A LOOK INSIDE A GIANT DRUG CARTEL

A Bicontinental Investigation Is Leading To Arrests And Searches For
More Victims Of The Powerful Juarez Cartel.

The disappearance of a US Drug Enforcement Administration operative
may have pushed officials to aggressively search for more victims of
the Juarez cartel's drug wars, observers here say.

Although US officials have not confirmed the agent is missing, the
Mexican press is reporting the DEA agent - one of four officials
assigned to the US Consulate in Juarez - had a car equipped with a
tracking device that led investigators to a shed on one of the ranches
being searched.

So far, 65 FBI forensics experts and 600 Mexican policemen have
exhumed six bodies from the sandy soil of four Juarez ranches
connected with the Juarez cartel. This week-old search, plus another
investigation in Buenos Aires into a Juarez cartel money-laundering
"cell," are providing a new glimpse inside the cartel's operations.

The Juarez cartel, responsible for some 50 percent of illegal drugs
that pass through Mexico to the US, rose in the past decade to become
one of the hemisphere's - if not the world's - most powerful crime
organizations Some US sources estimate the cartel's income reached as
high as $200 million a week. That mind-boggling sum was not only key
to the organization's rise, but also an element in its undoing after
its mastermind, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, died in July 1997.

The geographic spread of investigation sites - from Los Angeles and El
Paso, Texas; to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico; Mexico City; Buenos Aires; and
Santiago, Chile - is a measure of the reach of a drug-trafficking gang
once powerful enough to count on its payroll Mexico's equivalent of US
drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey.

On Thursday the director-general of Interpol-Mexico, Juan Miguel Ponce
Edmonson, announced that a two-year investigation into the cartel has
resulted in the shutting down of its Buenos Aires money-laundering
"cell." Several Argentine and Italian citizens suspected of
involvement have been barred from leaving Argentina, while their
properties and cash were seized.

The Buenos Aires laundering operation was designed to provide more
hiding places for the mountains of cash the Juarez organization was
taking in.

The cartel's roots

The Juarez cartel has its antecedents in the 1980s, but bloomed under
the direction of Carrillo Fuentes in the 1990s. Benefiting from the
cocaine boom of the '80s and taking advantage of the crackdown on the
Colombian cartels, Carrillo Fuentes began building his operation.

His big breakthrough, US sources say, came with his decision to take
merchandise - cocaine - instead of cash for his work with the
Colombians. That allowed him to develop his own distribution system
from the point of origin to the point of sale.

But Carrillo Fuentes's stroke of genius - the one that earned him the
nickname Lord of the Skies - was his idea of creating a kind of sky
train of large jets. Putting aside the small boats and prop planes of
his predecessors, he ferried tons of white powder from Peru, Bolivia,
and Colombia, to Mexican airfields and on to American streets.

Like a Henry Ford, a Sam Walton, or a Bill Gates, it was brilliant
business thinking that made Carrillo Fuentes a legend. But Carrillo
Fuentes' success also ultimately led to his downfall.

Feeling intensifying pressure from US and some Mexican authorities,
the Lord of the Skies in 1996 apparently decided to shift his base of
operations to the southern cone of South America. He considered Chile,
according to Mexican investigators, and began setting up a number of
operations there. He also worked in Argentina and visited Brazil,
Uruguay, and Cuba.

Santiago has never drawn attention as a hotbed of drug trafficking or
of drug-money laundering. But when President Clinton traveled there
for the Summit of the Americas in April 1998, local journalists joked
about how the US delegation was staying in what they called a
"narcohotel," a glitzy new property that according to some muckraking
media investigations had been built with drug money.

Disappearing act

In what may have been one of the final steps in his plan to disappear
from Mexico and carry on his business elsewhere, Carrillo Fuentes went
under a plastic surgeon's knife in Mexico City in July 1997 in an
attempt to alter his physical appearance. Exactly why he died during
the operation is not clear - in fact some people believe the death was
staged and that Carrillo Fuentes is still running cocaine. The story
of what really happened may never be known. The two doctors who
performed the unsuccessful surgery were later found dead along a
highway, stuffed in oil drums.

Carrillo Fuentes's death set off a wave of violence focused in Juarez
as lieutenants battled to assume the throne or other drug thugs tried
to move in. Several leaders were killed, while other high-ranking
operatives were arrested.

Last month the man considered to be one of the cartel's top money
launderers was arrested in the US Embassy in Mexico City as he tried
to obtain a visa using false documents.

It was also a former hitman for Carrillo Fuentes - a onetime judicial
police commander in Juarez whom Mexican officials say moonlighted for
$5,000 a month as a cartel bodyguard - who helped lead Mexican justice
officials to the Juarez graves.

Mario Silva Calderon was called "The Animal" by fellow cartel minions
for his ruthlessness.

The nickname rose from the way he finished off suspected turncoats or
the poor country boys who worked as "mules" taking drugs across the
border but ended up knowing too much.

Under arrest in Mexico and seeking a lighter sentence, Mr. Silva
apparently started talking about the graves. But even with its deaths
and arrests, no one thinks the Juarez cartel is anywhere near undone.

'El Metro' takes over

Another Carrillo Fuentes bodyguard and former judicial police
commander, Alcides Ramon Magana, has moved the operations eastward
along the Gulf coast and into the Yucatan Peninsula.

The man nicknamed "El Metro" had quick success in Quintana Roo state,
home of Cancun, a favorite US vacationing spot. In very little time El
Metro took what had been Colombian traffickers' territory and made it
his own, US investigators say. In the process he brought the state's
former governor, Mario Villanueva, into his fold.

Mr. Villanueva disappeared a few days before leaving office in April
and hasn't been seen since. As one US investigator said, the Juarez
cartel turned Quintana Roo into a narcostate, and its highest elected
official into a narcogovernor.

The Interpol-Mexico investigation detected at least $25 million that
was sent from Mexico to banks in New York and Los Angeles, before
being wired on to Argentina and the Cayman Islands. The US end of the
cartel's laundering scheme involved Citibank, which is already under
investigation in the US for its role in the holding and transferring
of millions of dollars for Raul Salinas de Gortari, brother of former
Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

Raul Salinas is in prison for planning the murder of a political
rival.

According to Interpol's Mr. Ponce, the investigation revealed that the
Juarez cartel's Argentina laundering operations depended on a network
of Argentine businessmen and public officials, including at least two
high-level government officials from the 1980s.