WAR ON DRUG FAMILY FAILING

CRIME: A ring run by Mexico's Arellanos brothers thrives in the face of
stepped-up law enforcement efforts.

TIJUANA,Mexico - in the long, lurid history of drug trafficking along
Mexico's border with the United States, perhaps no fugitives have been more
notorious than the six Arellano Felix brothers.

Since 1993, when gunmen working for them murdered a Roman Catholic
cardinal, several of the brothers have been among the most wanted men in
Mexico. In 1997, after the Arellanos were accused of killing Mexican police
official, one of them was named to the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list.

But despite the most sustained and costly fight ever waged against one of
the drug mafias that have tormented Mexico, the Arellanos and their most
important associates have evaded capture, emerging as glaring symbols of
the failure of the U.S. and Mexican governments even to disrupt the
powerful gangs that control Mexico's drug trade.

Through plan after secret plan to combat the traffickers, their business
has thrived. According to U.S. Customs and law-enforcement officials, the
flow of drugs across this part of the border may now be heavier than ever
before.

"It's just not working," said Thomas A. Constantine, former head of the
Drug Enforcement Administration. "We know who they are. We have arrest
warrants against them. But for all the high-level meetings, the task
forces, the millions of dollars spent, the major figures still aren't
arrested."

A lengthy examination of the campaign against the Arellanos, based on
intelligence reports from both countries and dozens of interviews, suggests
that its most basic obstacle remains the corruption that pervades Mexican
law enforcement.

But some U.S. officials say that has become almost a blanket excuse for
failings that are far more complex - and more evenly shared.

Indeed, there is considerable evidence for the assertions of Mexican
officials that they often get inaccurate or incomplete information on the
traffickers from the United States.

Similarly, though a program to train Mexican police teams is a centerpiece
of the United States' international drug-enforcement strategy, the training
is so limited that some U.S. officials say the new Mexican units are
capable of only modest operations.

And though U.S. agents and prosecutors have won sealed indictments against
most of the Arellanos and their main associates, officials say the Clinton
administration has done little to press Mexico City to join in a viable
plan to apprehend them.

"This is not rocket science," the former acting U.S. attorney for the
Southern District of California, Charles G. LaBella, said in an interview.
"The Mexicans and the Americans could get these guys tomorrow if they
really wanted to. If we were serious about it, we would pull out the stops."

With congressional pressure on the authorities rising in both countries,
particularly after their largely unsuccessful collaboration in the recent
search for mass graves purportedly left by drug traffickers in Ciudad
Juarez, officials are vowing again to step up their pressure on the gang.

In San Diego, federal prosecutors may soon unseal some of their indictments
against the Arellanos and their closest lieutenants. Officials in Mexico
City are considering moving federal police forces into Tijuana as they once
did in Cancun, raiding traffickers' safe houses, confiscating their
properties and attacking their protective network.

Many officials who have worked on the case remain skeptical. Though the
Cancun operation was highly ambitious by Mexican standards, they note that
almost all its big targets got away. In Baja California, moreover, such
promises have been heard many times before.

Although few officials recognized it at the time, the slaying of Cardinal
Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo during a gun battle between the Arellanos and one
of their rivals at the Guadalajara airport in 1993 signaled the emergence
of a new drug threat in Mexico.

Like their most prominent rivals along the border, those accused in the
cardinal's killing were sons of a well-known drug-trafficking family, one
of several clans that rose from the peasantry in the rugged poppy and
marijuana fields of the western Sierra Madre.

As law-enforcement pressure on them intensified after the cardinal's
killing, the Arellanos lavished money on a network of lawyers, officials
and others who paid bribes and managed business beyond the brothers'
underworld.

According to one intelligence report, corrupt police agents provided them
with a steady flow of stolen vehicles, while allies in the Mexican military
arranged for their purchase of hundreds of AK-47 assault rifles and even
M-50 machine guns. Of every 10 Tijuana judges, one senior Mexican official
who has worked in the region said, "11 of them are on the Arellanos' payroll."

Through intermediaries, the brothers offered campaign contributions to
up-and-coming politicians and loans to struggling business people. They
expanded their contacts in government offices, hotels, airports, newspapers
and television stations. U.S. drug-intelligence analysts believe the
Arellanos began laundering profits into offshore accounts, real estate and
other investments.

After four years of frustration, U.S. and Mexican officials resolved in
1997 to redouble their efforts in Tijuana, where the slayings of half a
dozen senior police officials and prosecutors had been attributed to the gang.

Washington ultimately detailed more than 100 agents, analysts and
prosecutors to the case, and U.S. officials sought to take advantage of
what they saw as progress.

First, a Mexican army general who had taken over as the federal attorney
general's representative in Tijuana turned in another general who had come
to him on the Arellanos' behalf offering bribes of $1 million a month.

Then, tipped off by yet another Mexican general, Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo,
U.S. agents arrested two of the gang's young gunmen at a San Diego-area
condominium on Coronado Islan. Next, in December 1997, Mexican police
officials arrested one of the Arellanos' better-known lieutenants and
agreed to try to extradite him for trial in the United States.

A new Mexican attorney general, Jorge Madrazo Cuellar, let U.S. agents and
prosecutors comb Mexican files on dozens of killings attributed to the
Arellanos so the they might develop witnesses for their cases in San Diego.

The chief of the new organized-crime force, Samuel Gonzalez Ruiz, went
further, quietly assigning three of his own agents to work directly with
U.S. officials in San Diego. Later, over the objections of other Mexican
officials, Gonzalez even arranged the secret transfer of two Mexican
convicts to U.S. prisons so they could testify before a federal grand jury
hearing evidence against the Arellano gang.

"Nothing like it had ever happened before," a U.S. drug-enforcement
official recalled. "Of course we were encouraged."

For all the effort, however, the two governments made scant progress.

Gen. Gutierrez Rebollo, whose pressure on the brothers had helped him gain
appointment as Mexico's drug-enforcement chief, was found to be working
secretly with their main rival. The promised extradition of the Arellano
lieutenant quickly got bogged down in Mexican courts.

In San Diego, drug-enforcement and FBI officials grew so suspicious of a
Mexican federal police commander in Tijuana that they cut him out of
sensitive meetings altogether, several officials said.