KILLING RAISES DOUBTS ON MEXICO'S WAR ON DRUGS

TIJUANA, Mexico -- Jose Patino Moreno was unusually well versed in the
risks of his work as a narcotics investigator. He had seen colleagues
killed by drug traffickers, and he had seen traffickers bribe their
way free.

He had watched raid after raid compromised by corrupt officials. He
even lost his job for a time after a senior official in league with
smugglers grew displeased with his efforts against the drug trade.

Mr. Patino pressed on, friends said, partly because he believed that
someone at some point would finally make headway in the fight against
organized crime.

But late on the morning of April 10, months after taking charge of a
new team set up to pursue Mexico's most-wanted drug suspects, he and
two other officials were abducted as they drove here from San Diego.
Their badly tortured bodies were found the next day in a desert ravine.

In the weeks surrounding Mr. Patino's death, the Mexican authorities
have made their most significant progress in years against the the
Tijuana-based gang he had come to fight, run by the Arellano Felix
brothers. And Mexican officials have suggested that the deaths of Mr.
Patino and his two colleagues might foster the success that they could
not achieve themselves.

"The blood of our friends was not spilled in vain," Attorney General
Jorge Madrazo promised his subordinates at a service for the three.
"The hour has come to act and to come together."

Yet almost as quickly, questions have emerged among United States
officials and others about how the offensive has been carried out and
whether it will be sustained.

Although Mr. Madrazo and his federal police have taken much of the
credit for the most important blows landed in the new offensive -- the
arrests of two of the drug organization's presumed leaders --
officials say the attorney general's office had almost no role in
either action. Nor do those arrests appear to have involved much work
by American law enforcement officials.

Rather, officials said privately, the man accused of running the
day-to-day operations of the gang, Ismael Higuera, was tracked down by
Mexican civilian and military intelligence officers who received
unusually good information from the Central Intelligence Agency. The
capture a few weeks earlier of a powerful uncle of the Arellano
brothers was the work of a military intelligence unit that the C.I.A.
trained and supported, the officials said.

American officials say they have seen no clear sign of a change in the
loyalties of Mexican officials or institutions linked to the
protection of the drug traffickers.

Some terrified Mexican anti-drug agents here even asked to be
reassigned after Mr. Patino's death, officials said, and the
government has denied reports that other agents quit rather than be
sent here.

The push in the state of Baja California comes after a long stretch of
frustration. Last year, the number of drug seizures was mostly down,
the government's promises to extradite drug suspects to the United
States were unfulfilled and official corruption was widespread. Only
last fall, American officials were despairing that the Mexican
authorities had effectively given up in Tijuana.

Then the prosecutor who heads the long-running federal inquiry in San
Diego, Gustavo P. Curiel, and his new boss, United States Attorney
Gregory A. Vega, decided to fly to Mexico City to meet with Mr.
Madrazo. "We figured that unless we re-engaged with the Mexicans --
unless we did something -- nothing was going to happen," Mr. Vega said
in an interview.

At that time, Mr. Madrazo and his drug enforcement chief said they
would begin a new campaign against the Arellanos. Mexican prosecutors
and military officials agreed to focus on different leaders of the
gang, and Mr. Madrazo put Mr. Patino, 49, in charge of his side of the
investigation.

Pepe Patino, as his friends called him, was in some ways an obvious
choice. He had worked intermittently on the Arellano case since 1993,
when the gang was blamed for killing a Roman Catholic cardinal.

Although American law enforcement officials are generally loath to
vouch for their Mexican counterparts, Mr, Patino had earned a
reputation for honesty on both sides of the border.

"If you needed any kind of help, he was there," said Reid C. Pixler, a
federal prosecutor in Phoenix who worked closely with Mr. Patino. "He
was absolutely courageous. He was extremely bright. He did everything
he ever promised and more."

Mr. Patino rushed to the scene on March 3, 1994, after Mexican federal
agents working under a young police commander, Alejandro Castaneda,
caught up with a man they believed to be Ismael Higuera and one later
identified as the youngest of the Arellano brothers, Francisco Javier,
in Tijuana. When Mr. Castaneda ordered the men to surrender, they and
their bodyguards opened fire, killing him.

In an interview years later, Mr. Patino said he argued bitterly with
state justice officials over the custody of the suspects. After a
tense standoff, the state officials took the men away, only to allow
them to sneak out the back entrance of a state police office hours
later.

"That was the way things were," Mr. Patino recalled.

For the federal police team with whom Mr. Patino worked, it was the
latest in a long series of mishaps and frustrations. "They got their
clocks cleaned in Tijuana," recalled Alex M. Romero, an American drug
enforcement agent who worked with Mr. Patino's group on several cases
in the early 1990's. "That was definitely their Waterloo."

Three weeks after Mr. Castaneda was killed, the shock of his death was
swept aside by the assassination here of the governing party's
presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio. Mr. Patino's team was
pulled back to Mexico City. Then, after a shake-up in the attorney
general's office, the team was disbanded by a senior official who was
later found to have worked for the traffickers.

Mr. Patino returned to the federal anti-drug force in 1997. United
States officials were strongly encouraged when he was selected to lead
the new push in Baja California.

The Americans also took it as an indication of Mexico's seriousness
that Mr. Patino and a few colleagues had decided to work from San
Diego rather than Tijuana -- farther from the prying eyes of other
Mexican officials.

Still, despite the supposed priority and evident danger of their
mission, it took Mr. Patino months to obtain financing from Mexico
City to rent a house, and his pleas for an armored car were answered
only by promises.

Working closely with agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and
the Drug Enforcement Administration, Mr. Patino and his colleagues
began compiling addresses and seeking search warrants for safe houses,
law offices and other businesses that the traffickers used.

The team had not gotten far, officials said, when word came on March
11 that members of the army's drug intelligence unit had captured the
Arellanos' uncle and reputed confederate, Jesus Labra Aviles, a
wealthy Tijuana executive.

Some American officials later speculated that Mr. Patino had been made
a target by the Arellanos for his role in helping to transport Mr.
Labra to a high-security prison outside Mexico City.

But a Mexican official who worked closely with him said Mr. Patino
appeared to have drawn the traffickers' attention in long battles over
search warrants in the notoriously corrupt courts here.

Colleagues of Mr. Patino said he had been acutely aware of the dangers
he had faced. But because of a longstanding dispute between Mexico and
the United States over whether agents of one country working in the
other could carry guns, Mr. Patino and the two other officials were
unarmed when they drove to Tijuana from San Diego on April 10.

It was only a short distance from the border crossing to a federal
police office where they kept their weapons. Along the way, officials
said, the three men were intercepted by perhaps 10 others who were
heavily armed and clearly knew their routine.

The three were tortured with a brutality that immediately led
officials to suspect Mr. Higuera, 38, who has a considerable
reputation for savagery. The men were cut with knives, beaten with
bats or pipes and run over with a large truck. The heads of two are
thought to have been crushed in a pneumatic press.

Mr. Higuera, indicted in federal court in San Diego on charges of
conspiring to ship tons of cocaine into the United States, was
captured on May 3. Mexican police officials said they had helped
arrest him at a house near the port city of Ensenada after neighbors
had reported a wild party.

But officials said he had been caught in a complex operation in which
Mexican intelligence agents, set in motion by the C.I.A., had tracked
his Colombian girlfriend and a friend of hers.

American officials said they had growing evidence that Mr. Higuera had
been captured by the Mexican military a month before in Mazatlan, the
western resort city, only to be freed by the police.

Mr. Madrazo's office denied that. But its account was publicly
challenged by a spokesman for the Defense Ministry and an army general
in Baja California.