SUSPECTED DRUG TRAFFICKER SEIZED IN SHOOTOUT IN MEXICO

MEXICO CITY, - A major drug trafficker who officials said
oversaw daily smuggling operations for the Tijuana drug cartel has
been arrested and charged with racketeering and murder, Mexican
authorities said today. The trafficker, Ismael Higuera Guerrero, was
seized on Wednesday in what American officials called a major victory
in the fight against drugs. He was captured after traffickers and
soldiers exchanged gunfire and the soldiers lobbed tear gas grenades
into a Pacific coast mansion at Ensenada, 60 miles south of Tijuana,
the authorities said.

Mr. Higuera was flown to central Mexico and jailed in a top-security
prison outside Toluca, west of Mexico City, on Wednesday night, they
said.

Mr. Higuera emerged as a key lieutenant to the Arellano Felix
brothers, who head the Tijuana cartel, in the mid-1990's, when police
pressure forced them to delegate many cartel operations to
subordinates, the authorities said.

A statement by the Drug Enforcement Administration today called Mr.
Higuera, who is 39, "the most visible member" of the cartel.

His arrest follows a period of ferocious drug warfare in the western
state of Sinaloa, in Mexico City and especially in Tijuana, which has
recorded more than 100 murders this year.

President Ernesto Zedillo ordered a crackdown on traffickers during a
visit to Tijuana in February, but three days later the city's police
chief was gunned down, and on April 10 a senior federal prosecutor and
two aides sent from Mexico City to Tijuana to investigate the cartel
were abducted, beaten to death and hurled into a ravine.

At a news conference in the attorney general's downtown office here
today, Mariano Herran Salvatti, Mexico's special prosecutor for drug
crimes, said that Mr. Higuera had ordered many killings and that it
was an official hypothesis that he may have ordered the April 10
murders. But he said investigators had not yet developed evidence to
confirm that.

A senior Mexican official said in a recent interview that a new war
between the Tijuana cartel and a smuggling group headed by one of the
Arellano Felix brothers' former lieutenants, Ismael Zambada Garcia,
was contributing to the current violence.

Other experts have said a broad restructuring of the narcotics
industry is under way, with alliances between traffickers and corrupt
officials under strain as President Zedillo's presidency nears its
end.

In February the Tijuana cartel's top financial operator was also
arrested.

Mr. Herran said today that the two arrests were signs of dramatic
progress. "We're witnessing the dismantling of the Tijuana cartel," he
said.