DRUG TRAFFICKERS SUSPECTED IN AGENTS' DEATHS

Anti-drug Czar Promises Probe Of Tijuana Cartel

MEXICO CITY -- Mexican officials suspect that drug traffickers are behind
the mysterious deaths in Tijuana of three agents from the federal Attorney
General's Office in what authorities privately say is a war between Mexican
prosecutors and the Tijuana-based Arellano-Felix drug cartel.

The mangled bodies of investigators Jose Patillo Moreno and Oscar Pompa
Plaza and Federal Police Capt. Rafael Torres Bernal were found in their car
early Wednesday at the base of a cliff in a rugged mountain pass east of
Tijuana, which is across the border from San Diego.

The investigators' deaths followed the discovery of yet another body --
still unidentified -- in the same area over the weekend. Other recent
incidents include a failed assassination attempt last month by gunmen on
Cuauhtemoc Herrera, a former prosecutor who is under investigation for
alleged ties to drug dealers.

That shooting followed the Feb. 27 ambush killing of Tijuana Police Chief
Alfredo de la Torre and the March 15 slaying in Mexico City of a lawyer for
Jesus Labra Avila. Labra is the reputed financial wizard for the
Arellano-Felix cartel.

Officials refused to say specifically that the agents were killed by drug
dealers or how they died, but the country's anti-drug chief and two of his
lieutenants appeared stricken as they met with reporters Wednesday and
showed off grisly pictures of the agents' mangled bodies. The bodies showed
signs of torture and severe head wounds.

The agents had been missing since Monday, when they failed to show up for a
meeting in Tijuana about their investigation into the slaying of Labra's
lawyer.

Labra has been jailed in Mexico City since soldiers arrested him March 11
at a Tijuana soccer field where Labra was watching his son play.

In the course of the investigation, Moreno had issued some 60 arrest and
search warrants in cities in northern Mexico, said Mariano Herran Salvatti,
chief of Mexico's anti-drug task force, which is part of the attorney
general's office.

Herran Salvatti, known as Mexico's anti-drug czar, said he knew Moreno and
considered him one of the toughest homicide investigators on his team. He
said Moreno was directing the work of 12 special investigators in Tijuana
assigned to the Arellano-Felix cartel.

``We are in mourning,'' Herran Salvatti said, adding that the agents'
``sacrifice will not be in vain.''

At least 100 violent deaths in Tijuana this year are attributed to drug
traffickers and to a growing market of drug users who congregate around
wholesale drug-sale sites known in Spanish as ``picaderos'' -- places where
people go to inject drugs. Police also report a surge in crime related to
the city's growing methamphetamine business, whose product known as
``crank'' is exported to California.

``There is no stopping our investigations into border region drug
organizations,'' Herran Salvatti said. ``If we determine that these deaths
were due to their work on these investigations, we will redouble our work
and get to the bottom of who killed our agents.''

Such deaths are ``now so common that people hardly blink anymore when, day
after day, one or two bodies are found with signs of executions,'' said
Heriberto Garc(acu)a, deputy director of the law school at the University
of Baja California, who has studied the drug trafficking business. ``These
murders, if they are determined to be murders, are part of an internal
fight between clean government agents and the agents of the drug cartels.''

For years, the area east of Tijuana, along a windy mountainous road called
La Rumorosa, has been known as a dumping ground for the victims of drug
dealers.

Mexican prosecutors said the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the
FBI were helping in the investigation into their agents' deaths.