ONCE-DREADED JUAREZ CARTEL IS LOSING ITS STRENGTH

MEXICO CITY -- The two ranches that police say were used as clandestine
graveyards for perhaps 100 or more victims of the drug war are apparently a
legacy of what was once Mexico's best-organized and most violent
trafficking gang: the Juarez cartel.

The cartel was so organized it could fly old passenger jets over the border
stuffed with tons of cocaine. It was so far-flung that it set up a branch
operation on the Caribbean coast.

And it was so violent that when cartel founder Amado Carillo Fuentes died
in 1997 while in the care of his own doctors, soon afterward the doctors'
tortured bodies were found stuffed in oil drums.

Shootouts and killings raged in Ciudad Juarez during the battle to succeed
Carrillo. The violence reached a climax in August 1997, a month after his
death, when a gang of gunmen opened fire on nine people at a table in a
Ciudad Juarez restaurant. Police estimated that more than 100 rounds of
.45-caliber bullets were fired. Five people were killed and three wounded.

The leadership fight culminated on Sept. 10 when the body of Carrillo's
successor, Rafael Munoz Talavera, was found shot to death in a bulletproof car.

Carrillo's brother, Vincent, is now believed to control the remnants of the
cartel. Vicente Carrillo is wanted in Mexico on drug-trafficking charges
and in the United States on a 26-count indictment for trafficking and money
laundering.

Bodies were supposedly buried at the two Ciudad Juarez ranches between 1994
and 1996, during the cartel's heyday. So many people disappeared in Juarez
during those years that the Mexican government sent an elite task force to
Ciudad Juarez in 1997 to investigate.

But in May 1998 the Attorney General's office recalled the unit after three
of its members -- soldiers assigned to police duty in hopes of stamping out
corruption -- were arrested themselves for allegedly staging a kidnapping.

Relatives said many of the missing persons whose bodies are being sought on
the ranches were last seen being taken away by men dressed as police.

The belief that the cartel long had ties with some Mexican police officers
was strengthened yesterday when prosecutors announced the arrest of Mario
Silva Calderon, a former federal agent who allegedly served as one of the
cartel's "moles" inside police forces.

Officials have said the Juarez cartel is somewhat weaker now.

"It cannot be as strong as it once was because it's under so much scrutiny
right now," said Dave Alba, special agent in charge of the FBI office in El
Paso. "They don't have the same strength."