DRUGS, CORRUPTION IN JUAREZ STAINING STREETS WITH BLOOD

Rapid Population Growth Adds To Social Pressures On Border City

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- Body counts are nothing new in this dust-choked
border town.

All last week, FBI agents and Mexican federal police dug behind a walled
compound known as La Campana on the southern edge of town, methodically
removing the skeletal remains of six people presumed to have been victims
of Juarez's notorious drug trade.

Mexican authorities, working from a list of more than 100 people who have
disappeared here in recent years, say they will search for more remains on
three other properties they have seized.

Whatever the final toll, it adds up to an era of violence, murder,
kidnapping and corruption that experts say is unmatched elsewhere along the
U.S.-Mexico border.

A private El Paso group established two years ago now lists 196 men and
women who have disappeared without a trace. And in Juarez, state police
have compiled a tally of 194 women murdered since 1993, many of them young
women who found jobs in hundreds of foreign-owned maquiladora manufacturing
and assembly plants dotting the city.

Mexican newspapers here run headlines declaring 500 people have died at the
hands of the Juarez Cartel, an international narcotics trafficking ring
forged by Amado Carrillo Fuentes. The savvy young trafficker -- nicknamed
"Lord of the Skies" for buying old jetliners to ferry tons of dope into
Mexico -- died in July 1997 after a botched plastic surgery.

Carrillo's death triggered a wave of violence that literally stained Juarez
streets with blood, as hitmen gunned down rivals by raking restaurants and
other public places with machine gun fire.

And while authorities have not linked these various categories of crime
victims, the common thread is that they are a product of the tremendous
social pressures that plague this city, one expert says.

Juarez's official population is 1.3 million, but other estimates conclude
that more than 2 million people now live in a border city that has sprawled
across an uninviting desert valley and is ringed by grim shantytowns. And
despite a lack of basic infrastructure and services, the numerous
manufacturing jobs provided by an estimated 350 maquiladora plants lure
40,000 to 60,000 new residents from the Mexican interior each year, causing
Juarez to double in size every 10 years, city officials note.

"You have to look back into history to understand the foundation of
Juarez," notes Howard Campbell, an associate professor of anthropology at
the University of Texas at El Paso. "It's an economy based on contraband
and crime, going back to the days of Prohibition."

It is an economy based on illegal immigration and the smuggling of
electronics, weapons, liquor and drugs, Campbell said.

"The violence is something new and unprecedented; that is something that
changed in the '90s. Juarez was always a rough-and-tumble border town, but
the killings of the women and the drug killings brought it to an incredible
level.

"When the Juarez Cartel established itself, you saw the body count go up
dramatically."

And many in Juarez would not be surprised if some of those discovered in
the clandestine "narcograves," as the Mexican press has called the walled
compounds where police are excavating, prove to be women who were abducted
and are now listed as missing.

The first bodies have been identified as men.

"I think there could be some women who could be found there, because there
are some women who disappeared without a trace," said Esther Chavez,
director of the Casa Amiga Crisis Center, a support center for women and
children who have been abused, raped or beaten.

Chavez cited the case of two young women in their 20s working in a local
cabaret who were last seen two years ago on a downtown street as they got
into the car of a known narcotics dealer.

"The attorney general (of Chihuahua state) said it's possible the federal
or state police could be responsible for those found in the graves, and I
think they could also be responsible for the deaths of women," Chavez said.

Chavez said Juarez citizens have no faith in any of the various police
forces in the city -- municipal, state or federal -- and many believe they
had a role in killing members of drug rings and scores of women whose
bodies were dumped outside of town.

"So a bunch of drug barons are getting drunk in a bar and they see a woman
they want and they make her come with them, and then they kill her so there
are no witnesses," said Campbell, the UTEP anthropologist. "Police can do
the same, and a lot of people think a lot of these women were murdered by
police.

"I guess the overlap is you have heavily armed people who can do things to
anybody. So women are picked up for sex and killed. And the drug
traffickers can take care of their enemies. The point is there is no
institution in Juarez that can protect anyone," Campbell said.

In April, community activists were angered when state police arrested four
bus drivers under contract with the maquilas to transport workers, and
charged them with murdering some of the women found dumped in Juarez. Three
of the bus drivers had prior criminal records, raising concerns the
maquiladora industry was not serious about protecting its workers,
including many who are young women. An Egyptian engineer who worked at a
maquila plant, Abdel Latif Sharif, is serving a 30-year sentence for one of
the murders, but many of the homicides remain unsolved.

Richard Schwein, a retired agent who headed the El Paso FBI office, agreed
that Mexican police were on the payroll of the Juarez Cartel.

"That's no secret. They had police escorting loads (of narcotics),"Schwein
said. "The cartels buy them, that's no secret.

"If you're a Mexican police officer making $300 a month and the cartel pays
you $10,000 a month, what are the odds? It's a matter of economics."

The level of corruption makes it dangerous for U.S. agents to share
sensitive information with Mexican police, Schwein said.

"If you're an American law enforcement officer -- FBI, Customs, DEA,
whatever -- you don't share information with your counterparts across the
river because you don't know whom you can trust. The Mexican officer you're
working with may be honest, and there are honest police over there, but
what about his superiors?" Schwein said. "So it's a very dangerous thing to
do, and it's very frustrating."

At Juarez City Hall, an aide to Mayor Gustavo Elizondo defended the city's
efforts to combat drug trafficking, noting that police had made 3,000
arrests for the sale of narcotics between October 1998 and June of this
year.

"A lot has been said about the so-called Juarez Cartel," said Javier De
Anda, the city's chief spokesman. "The cartel is not from Juarez, and not
made up of Juarez citizens. Cartels are international criminal
organizations.

"Juarez is about hard work. Juarez is about normal people, and therefore we
don't like it that a criminal organization uses the name of our city as
their brand name."

De Anda acknowledged that several members of Juarez's 1,600officer police
force were fired after testing positive for drug use, but the number was
fewer than 10 percent.

He also acknowledged the strain the rapid growth has put on the city's
limited resources.

"Because of the growth in industry, in the maquilas, this city has
practically a zero unemployment rate, and that attracts a lot of people.
And now, because of the situation of the flooding in the interior of
Mexico, we had 60,000 come to Juarez in 1999, and we expect the same in
2000," the mayor's aide said. "So what you have here is a population with
explosive growth, which has made the resources we have insufficient for the
needs of a population of this size."

Academics such as Campbell say Juarez contains all the key elements for a
"very violent brew" of heavily armed contingents of corrupt police along
with drug cartel enforcers, mixed into a rapidly growing population of
immigrants who don't have strong ties to their neighbors or the community.

U.S. law enforcement agents said that although the flow of drugs through
Juarez has not diminished, the violence that plagues that city has not
jumped the Rio Grande. They noted there were only 17 homicides in El Paso
in 1998.

"It's a different world over there," said FBI Special Agent Andrea Simmons.