IN MEXICO, DRUG CARTE IS BY ANY OTHER NAME ...

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - What's in a name? For Mexico's two biggest northern
cities, plenty. Their names have become synonymous with the country's two
most powerful drug mafias - the Juarez and Tijuana cartels.

So Mexico's top law enforcement official has come up with a solution he
hopes will appease city leaders angered by endless headlines associating
their towns with shootouts, corrupt cops and corpses dumped in the desert.
He is changing the names of the criminal organizations in an effort to
protect the innocent, namely the cities' good names.

Henceforth, federal law enforcement officials will no longer be allowed to
refer to drug cartels "by the name of the city where delinquent activities
may have taken place," Attorney General Jorge Madrazo Cuellar declared
recently. "This is a completely unjust stigmatization of these cities."

And in a jab at Washington, he added, "I don't think anyone would like us
to refer to the 'Potomac cartel,' although they say lots of drugs are
distributed there."

Madrazo has ordered his agency to call drug-trafficking organizations by
the name of their current leader. Out with the Juarez cartel, in with the
Vicente Carrillo Fuentes cartel. No more Tijuana cartel, it is the Arellano
Felix brothers cartel. Forget the Sinaloa cartel, it will be dubbed the
Hector Palma and Joaquin Guzman cartel.

"The cartels change leaders much more frequently than they move cities,"
groused Jorge Chabat, an analyst at the Mexico City-based Center for
Economic Research and Teaching. "And it's difficult to name the leaders
because the name would have to change each time a leader was killed, or
caught by the authorities, or as in the case of Amado Carrillo, each time
they died during plastic surgery."

The latter is a reference to the former chief of what should have been
called the Amado Carrillo Fuentes cartel, who died in July 1997 shortly
after undergoing liposuction and plastic surgery, and who was succeeded by
his brother and current cartel namesake, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes.

But the mayor of Ciudad Juarez, who led the campaign for the narco name
change, said he was fed up with the moniker that has dogged this border
city in the decade since Mexican drug-trafficking organizations rose to
prominence as hemispheric criminal powerhouses.

"For many years the Juarez cartel has given us a bad image in the eyes of
the world, which made it seem as if everyone who lives here was part of
organized crime," said Gustavo Elizondo, the indignant mayor.

The final blow came several weeks ago, he said, when the FBI announced that
as many as 100 bodies were buried on remote ranches near Ciudad Juarez,
prompting the biggest international media stampede to Mexico since the 1994
Zapatista uprising in the southern state of Chiapas. The excavations at
four ranches on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez turned up the remains of
nine humans and two dogs.

"After the events last December, our city once again appeared in the media
as a mecca for drug trafficking, homicide and all kinds of crime," Elizondo
complained in an interview.

Unfortunately for the mayor's campaign to polish his city's tarnished
image, Ciudad Juarez, which shares an international boundary with El Paso,
is one of the border's most active drug-trafficking portals into the United
States. An estimated 70 percent of all illegal cocaine imported into the
United States enters via the southwest border, much of it along the Ciudad
Juarez corridor, according to U.S. law enforcement reports. The city also
has one of the highest murder rates in Mexico, and at least 200 people have
disappeared off its streets, from their front yards and their cars over the
past several years.

But those are occurrences upon which the mayor would rather not dwell.

"That type of negative image could paralyze investment because businessmen
get alarmed about what could happen in Juarez," fretted the mayor, who
prefers to highlight the city's booming foreign assembly plant industry.
"Tourism also drops and all this has an impact on the local economy."

After the pronouncement by the attorney general, the local daily newspaper
El Diario de Juarez declared in a front page headline: "Juarez Cartel
'Disappears.' " Editors of other newspapers were equally dubious about the
perceived identity crisis. "Although it's understandable that he wants to
improve the city's image, you can't limit the media like that because
people won't understand what you're writing," said Alejandro Ramos, editor
of El Financiero, a Mexico City financial daily. "If we changed our way of
writing about the cartel, readers would be disconcerted."

More important, said Ramos, Ciudad Juarez needs more than the name change
of its resident cartel to clean up its image: "The government has to find
some real solutions for the serious problems found all along the border,
which include poor regional development, labor rights violations, low
standards of living as well as political and social problems."

Researcher Garance Burke in Mexico City contributed to this report.