WHAT MASS GRAVES?

DRUGS: Search along Mexican Border fails to turn up the dozens of
bodies officials said had been murdered by traffickers.

MEXICO CITY-U.S. and Mexican agents ended their search for mass graves
along the border in unspectacular fashion this week after finding just
nine bodies - well short of the dozens they had hoped to unearth.

Critics called the effort a failure, and others scrambled to shift the
blame to everyone from unreliable informants and the media to
publicity-hungry FBI agents.

"We all look bad," Adolfo Aguilar Ainser, a Mexican senator, said
Thursday.

News of the graves made worldwide headlines in late November when U.S.
officials said as many as 100 bodies could be buried on ranches outside the
Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez. Hundreds of Mexican soldiers and
police officers, along with forensic experts from the FBI , descended on
the town and started digging.

Television cameras rolled as investigators tore up the grounds of four
ranches in their grisly search. Drug traffickers, the agents said,
killed the people and buried them on the ranches.

Mexican Attorney General Jorge Madrazo and FBI Director Louis Freeh
wept into town and called the joint operation - the largest of its
kind in history - a shining example of cooperation against drugs. And
at the White House, President Clinton condemned the Juarez murders as
a horrible example of the "excesses of the drug-dealing cartels in
Mexico."

Amid all the excitement, veteran anti-drug agents were
skeptical.

Sure, traffickers kill people and sometimes they bury them, said Tom
Cash, a former senior official with the Drug Enforcement
Administration.

"But it's not like you're going to find bodies stacked up like
cordwood," he said.

Other DEA agents said the existence of "narco-graves" in Juarez had
been known at the agency for years, but few envisioned body upon body.

Ciudad Juarez is one of the main gateways for illicit drugs entering
the United States, and hundreds of people disappear or are murdered
there every year, U.S. and Mexican agents say.

Appearing before senators Thursday, Madrazo defended the joint
investigation and blamed the American news media for publishing
statements from anonymous U.S. officials who gave the impression that
as many as 100 bodies would be found.

Madrazo also said investigators tried hard to find the
bodies.

"He said, ' We have dug to the point where the next thing we might
find is oil. But no bodies,'" Aguilar quoted the attorney general as
saying at the briefing.

El Diario de Juarez, a daily newspaper in Ciudad Juarez, published a
report in December saying that a key informant in the graves case was
a former Mexican federal police commander named Mario "The Animal"
Silva Calderon.

The newspaper described Silva as a former hit man for drug boss Amado
Carrillo Fuentes, who died in 1997. Silve became a protected witness -
and evidently was interviewed by U.S. and Mexican agents - after
Mexican authorities arrested him, El Diario said.

Relying on such sources isn't always a good idea, critics
say.

"The United States Has fallen into the trap of using informants ...
corrupt, shrewd informants," Aguilar said.

The FBI has said it built its case using information from a variety of
sources, not a single informant.

Whatever the case, the FBI's quest to find the Juarez bodies didn't
help boost its popularity among Mexican.

Instead, many Mexican said they saw the FBI's incursion into their
country as a violation of sovereignty.

Madrazo said asking the FBI to help search for the victims doesn't
harm Mexico's sovereignty, "especially since these actions have the
objective of preventing our children and young people from being
poisoned by drugs."

But in the end, Aguilar said, both sides lost.

The U.S. government comes off as "abusive," he said. "The Mexican
government looks bad because it looks like we're so incapable we can't
do an autopsy."

Cash and other former DEA agents say Mexican police are among the best
in the world - when they want to be. But most murders in Mexico go
unsolved, they say.

"I don't recall very many successful Mexican murder investigations,"
Cash said. "If we get one, we ought to box it up and send it to the
Smithsonian. There's a long history of Mexican inefficiency when it
comes to forensics."

The search for bodies in Juarez raised the hopes of families trying to
finally learn what happened to their relatives, said Jaime Hervella,
director of the Association of Relatives and Friends of Missing
Persons in El Paso.

The past weeks haven't been easy for many families, he said. But the
meager results mean that perhaps some of the disappeared are alive,
perhaps hidden in military jails, he said.

"In a way, we can now breathe a sigh of relief that our loved ones are
not buried in the desert. That is our prayer - that they won't find
anyone."