DIGGING FOR MASS GRAVES ENDS, BUT QUESTIONS REMAIN IN JUAREZ

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - The only signs that La Campana ranch was recently a
focus of world attention are discarded foam coffee cups, spent batteries
and a few bored soldiers standing guard outside.

The digging has stopped, and there is no more talk of finding the bodies of
100 Mexicans and Americans in mass graves just over the U.S. border.

What remains are questions: Were the expectations of finding so many bodies
in mass graves overblown? And, if the 100 people missing in the Juarez area
aren't in the mass graves, where are they?

The end of the digging was casually announced Thursday by Mexican Attorney
General Jorge Madrazo during a news conference. The two-month, joint
Mexican-FBI investigation had turned up nine bodies and a drug laboratory
at three sites.

It was an anticlimactic ending to a sensational story that grabbed
headlines worldwide, with talk of a killing field right across the border
from El Paso, Texas.

"It's the titillation factor of wanting to see the border as a grade-B
movie about the drug trade," said John Amastae, director of the Center for
Inter-American and Border Studies at the University of Texas-El Paso.

The news broke Nov. 29, with U.S. law enforcement officials, speaking on
condition of anonymity, telling reporters that an informant had said as
many as 100 bodies might be buried in Ciudad Juarez.

Yet the head of the Mexican attorney general's organized crime unit, Jose
Larrieta Carrasco, told The Associated Press on Thursday that no informant
had ever used that figure to either Mexican or U.S. officials.

Madrazo had acknowledged that 100 people were missing in the Juarez area,
but repeatedly said he did not know how many might be buried in the graves.
The FBI also did not give a figure.

"The FBI never speculated," spokesman Jim Davis said. "The notion that the
FBI was shooting its mouth off just isn't accurate."

But U.S. and Mexican officials did little at first to counter speculation
that so many bodies might be found. Madrazo, for example, said in a
television interview on Nov. 30 that "there is a list of 22 U.S. citizens
that could be ... in those sites that we are now searching."

It wasn't until two days later that Madrazo expressed concern in an
interview about the "enormous speculation" and "frankly extravagant
numbers," which he described as "very far from reality."

The scope of the investigation also indicated that authorities were looking
for something big. Hundreds of Mexican police worked with dozens of FBI
agents in a rare joint operation. FBI director Louis Freeh visited one of
the sites and held a joint news conference with Madrazo. And President
Clinton spoke of the mass graves as a "horrible example of drug violence."

"The comments made by both U.S. and Mexican authorities were totally
removed from reality," Ciudad Juarez Mayor Gustavo Elizondo said.

He said the same investigation could have been conducted by far fewer
people with a much lower profile. Publicity from the digging has hurt
tourism and investment in Ciudad Juarez, he said. The city has suffered
years of bad press because of a series of killings of young women and
because the Juarez drug organization was based there.

"I believe that both authorities -- Mexican and U.S. -- ought to be more
careful in their declarations to avoid the psychosis they caused in the
city and the alarm throughout the world," Elizondo said.

Both U.S. and Mexican officials say they're not disappointed with the
results of the investigation. Mexican authorities say seven bodies have
been identified and appear to be victims of the Juarez-based drug
organization of the Carrillo Fuentes family. Five suspects have been detained.

Yet the many disappearances in the Juarez area remain unresolved. Official
figures put the number of people missing at 100; some private groups say it
is more than 200.

"They have to be somewhere," said Guadalupe Ramirez of the Independent
Chihuahua State Committee for the Defense of Human Rights. "They couldn't
have just disappeared."