JOINT TEAM BEGINS ANALYSIS OF BONES FOUND IN MEXICO

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - They were three middle-aged men, and when they were
dumped into a desert grave, two were wearing boots and a third had on
tennis shoes. Their heads were wrapped in cloth, and one appears to have
been wearing only underwear. They were probably shot to death but might
have suffocated.

Top Mexican and United States law enforcement officials announced those
preliminary conclusions Friday from an analysis of the skeletal remains of
three of the six victims unearthed on a drug trafficker's farm here this week.

If the findings were a bit sketchy, the Mexican government made them public
with tremendous fanfare, perhaps in part to justify the scale of the
operation and the Federal Bureau of Investigation's extensive involvement,
which has been criticized by Mexican nationalists.

Jorge Madrazo, Mexico's attorney general, and Louis Freeh, the director of
the F.B.I., flew by helicopter to the farm, which hugs a bone-dry hillside
on the southern outskirts of this border city facing El Paso. Working at
this and another ranch since Monday, 65 F.B.I. forensic experts and
hundreds of Mexican police officers and soldiers have been seeking the
remains of people presumably executed on orders of the drug bosses in
recent years.

The operation is part of a three-year-old inquiry into the whereabouts of
scores who have disappeared in northern Mexico after running afoul of the
traffickers.

The midmorning arrival of the two Russian-built Mi-17 helicopters carrying
Madrazo and Freeh, along with dozens of assistants, kicked up a tremendous
dust cloud, which swirled skyward for 1,000 feet, forcing the Mexican
soldiers guarding the farm's perimeter to cover their faces with their
fatigue jackets. After the dust settled, the two officials strolled smartly
through the farm, kicking sand and chatting for a time at the edge of the
grave, tucked between a granary and a towering masonry wall.

Adding a surreal element to the encounter were a dozen young Mexican women,
hired by the Mexican government and wearing black miniskirts, low-cut
blouses, and high heels, who stood along the path leading to the grave as
Madrazo and Freeh made their tour. The women, shivering a bit in the wind,
wore nametags labeling them "hostesses."

Later Freeh and Madrazo sat down together in a white circus tent erected
for the occasion. They faced a bank of television cameras and scores of
international journalists eager for news about advances in the investigation.

Instead Madrazo, who has come under fire from nationalists on Mexican
television for allowing the F.B.I. technicians 15 miles into Mexican
territory to carry out the excavations, delivered a 20-minute speech
justifying the joint operation as entirely legal.

"This operation does not infringe upon our sovereignty in the slightest,"
Madrazo said.

Freeh said that not just one but several F.B.I. informers had identified
four ranches in the state of Chihuahua as places where traffickers had
buried their victims. "Our preliminary view is that the information we have
received about these sites is very accurate," Freeh said. The officials
said the search for bodies at the ranches would last weeks.