MEXICO'S 'BERMUDA TRIANGLE'

Two months after officials dug up nine bodies near Juarez, pressure to
locate the 'disappeared' mounts.

As any mother would, Esperanza Gomez de Ontiveros remembers the day her son
disappeared from the streets of Ciudad Juarez as if it were yesterday.

She can still picture Victor Hugo, an armaments specialist with the
Chihuahua state judicial police, stopping by after work on Sept. 2, 1996,
to celebrate the start of his vacation.

"He was happy about his time off when he left for his house," says the
retired teacher, whose middle-class neighborhood sits just a few miles from
the Texas border. "Then three blocks from here, neighbors saw his car
surrounded by other cars with heavily armed men in dark clothing. They said
Victor tried to escape," she adds, "but the men shoved him into one of
their cars, and they sped away. We never saw him or heard a word about him
again."

The Ontiveros' nightmare is not theirs alone. The disappearance of a loved
one is something dozens of families in Ciudad Juarez have faced over the
past decade. What makes matters worse, family members say, are
circumstances often indicating police involvement - making their experience
reminiscent of the worst of the military dictatorships of Chile or
Argentina in the 1970s, when hundreds of people were rounded up by
authorities and disappeared without a trace.

The more than 200 disappearances that Juarez family groups and human rights
organizations have documented since 1993 received fresh attention in
December when Mexican and US authorities dug up nine bodies on ranches
outside Juarez. Acting on tips from informants or recently arrested drug
traffickers, Mexican police and FBI agents invaded ranches owned by
individuals with close contact to drug traffickers or Mexican antinarcotics
police - or both.

At one point, some US officials said the objective of the diggings was more
than 100 bodies - a figure reflecting the lists of "disappeared" persons
kept by area groups. Eventually only the nine bodies were found.

But the horror of disappeared persons in Mexico is much larger than the
"narcograves" case and reaches well beyond Juarez, say local human rights
leaders and activists in organizations for the relatives of the disappeared.

"This is a national problem, but one that remains covered up because of the
fear in Mexico that going to the authorities or speaking up is not safe,"
says Ernesto Ontiveros, father of the disappeared Victor and Juarez
representative of AFADEM, a national group representing the families of the
disappeared.

Rights groups like AFADEM, which works with a federation of similar
organizations across Latin America, count as many as 900 cases in Mexico,
with the majority of them concentrated in a few states.

In Mexico the disappearances tend to be divided between political cases
focused in such states as Guerrero and Oaxaca, Mr. Ontiveros says, and
others related to the drug trade. The latter are concentrated along the
border and in drug-producing and drug-trading states like Sinaloa on the
Pacific coast and Quintana Roo on the Gulf.

"But you don't hear as much about Quintana Roo's disappeared, because they
don't have the United States next door," says Jaime Hervella, president of
the Association of the Relatives and Friends of Disappeared Persons in El
Paso, Texas. "That's the only reason our association is still alive."

The families and friends of the disappeared in Ciudad Juarez say
authorities have told them that their relatives must have been involved in
drugs or other illicit activities.

"The authorities always give that excuse [drug involvement] to explain
every disappearance," says Leticia Lucero de Medina, whose husband, a
Juarez criminal lawyer, disappeared in July 1997. "It just makes you feel
like they ... are covering something up."

It may in fact be true that many of the Juarez disappearances were
connected one way or another to the drug trade that boomed in this gritty
border town in the '90s. Most of the Juarez disappeared fall into three
groups, Mr. Hervella says: people simply in the wrong place at the wrong
time, people very likely involved with rising drug traffickers who posed a
threat to the larger cartels, and people who worked with one of Mexico's
police branches.

This last group includes people like his godson, Saul Sanchez Jr., an
American citizen who was developing a system for the federal attorney
general's office in Juarez to monitor conversations between airplane pilots
and ground receivers. Mr. Sanchez and his wife Abigail disappeared in May
1994 on a night they were invited to a Juarez theater by a state police
official.

It is chillingly possible - because of the known involvement of Mexican
officials in the drug trade - that a number of the disappeared were honest
individuals with jobs or specific talents that made them targets of corrupt
officials.

It's a scenario especially plausible to families of the disappeared in
Juarez, which served as the base of one of Mexico's most powerful drug
cartels, built up by Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

Before he died in July 1997 during plastic surgery, Mr. Carrillo became
known as the "lord of the skies" for developing a cocaine skytrain, using
jumbo jets to ferry cocaine to the US-Mexico border for shipment into the
US. His powers were so extensive that he was able to corrupt an Army
general in charge of Mexico's drug war, Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, and keep
him on his payroll.

Knowing this, family members suspect that the Mexican military or former
military officials, working for either the attorney general's antidrug
squads or state police, were involved in the disappearances. The method of
kidnapping and "disappearing" people also makes the military and law
enforcement agencies suspect that the Mexican military or former military
officials, working for either the attorney general's antidrug squads or
state police, were involved in the disappearances.

Often people were seen being taken away in one or more white Suburbans,
full of heavily armed men in dark clothing, as in the Ontiveros case. "It's
not a coincidence that the time of Guttierez Rebollo is when many of the
disappear ances took place," says Lorenza Benavides de Magana, director of
the Juarez association of the family and friends of the disappeared.
Gutierrez Rebollo was arrested and imprisoned in February 1997, but Mrs.
Magana's list includes disappearances through 1999.

Federal investigators told the local association's leaders in a meeting
last October that all of the cases they are investigating involve either
federal or state police, Hervella says.

Recent developments concerning the Juarez disappeared have both raised and
dashed hopes, family members say. They were encouraged by Attorney General
Jorge Madrazo Cuellar's words before the Mexican Senate Jan. 20, when he
said, "I can affirm that less than half of the registered disappeared
persons had ties to the drug trade."

Most disturbing for many is the fact that the attorney general's special
investigator of the Juarez disappearances, Enrique Cocina Martinez, has
been out of touch with association leaders since December. The Monitor's
efforts to contact Mr. Cocina also went unanswered.

Magana has recently received phone calls from a federal official calling
from a pay phone to reassure her that the Juarez investigation team,
including Cocina, is continuing its work. "We'd like to think that the
investigation has become so delicate and is getting so close to big names
that it has to be carried out hermetically," she says.

Although the government has given little information on the identity of the
nine bodies found, association members say they have enough information to
deduce that it is unlikely any of the bodies are those of their relatives.

One of the most disheartening realities, Magana says, is that none of her
group's 200 disappearance cases has ever been cleared up. Yet since
publicity swirled around the "narcograves" case, 18 more Juarez families
have reported missing relatives, she says.

Frustration over scant results has prompted people to take their cases to
international human rights organizations to increase pressure on Mexico to
take the disappearances seriously.

"I call what we've encountered a black hole," says Hervella. "You enter it
and disappear forever, and no one is sure that you ever existed."