MEXICAN RANCH YIELDS FEW BODIES, FEW ANSWERS

MEXICO CITY -- Families of the missing are reeling and some American
drug agents are scratching their heads after the FBI and Mexican
authorities recently denied that scores of bodies might be at remote
ranches outside of Ciudad Juarez, not far from the border with El
Paso, Texas.

After two weeks of digging at two of four ranches that some officials
initially called possible mass grave sites with as many as 100 bodies
buried, remains of only eight men have been unearthed. They are being
studied by FBI forensics specialists in El Paso.

With Mexican Attorney General Jorge Madrazo signaling that the digging
may end in two weeks, officials are saying they're not sure how many
bodies they will turn up. The total may be well below original estimates.

Mexican and FBI sources at first suggested that as many as 100 bodies
might be found, victims of a long war between drug gangs over illicit
cocaine supply routes in Mexico said to be worth $10 billion a year.

A media crush ensued, dozens of FBI specialists were granted permits
to work in Mexico, and a forensics lab was set up in El Paso. Buoyed
by the official ruckus, families of the missing began hoping
authorities could finally close ugly chapters in their lives.

But it soon became clear that scores of bodies might not be buried at
the ranches after all -- souring hopeful families on the spectacle.

``The families are calling me, wondering what is going on, and I can't
tell them a thing,'' said Jaime Hervella, who directs an El Paso group
that has tracked nearly 200 unsolved border area disappearances and
kidnappings back to 1994.

``If the authorities would stay with it and dig up all the ranches
said to belong to drug traffickers, and all the abandoned wells around
Juarez, they might turn up 100 bodies. But that could take years.''

Agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, left on the
sidelines in this case by the FBI, privately doubt the existence of
burial sites with high concentrations of drug-war victims.

``I wonder if people moved too quickly,'' said one Texas-based
official. ``Everyone is jumping to conclusions, and there is really
nothing yet to indicate drug-related burials at the scale they've
advertised.''

Last week Madrazo was careful to point out that neither he nor the FBI
ever issued an official body-count estimate. Yet in a meeting with
reporters just days after the digging began, Mexican prosecutors said
they were working with a list of 100 people -- including up to 22
American citizens -- reported missing between 1994 and 1997.

Many of the missing were last seen in Mexican police custody, or being
hustled away by men wearing black uniforms of federal police.

None of those disappearances has been solved, despite a task force and
four special prosecutors assigned to the mystery by Mexican officials.

Madrazo says investigators are not ruling out the possibility that
some people on the list may be alive ``and perhaps even working in the
United States'' -- a suggestion scoffed at by Juarez human rights activists.

``I am afraid we're all going to be disappointed again, just as we
have with police and politicians who do nothing about rampant abuse of
women and children in Juarez, and the many unsolved murders of young
women,'' said Esther Chavez, an activist who counsels families of
almost 200 young women found dead over the last six years in and
around Juarez.

Most of those killings are blamed on domestic violence, crimes of
passion and drug traffickers. But at least 30 of the murdered women
remain unidentified, and locals suspect that serial killers -- perhaps
corrupt police officers -- roam the streets of Juarez.

Locals see it as a given that Juarez police are crooked, and that a
booming export manufacturing industry only slightly obscures the
danger of the city.

Just days before a horde of Mexican soldiers, hooded federal agents,
and 46BI agents descended on Juarez, remains of five more women were
discovered in a remote site outside the city.

And even as authorities dug up the ranches, dubbed
``narco-cemeteries'' by locals, drug dealers kept on shooting each
other. Last week, a known drug informant was gunned down in daylight
on a downtown street in a small city west of Juarez.

``Drug dealers don't stop for anything,'' Hervella said. ``They shoot
people and leave them where they fall as calling cards -- warnings to
others not to talk.''