DRUG VIOLENCE PERVADES A MEXICAN BORDER CITY

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- One summer night last year, state policemen
raced through the downtown streets here in a shoot-out with alleged
kidnappers just a few blocks from the international bridge that
connects the city with El Paso, Texas.

At the end of the high-speed gun battle, the Chihuahua state police
caught their suspects, who included three Mexican Army soldiers
belonging to a special federal police force sent to the border to
combat drug-related kidnappings and other violence.

The confrontation was not an isolated incident in this sprawling
desert border city where violence is rampant, and citizens say they
routinely find the police on-either side of the law.

"Everyone in Juarez knows the police work for the drug traffickers and
that they kidnap and kill people," said Alfredo Quijano, an editor for
the Ciudad Juarez edition of the Monterrey daily newspaper El Norte.
"But government authorities haven't done anything about it."

Mexican officials argue they are not entirely to blame. "As long as
Juarez shares a border with the largest drugconsuming nation in the
world, our city will be a conduit for the drug trade, " said the
municipal police chief, Javier Benavides. "This creates a set of very
difficult problems for us."

The seamy side of Ciudad Juarez surfaced again last week when Mexican
and U.S. law enforcement authorities discovered isolated desert grave
sites allegedly containing as many as 100 murder victims. After a week
of intensive digging, officials said they have found the remains of
six people believed to have been shot or suffocated.

But Ciudad Juarez, crowded against the border of western Texas, is a
city of extraordinary contrasts, a crossroads for both the best and
the worst of modem-day Mexico. The same proximity to the United States
that is cursed for attracting Mexico's most powerful drug mafia, the
Juarez cartel, is embraced for drawing assembly lines of Ford Motor
Co., General Electric Co. and other leading U.S. companies that helped
pull Mexico out of a crushing economic crisis.

Ciudad Juarez claims ostentatious mansions that could dwarf houses in
wealthy U.S. suburbs, as well as vast slums built of cardboard and
plywood packing crates. Huge modem factories framed by lawns kept lush
by whirring sprinklers loom beside dusty shantytowns; without running
water. Eight-lane boulevards connect the assembly plants to the
airport and main highways, but in most factory workers' neighborhoods
the streets are little more than narrow dirt paths impassable to most
automobiles.

According to criminologists and sociologists, this volatile mix of
wealth and poverty, legitimate and illegal businesses, has contributed
to Ciudad Juarez's status as one of the most violent and corrupt
cities in Mexico.

An entry-level municipal police officer makes just under $500 a month,
and federal 'officers are paid only slightly more, making them easy
targets for drug traffickers offering thousands of dollars or more a
month to protect their shipments, according to Mexican police officials.

Five police agencies answerable to different bosses have jurisdiction
in Ciudad Juarez. "There has been friction between the agents,
especially when the federal, judicial police do not want to identify
themselves, " said Mr. Benavides, the city police chief. "When
authorities assume responsibilities that do not correspond to them, it
definitely creates tensions."

In addition to natural rivalries, tensions have flared in recent years
between police units protecting rival drug trafficking gangs.

In many cases it was not clear "if the authorities were working with
the goal of fighting drug trafficking in general, or were in the
employ of a drug trafficker looking to weaken a rival gang," the human
rights group Americas Watch wrote in a report on police corruption in
Mexico.

Those reports, along with accounts of witnesses, have led human rights
groups and families of an estimated 200 people from the Ciudad
Juarez-El Paso area who have gone missing in recent years to believe
that law enforcement authorities have been involved in many of the
disappearances.

FBI officials said an informant who led them to the grave where the
remains of the six bodies were found last week was a former police
official who witnessed the burials.

Until the recent investigation, neither U.S. nor Mexican law
enforcement agencies showed much interest in investigating the
disappearances, according to family members.

"We're not talking about ordinary citizens disappearing here," the
Chihuahua state attorney general, Arturo Gonzalez Rascion, said in an
interview last week. "We're talking about people who were involved in
drug trafficking and who were involved in activities that have certain
kinds of consequences. So they disappeared. "

That attitude angers many people, including Alberto Medrano
Villarreal, president of the city bar association. and an attorney for
the families of some of the missing victims. "You can't justify
violence like that," he said. "In a just society you just can't cover
up executions."