TALKS BEGIN IN NO-KNOCK DEATH

March 16 - SAN FELIPE JESUS DE LAS CASAS BLANCAS, Mexico - Ismael Mena's
three-room adobe house gives shelter from hot wind.

Nine children once chattered by flowers in the courtyard where, today,
their 80-year-old grandmother putters alone.

An adjoining stable Mena built for his beloved red horse sits empty; the
saddle gathers dust. His cornfield fights weeds.

The 14-acre farm here was Mena's dream.

To keep it alive - traditional lifestyles are dwindling as Mexico goes
modern - Mena had to toil in the United States for much of his life. Most
recently, he worked the night shift for Coca-Cola in a graffiti-splotched
north Denver neighborhood where drug deals are done. He fixed wooden
pallets. He lifted hundreds of red plastic crates, each packed with eight
2-liter plastic bottles of Coke, and hoisted them into red trucks.

The money he sent home sustained his wife and seven children on the farm.
Two older sons had moved to work in Los Angeles.

Now Mena's dead. Denver police shot the 45-year-old migrant mistakenly in a
botched no-knock drug raid last fall; they went to the wrong house. Once a
policeman in Mexico, Mena had been sleeping off his night shift.

Five months later, Mena's family is torn. Without him working, Maria del
Carmen saw fit to sell his 10 cows, one mule and the horse. She has moved
the children in with her parents 5 miles closer to the nearby town of San
Julian and the doctor her diabetic son needs.

"We are wondering how we will live," she said.

Today, negotiations for wrongfuldeath compensation begin in Denver, where
Maria, eldest son Heriberto, and attorney Robert Maes, referred by the
Mexican government, square off against Denver's legal team.

The city's offer - $150,000 - falls short of the $5.5 million Maes seeks
for the family. Former federal Judge James Carrigan is to guide arbitration
today.

The only reason Maria didn't sell her husband's land, too, is that Mena's
mother, Don~a Julia, absolutely refuses to leave it. While water trickled
from a tap into buckets, Julia conjured images of Ismael talking to his
cows as he milked them.

"Why did they have to kill my son? I loved him so," she said, drawing a
black shawl across her wrinkled face. If she left the farm, Don~a Julia
said, "everything would be over. It would all fall down. That's why I don't
want to go."

Meantime, Ismael's 20-year-old daughter, Rosalilia, is in charge of the
children surviving here on beans and tortillas, cooked over a wood fire in
an adobe house with no bathroom. Ismael Jr., 17, injects himself each
morning with insulin. Rosalilia's twin, Rosaelia, cradles Mena's 1-year-old
grandson, also named after him, whom he never saw.

Little Maria del Carmen, 8, and Alejandro, 11, attend a small rural school;
no secondary school is reachable for Juanita, 11, Irene, 14, and the
others. The younger children grasped that their father was dead when they
saw his body at the funeral. Now they treasure his clothes.

"We try not to talk about it too much," Rosalilia said. "Thinking about
their father makes them feel very bad."

The pastoral lifestyle Mena preferred to modern city life is also a dream
for thousands of other migrant workers in the United States. For lack of
money as Mexico modernizes, they travel north, sometimes at great risk, to
fill proliferating U.S. jobs that pay $8 an hour or less. Our humming
economy depends on their labor. U.S. big business is lobbying Congress to
allow more migrant workers, especially those with basic skills, lest labor
shortages force up wages.

Yet rather than settle in the United States, many like Mena work solely to
build up what's theirs back in Mexico, using their savings to expand rural
houses and herds. Here in rugged 6,000-feethigh eastern Jalisco,
electricity lines installed around 1993 and telephones more recently raise
the possibility of comfortable rural living.

For one fleeting moment in 1997, Maria del Carmen said, she felt Mena had
achieved his Mexican dream. Water holes were full. Green maize shoots poked
up from the field. Mena strode proudly from the adobe house to the field.

"I was walking with him. We were walking with all the children too." She
wanted that togetherness every day.

"I'd tell him: "Come back and live with your brother and sisters and
horses,' " Maria del Carmen said. "He'd say he'd come back when he got some
more money."

His mother Julia said she regularly reminded him: "Save the money. Send it
to Mexico. Or bring it. So that you can stay here and not have to leave so
much." Mena was born during hard times. His father moved from the town of
San Miguel across what is called "El Can~on" to a mesa. Drought soon drove
the family away again to the current farm near the stone church and a dozen
or so homes that together are known as San Felipe Jesus de las Casas
Blancas.

They sold a little maize.

Mena loved horses, his brother Salvador, 58, said in the dirt-floor house
where he lives nearby. "Charro" horsemen are local heros to this day.

School for Mena lasted only a few years. Work beckoned. At 18, he left
Mexico, crossing to Arizona, where he drove a tractor.

Back from that first stint abroad, he was playing soccer one day when Maria
del Carmen and friends stopped to watch. He remembered her. A few weeks
later at a fiesta nearby in Jalpa, he approached. "He said: "I want you to
be my girlfriend,' " Maria del Carmen recalled. "I said: "Yes.' " They
married. "He wanted a family." To that end, Mena moved north again - the
migration that would repeat itself again and again over nearly three
decades. In the United States he worked as a meatpacker, cook, busboy while
she raised their babies. Family photos show Mena working at one restaurant
in California. He wore a clean white shirt with black bow tie and cap. He
tended bar, washed dishes in the kitchen, wiped tables and, after closing
time, swept the floors.

When he returned to Mexico, his children said, he brought them presents:
bicycles, dolls, a tape deck. Once he brought a television. The kids spend
hours watching a wide commercial world from the countryside here.

The children especially remember his way with horses. "He could make one
lie down, and then he'd motion and it would get up," Rosalilia said.

Ismael Jr. recalled: "He would say "Never hit an animal. Talk with them,
chat. Feed them well. And stroke them.' " He also worked on roads. Once,
his brother Salvador said, he cracked a rib trying to pry loose a rock. For
days he wheezed.

Unable to work on his farm, he arranged to serve as policeman in the sleepy
town of San Diego de Alejandria. A family photo shows Mena standing with a
pistol tucked into the waist of his trousers. Six months later, he turned
in the pistol and the bullets. "He thought police work might be dangerous,"

Salvador said. "He wanted to get back to the ranch." Yet to buy animals,
Mena had to migrate, carrying a crinkled Virgen de Guadalupe prayer card in
his wallet. Mena left last in August 1997. He worked for a beef company in
Idaho, earning more than $18,000 in 1998, according to records attorney
Maes collected.

Last year he moved to Colorado, staying first with cousins in Fort Lupton,
cleaning apartments and landscaping.

He moved into Denver as pressure mounted back home: Ismael Jr. had
collapsed. Maria del Carmen and her parents hauled him to San Julian. "He
was almost in a coma," said Dr. Ismael Macias, who gave basic treatment and
then sent the boy to a hospital in Guadalajara. He lay for 15 days on
intravenous fluid. The final diagnosis is that "his pancreas does not work
at all," Macias said. He needs insulin daily.

Mena began building up savings when he landed what his son Heriberto
described as a $300-a-week job at the Coca-Cola bottling plant.

Heriberto recalled their last telephone conversation: "It was difficult for
him to sleep at day. But he was happy with this work," said Heriberto, a
restaurant worker in Los Angeles.

Mena also "asked about the family. He said he was going back to Mexico this
year."

Coca-Cola managers said they were preparing Mena to drive forklifts.

At daybreak, Mena would walk two blocks past public housing and an alley
where dealers and junkies would hang out. He'd climb the 15 stairs in the
house at 3738 High St. where he rented an 8-by-8-foot room. The window
looked out on the Coca-Cola plant and a round brick smokestack in the
distance. And he'd sleep.

Penciled Xs mark still mark the spot where bullets pierced walls in Mena's
room during the midday raid on Sept. 29. A Spanish-speaking little girl
from another family now sleeps there.

Mena was sleeping when police burst in.

They'd been paying an informant who once used drugs to make undercover
purchases in the area. Based on his information, they secured a no-knock
warrant for the two-story house where Mena lived. The informant apparently
got mixed up.

Police said they shouted "Police!" and "Policia!" as they entered. They
pinned down Antonio Hernandez in the room next to Mena's.

Earlier in September, police apparently had confiscated a gun Mena was
carrying illegally. They say he had another one on Sept. 29th, a Burgo .22
- - untraceable so far - and that, despite their warnings, he fired tthree
shots.

Police fired too. Eight bullets tore into Mena's face, chest and arms. He
died at the scene. Here in Mexico, his sister Maria de Jesus figured he had
the gun "for his protection" in a dangerous big city.

The shooting was "a violation of basic human rights," Dr. Macias contends.

"Police shouldn't be able to do things like this," Mena's brother Salvador
said.

"Who fired first?" nephew Sergio, 26, wanted to know.

Sergio feels the "indignity" acutely. When he was headed to the United
States for work in 1992, his mother Maria de Jesus told him to go with her
brother. The men crossed near Tijuana. Though Mena knew the way well, he
hired a "coyote" guide for $800, Sergio said. "He wanted to be more sure
we'd make it because of me." In tense moments crossing, Sergio recalled,
Mena encouraged him.

"He said: "We're going to go work . . . We'll go and earn a whole lot.' "
Today the farming lifestyle Mena loved is generally threatened. His
relatives hanging on here still contend "nothing's better." At night,
cattle low amid nopal cactuses, dogs howl, and constellations light the
sky: Virgen de San Juan in the north, Ojos de Santa Lucia overhead, and the
Cruz de Mayo to the south.

But shoe factories run by transnational companies are the focus of economic
action in the region. Small farming in Mexico "doesn't work economically,"
said Dr. Macias The land is too poor and there's not enough water, he said.
"It doesn't pay. Fertilizer costs. Seeds cost." Dr. Macias worries that
Mena's children still are "suffering a lot."

He and others advise Maria del Carmen to move into San Julian so her
children can salvage some education. Then they could work in small
business.

Maria del Carmen has a sewing machine. With money from Denver, she said,
she might afford a house. Living in San Julian would cost about $1,000 a
month, she figured. Rosalilia says she's interested in designing clothes.
She wants to make up the school she's missed over the last eight years.

"I'd say it would be justice to help my brothers and sisters with their
studies. Because my father can't help us. We don't have any help." The
decision to sell off the animals was painful, Maria del Carmen said, and if
immigration papers were available she'd consider leaving Mexico altogether
and moving to the United States.

"It's over," she said of the farm. Yet nobody's ready to really accept
that, least of all Don~a Julia. In Mena's empty stable, she tried to fix
his bridles and lassos. She nailed a stirrup on the wall above a crucifix
and broken television.

She envisions everybody back in the house. "Como antes," she said. "Like
before." Money from Denver might help at least fix up the farm, "starting
with Ismael's room," she suggested. She envisions white paint on the walls,
a tiled floor "not cement," a new door, with a tractor and little cow
outside.

The last time she spoke with Ismael, "he told me, "You know, I love you too
much.' I cried," she said, crying again.

"He told me: "Don't cry. When you think about me, just make a quick prayer.
Nothing more.' "