DRUG BLOODSHED THREATENS TO FLOW OVER BORDER

TIJUANA, Mexico -- Mexico's drug dealers operating along the U.S. border
have offered a $200,000 bounty for the murder of a U.S. law enforcement
officer.

There have been no attempts to collect the bounty, which was reported to the
U.S. Border Patrol by informants. The threat, however, underscores the
lawless climate in this city of 1.5 million where about 100 people have been
shot to death this year despite a law against owning firearms. Across the
border, San Diego, with a similar population, reported just 42 murders in
1998.

The latest and most audacious attack here was the daytime assassination of
Police Chief Alfredo de la Torre Marquez, who was ambushed Feb. 27 as he
drove on a busy street. The killing came just two days after Mexican
President Ernesto Zedillo made a high-profile visit to nearby Mexicali to
promise a crackdown on the drug-related violence spreading across Mexico's
Baja California peninsula.

Mexican authorities say they have arrested six suspects who allegedly
confessed to the killing of the police chief and 14 other victims. Despite
the arrests, a ''heightened alert'' is still in effect for police and
federal agencies on the U.S. side of the border, says San Diego U.S.
Attorney Gregory Vega. Under the alert, U.S. law enforcement officials are
taking extra precautions and avoiding off-duty trips into Mexico.

''The threats don't stop us from doing our job,'' says Vince Rice, spokesman
for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in San Diego. ''I personally
think drug dealers know that if they were to kill a federal agent, the whole
force of the U.S. government would come down on them. They'd have no place
to hide.''

In Tijuana, Mexican officials are under siege:

* Six years ago, another Tijuana police chief was killed in much the same
manner as de la Torre.

* A presidential candidate was assassinated here in 1994.

* More than a dozen of the city's police officers and prosecutors have been
shot or tortured to death in the past five years.

Few of the cases are solved.

In San Diego, the influence of the Mexican drug traffickers is prevalent,
Vega says. ''San Diego gang members are now in the employ of the Arellano
46elix (drug) cartel, and we had to put a federal prosecutor in the
narcotics unit under armed guard for close to a year'' because of threats
against him for prosecuting members of the Tijuana-based cartel.

Vega's office has set up a task force to prosecute Mexican drug cartel
members who commit crimes in his region. As a result of stepped-up border
surveillance, drug prosecutions in San Diego have gone up from more than
1,400 in 1995 to almost 3,200 in 1999.

That's because more drugs -- marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and
heroin -- are seized along the Southwest border than anywhere in the USA,
the DEA says. The San Diego border is the busiest in the world -- both in
terms of the number of border crossings and the amount of contraband
confiscated.

Family believed in control

Brothers Benjamin and Ramon Arellano Felix are believed to be responsible
for much of the drug trade. Based in Tijuana, they terrorize rival
traffickers and control the narcotics trade throughout the Baja California
peninsula, officials say.

Ramon Arellano, believed to be the link between the cartel and gang members
from San Diego's barrios, has been indicted by U.S. prosecutors on drug
charges in documents sealed in San Diego's federal court. He once cut a
high-profile figure, partying in Tijuana's bars and clubs. But he's had to
lie low since he made the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list three years ago -- with
a $2 million price on his head. Arellano is said to travel only at night
protected by bodyguards.

He has remained free, U.S. authorities say, because he reportedly can afford
to pay more than $2 million a week for protection and because potential
witnesses against him fear for their lives.

U.S. drug agents are annoyed that Ramon Arellano -- the younger of the
brothers -- hasn't been arrested. They believe he has paid off Mexican
authorities to keep out of jail. ''The Mexicans know where he is, and they
can find anyone -- if they want to,'' says William Gately, a U.S. Customs
agent who retired last year after working undercover on the border for more
than two decades.

Prosperity and peril

Tijuana is a bustling and increasingly prosperous metropolis that shares the
border with San Diego. Once known mainly for tacky trinkets, strip joints
and bars that drew servicemen from San Diego's military bases, the city now
has the second highest number of foreign-owned factories in Mexico.

Called maquiladoras, the Tijuana factories spit out television components
and other products. The plants, which are prospering because of the North
American Free Trade Agreement (signed in 1993), and American tourism have
given Tijuana an unprecedented unemployment rate of about 2%.

Officials on both sides of the border boast that San Diego and Tijuana have
melded into one region. But it's a region that is gaining an international
reputation as a lawless outpost.

During a recent trip to Asia by Alejandro Gonzalez Alcocer, governor of the
state of Baja California, prospective investors questioned him repeatedly
about safety.

''They were always questioning whether the security of their managers (could
be guaranteed),'' spokesman Jorge Ugas says.

As a result, Ugas says, the state and federal governments are beefing up
police details around the maquiladoras and transporting factory VIPs, most
of whom live in San Diego -- to and from the border each day for a small
fee.

Foreign investors flee

Although officials talk tough, few who live or do business in Tijuana seem
confident the violence will be stopped and drug traffickers will, as
President Zedillo said in his recent speech, ''find their only home in
jail.''

''I don't put much faith in this being solved,'' says Oscar Padilla, an
American whose San Diego company sells insurance on both sides of the
border. ''And if they do pick up someone . . . they won't get to the
source.''

American Carmen Ramirez and her husband recently sold their McDonald's
restaurant in Tijuana because they didn't feel safe. ''I would never go
back,'' says Ramirez, who lives in San Diego.

The murder of de la Torre was all the more brazen, says Adela Navarro,
editor of the Tijuana newspaper Zeta, because it came only two days after
Zedillo spoke in Mexicali and promised that Tijuana was not going to be the
nesting ground for drug traffickers. Zeta has crusaded against the drug
trade.

''It could be that the clear message from the drug traffickers is that, in
fact, it will be their nesting ground,'' Navarro says.