COCAINE KILLERS

Two hundred people have disappeared in Mexico's cocaine wars Damian
Whitworth reports

To understand how more than 100 people came to be interred in mass graves
along the Mexico-Texas border it is best to start on the Bridge of the
Americas. This spans the Rio Grande, between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez,
binding the richest nation on earth to the Third World. Stand on the bridge
on the Texas side and look south.

Behind you - and you don't want to look back - is El Paso, a town where even
the legendary sharpshooter Wyatt Earp felt so uneasy he left hastily. It
hasn't improved much today. But it is as nothing to the horrors on the other
side of the bridge, where lawlessness threatens to spill over the border,
and often does.

The only natural barrier between the two countries, the river, is not grand,
but rather a pathetic, fetid brown stream. However, row upon row of high
fences topped with razor wire ensure that the only way across is to join the
traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular, being funnelled across the bridge.
The traffic is light going south, but coming north it seems as though the
whole of Central and South America is on the road. Twelve lanes of traffic,
bumper to bumper, all the way back across the bridge and into Mexico, inch
towards the promised land. Cars are piled high with children and luggage.
And cocaine.

Not all of them are so laden, of course. That would be a ridiculous slur on
the Mexican people. But many have illegal cargo and somebody on the bridge
at this moment is bound to be sweating. Men lead sniffer dogs through the
jam and occasionally a dog gets excited and a car is searched. Every now and
then a vehicle will be hauled away and mercilessly ripped to pieces by
customs officers until they find bags of powder stashed under the floor or
concealed inside wheels. But for every car that is stopped, how many get
through? Who knows? "We cannot stop them all," says a customs officer. The
people driving the cars these days are, often as not, teenagers. Kids of 16
offered several hundred dollars - a fortune to them - to drive across the
border with freight worth tens of thousands of dollars. Even when they are
caught they display little concern. They might spend a few weeks in a
detention centre but few go down for a long spell. The people the United
States is anxious to get its hands on, as always with drug smuggling, are
those who dispatched the couriers. Only now, it is not just drug trafficking
they want them for, but mass murder.

Evidence of the killings is not hard to find. Cross the bridge and wend your
way through the hawkers ("Hey Mister, you come for girls or you need
something else, eh?") and the filth of the Juarez slums, and head a few
miles into the Chihuahua desert. There, in the grounds of the Rancho de la
Campaña - known to locals, for reasons nobody can remember, as the "Hidden
Treasure Camp" - is a killing field. The high walls are ringed by Mexican
soldiers wearing balaclavas and carrying Kalashnikovs, but you can peer in
through the gates to where a mechanical digger is ploughing up the earth
close to some baby-blue buildings. Figures in overalls sift and sieve soil
like palaeontologists, though the bones they are examining are rather more
recent than the Jurassic age.

The first grisly find was a human scalp. Then, as the FBI forensic
scientists - veterans of mass graves in Kososvo - dug deeper, they pulled up
the skeletal remains of six bodies, jumbled on top of each other in a single
grave. Two were wearing boots, another tennis shoes and one just his
underwear. At least one had been shot. The others may have suffocated. The
investigators, an unprecedented joint team of the FBI and Mexican government
officers, have not commented on a report that there is a cave near by
housing evidence that victims were tortured before they were killed.

The neighbours say they had no idea what was going on. The people who had
used the ranch had kept themselves to themselves and in any case, as the
faded "Welcome to the Paso del Norte Gun Club" sign suggests, nobody would
have been unduly alarmed by the sound of gunfire. The Mexican
Attorney-General has said his information is that there are 100 or more
bodies in the grave and at three other sites in the region - one of which
this week yielded two bodies. His estimate that 22 of them are American
citizens has been played down by the US authorities, who think the number is
likely to be nearer four or five. They may include informers who have not
been seen for a while. Some of the bodies are buried 12ft below ground.

The painstaking task of excavating the four sites will take months, and the
process of identifying the decomposed corpses by DNA testing and medical
records will be just as lengthy. Some of those waiting outside the gates are
pretty sure that they know who the bodies are already. They do not want to
hear, but expect soon that they will be told that there is no longer a
mystery over what happened to "the disappeared".

The desaparecidos are 200 or more people from both sides of the border who,
until last week's digging began, seemed to have vanished. They fell into two
groups: those who were involved in drug smuggling and those who were trying
to help the war against the traffickers. A few others were simply
unfortunate enough to get caught in the crossfire.

Many of those who disappeared were last seen in the company of men wearing
what looked like Mexican police uniforms. Until now friends and relatives
had held out hopes that their loved ones were simply in jail, through their
own fault or because of some mix-up, and would eventually be freed. Now
suspicions they had tried to suppress must be faced. The informant who took
a lie detector test and then led the authorities to the grave site was
himself a former Mexican police officer believed to have been culpable for
some of the killings.

One woman, who declined to give her name because her son had got "caught up
in" the drug trade, says that she had believed that the men in uniforms who
had come to cart her son away were taking him to prison. "But we could never
find a record of him being arrested," she said, her eyes red from crying.
She did not know whom he had upset or why.

Claudia Sanchez is quite clear about what her stepfather had done wrong.
Escobedo Martinez was a US Navy veteran who had invented a microwave
communications system for which Mexican federal police paid more than
$30,000 to aid their pursuit of drug traffickers. He was about to seal a new
deal with the authorities when he was invited with his wife to the theatre
one night five years ago. They never got there and have not been heard of
since. Señorita Sanchez has already been asked to supply investigators with
her parents' dental records. "Maybe if it's them, I have a place where I can
go and send flowers," she says. "I'll look for justice, somebody had to do
this and I need justice."

The man responsible may already have received justice. The ownership of the
Rancho de la Campaña has been traced to alleged frontmen for Amado Carillo
Fuentes, the former boss of the Juarez drug cartel, the most notorious gang
in Mexico. Fuentes died in 1997 after an overdose of anaesthesia during
plastic surgery intended to disguise him.

Fuentes's impact on the drug-trafficking world had already been huge. He
started out running cocaine across the border into the United States for a
Colombian cartel, which then picked it up again and distributed it across
America. But he soon realised that there were much bigger profits to be made
in doing the whole job himself. He became known as the "Lord of the Skies"
for the fleet of 727 jets he used to fly the drugs into remote Mexican
airports. He then smuggled the stuff over the border and distributed it. The
Juarez cartel became, says Phil Jordan, the former head of the El Paso
Intelligence Centre, the "Super Bowl champion of the drug trade".

Fuentes maintained the cartel's pre-eminence through ruthlessness. Those who
crossed him, or whom he suspected of trying to undermine him, were quickly
disposed of. He did not like to draw attention to the cartel so, unlike
Mafia killings, Fuentes preferred it if the bodies of his victims were never
found. He could not control matters so well after his death - the bodies of
those who had operated on him were discovered, in barrels in the Gulf of
Mexico. But the disappearances continued as rival factions fought for
control of the empire. Fuentes's brother, the brutal Vicente, who is now in
hiding, emerged the victor.

Bribery was Fuentes's other tool in establishing the Juarez cartel's legacy.
The Drug Enforcement Adminstration estimates that the cartel is smuggling
$10 billion-worth of cocaine into America every year and so the $200 million
it spends on paying off officials is loose change, brilliantly invested.
From doubling the $300 a month salaries of Juarez cops who turned a blind
eye to smuggling, to forking out thousands to those prepared to take part in
crimes, the cartel so corrupted the local police that the FBI and federal
investigators gave the Juarez cops no forewarning of the mass graves
investigation for fear that those on the take would tip off the suspects
arrested last week.

The Mexican Attorney-General, Jorge Madrazo Cuellar, said a few days ago
that police officers were being investigated and "We're not going to cover
up for anybody". But the American authorities driving the inquiry can be
forgiven for being wary. Corruption in Mexico has been seen to go much
higher. It transpired that General Jose de Jesús Gutierrez Rebello, then the
head of the anti-drug police, was supplying information to the Juarez cartel
in return for an apartment and other gifts. His arrest followed hard upon a
visit to Washington, where he was praised by the White House "drugs czar",
Barry McCaffrey, for having "absolute, unquestioned integrity". He is now
serving 32 years in jail.

In September Mario Ruiz Massieu, the former chief drugs prosecutor,
committed suicide just two days before he was due to appear in a court in
Houston, Texas, to face charges that he had profited from drug
money-laundering that he was supposed to be trying to stop. He was also
wanted in Mexico to answer questions about the investigation he had
conducted into the death of his own brother, amid accusations that he had
tried to cover up for Raúl Salinas de Gortari - the brother of the former
President, Carlos Salinas de Gortari - who is in jail for masterminding the
murder.

The Americans have been so sceptical of Mexican efforts to tackle drug
trafficking that last year they investigated money-laundering in the
country's banking system without telling the Government or their law
enforcement counterparts. Barry McCaffrey insists there is now "significant
co-operation" from Mexico, "but we have still got a huge problem". President
Clinton went as far last week as to suggest that America's neighbour is the
new Colombia; the success of attacks on the big Colombian cartels has merely
pushed the centre of power in the drug-trafficking world northwards. The
Mexican Government reacted furiously: "I think it's a completely mistaken
perception, I don't think we're like Colombia at all," howled Diódoro
Carrasco Altamirano, the Interior Minister.

But with their networks of inconspicuous fellow Mexicans in the US and a
2,000-mile border to run at, the future for the Mexican cartels looks good.
For even if the Juarez bunch begin to lose their touch, there are plenty of
others waiting to steal their throne. One pair of rivals from Tijuana, for
example; they didn't like a man, so sent him his wife's head in a box of
ice.

Even if the Mexican Government does a tremendous job on the investigation
and brings the kingpins of the Juarez cartel to justice, it is hard to see
how the US can hold back the tidal waves crashing against its border.

Meanwhile the forensic scientists in the desert, hiding their faces behind
ski masks and under constant armed guard, will keep digging to unearth the
secrets of the graves. And cars will keep trundling over the border.