mexico' s most
violent narco-trafficking cartel. Obviously, it could not protect them in
Mexico.

For U.S. and Mexican officials alike, the ambush, abduction and murder of
the three Mexican agents underscored another grim, maddeningly frustrating
reality in the decade-long fight against the Tijuana cartel. With a bribery
payroll that former DEA Administrator Thomas A. Constantine puts at an
estimated $1 million a week, the Arellanos had been buying multiple layers
of protection from Mexican police, prosecutors and politicians for years.
They almost always knew in advance of any move planned against them, and
how it could be countered.

Patino' s mission had been betrayed to his drug-trafficking targets. So had
his schedule and route that Monday morning after he entered Mexico at the
Otay Mesa border crossing. His abductors, said to number as many as 10 men,
perhaps resembling Mexican police, knew where to intercept the Patino team.

Pepe Patino, Oscar Pompa and Rafael Torres paid with their lives for the
chronic corruption that gives Mexico' s narco-traffickers a winning edge
over the Mexican government.

Powerful, violent

The DEA officially describes the Arellano Felix Organization as "one of the
most powerful, violent, and aggressive trafficking groups in Mexico . . .
responsible for the transportation, importation, and distribution of
multi-ton quantities of cocaine and marijuana, as well as large quantities
of heroin and methamphetamine."

"More than any other trafficking organization from Mexico, this
organization extends its tentacles directly from high-echelon figures in
the law enforcement and judicial systems in Mexico to street-level
individuals in United States cities the AFO operates primarily in the
Mexican states of Sinaloa (their birth place), Jalisco, Michoacan, Chiapas,
and Baja California South and North. From Baja, the drugs enter California,
the primary point of embarkation into the United States distribution network."

Former DEA administrator Constantine describes the Arellano Felix family as
"a mafia organization, only in many ways much more powerful, much more
wealthy and I believe more dangerous than even some of those old
organizations of the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s in the United States."

Constantine sees the Arellanos as quite literally challenging the Mexican
government for de facto sovereignty over their operational areas, including
Baja California. What is more, Constantine thinks the drug traffickers are
winning.

"Specifically, in Tijuana and in Baja, they in essence have become more
powerful than the instruments of government in Mexico. That is why they are
able to operate in the fashion that they operate presently and that is why
they are seldom if ever brought to justice," Constantine says.

Edward W. Logan, special agent in charge of criminal investigations for the
U.S. Customs Service in San Diego, adds up the ways in which the Arellanos
have built their present power over a decade:

"Obviously, they are a very well-financed organization. They've penetrated
the institutions of law enforcement in Mexico, penetrated business,
penetrated the media in Mexico, and they are very well protected by an
armed force. As an organization, they are robust, well funded, violent and
very intimidating," Logan says.

William D. Gore, special agent in charge of the FBI' s San Diego office,
believes the Arellanos now may be the biggest of Mexico' s half-dozen major
drug-trafficking cartels.

Gore and others note that the Arellanos have long since seized control of
the "Plaza," the Tijuana-San Diego border gateway into the United States.
Controlling the Plaza gives the cartel a dominant position from which to
move its own narcotics north and extract payment from any other traffickers
seeking to use the route.

Ruling by terror

But geography would mean nothing if the Arellanos' cartel had not
established a reputation years ago as practiced and eager killers of anyone
it perceives as a threat.

"There is no doubt in my mind that they are the most violent of the Mexican
cartels. They are just ruling by terror down there," Gore says, referring
to the escalating drug-linked violence in Tijuana and Baja California.

Phillip E. Jordan, retired former director of the DEA's El Paso
Intelligence Center, calls the Arellanos "without doubt the most brazen,
violent, ruthless (drug traffickers) in the Western Hemisphere."

A U.S. law enforcement intelligence source, speaking on condition that he
not be identified, calculates that the Arellano organization is moving tons
of narcotics into the United States every month and reaping at least
hundreds of millions of dollars, if not a billion dollars or more in annual
drug profits.

He describes the cartel's use of violence as sadistic yet calculated, and
wholly unrestrained.

No one outside the cartel knows exactly how many murders are attributable
to the Arellanos and their squads of assassins over the past decade. But
none of the investigators, intelligence analysts, prosecutors and law
enforcement officials interviewed for these articles put the number of
cartel murders at anything less than hundreds.

"About 500 would be a good estimate, a safe estimate," says one
investigator with extensive knowledge of the Arellanos' operations.

That estimate is roughly confirmed by Vincent DelaMontaigne, a recently
retired FBI special agent who supervised the inter-agency task force
investigating the Arellano Felix cartel from 1997 to 1999. DelaMontaigne
says U.S. law enforcement never attempted to document an exact tally
because the cartel did most of its killing in Mexico. But information
provided by Mexican authorities added to what U.S. law enforcement has
learned on its own suggests a total of perhaps 500 to 700 murders by the
Arellano Felix cartel over the decade of the 1990s, according to DelaMontaigne.

"Sixty or 70 of those have happened this year, from January to April,"
DelaMontaigne adds. "The Arellanos are shaking down rival drug dealers who
are trying to move dope through their territory. Anyone who does that
without paying the Arellanos risks being killed."

Other analysts -- citing, for example, the hundreds of Tijuana homicides
each year that are believed linked to drug trafficking, plus Arellano
operations in other Mexican states -- put the cartel' s killing toll even
higher.

"At least a hundred a year, maybe 200 a year, and this has been going on
throughout the 1990s," says an intelligence source. "They are prolific
killers. Their ruthlessness knows no bounds.

"And they don't just kill. They torture. They're flat out sadistic," he adds.

As but one example of the extreme brutality of Arellano-style killings, he
cites the 1997 assassination in Tijuana of Baja California state prosecutor
Hodin Armando Gutierrez Rico.

Gutierrez, an energetic young prosecutor who had been working on several
drug-related cases, was ambushed in front of his home and shot 120 times by
four assassins firing automatic weapons. Gutierrez' killers then repeatedly
ran their utility vehicle back and forth over his body and finally dragged
his riddled corpse several blocks down the street before dumping him.

As with so many other killings linked to Mexico' s murderous drug trade,
Gutierrez' murder remains unsolved.

However savage, Gutierrez' death was less terrible than those of many
others among the Arellano cartel' s victims. Gutierrez died quickly. Untold
numbers of others have suffered agonizingly slow and excruciatingly painful
deaths, all quite deliberately inflicted to obtain information, serve as an
object lesson, or simply to punish.

Gonzalo P. Curiel, assistant United States attorney in San Diego and chief
of the narcotics enforcement section, describes it as "killing for effect."

Torture is an Arellano cartel trademark.

"They torture to intimidate, to terrorize, to extract information,"
explains an intelligence source.

Cutting and bleeding victims during interrogation is a frequent practice of
the cartel's designated enforcers. A U.S. investigator tells of seeing
photographs of one torture victim who bled so profusely before he was
killed that his underwear was completely dyed red.

"They're just cruel," says a U.S. investigator. "They abduct, torture, kill
at will. There is a special place in hell for these people."