MASS GRAVE SEEN AS SIGN OF FEROCITY OF DRUG VIOLENCE

Fears Arise That Police Had A Role

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- Searchers found the skeletal remains of four
more bodies Wednesday in a burial ground that might contain the
remains of as many as 100 people believed killed by drug gangs.

The find brings to six the number of victims found this week in a
tedious task that observers in Mexico have likened to an
archaeological dig: slow, careful and painstaking.

''As of this morning, forensics experts have recovered the remains of
five different people, along with footwear and cloth,'' Jose Larrieta
Carrasco, head of the Mexican attorney general's organized crime unit,
said at a ranch 10 miles southwest of here. ''We're trying to
determine if there are more.''

Informants have told authorities that as many as 100 victims might be
buried on several rural ranches outside this city across the border
from El Paso. Although drug violence is not unfamiliar to an area that
officials say is a major pipeline of cocaine into the USA, the
prospect of a mass grave is a new and disturbing development in the
Mexico drug wars.

''I've never heard of mass graves in common with illicit drug dealing
before,'' says Mark Kleinman, director of the Drug Policy Analysis
Project at the University of California-Los Angeles. ''It's more
consistent with political violence.''

Bruce Bagley, a professor of international studies at the University
of Miami, ascribes heightened drug-related violence to the
''increasing greediness'' of Mexican drug gangs. It's the result, he
says, of fierce turf wars in the power vacuum created by the death of
Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the kingpin of the Juarez drug cartel. Fuentes
died in July 1997 while undergoing plastic surgery to disguise his
appearance.

''I firmly believe that they are going to find a lot more (bodies),''
Bagley said.

Amnesty International, a human-rights organization, said it has
information indicating that some of those who vanished were last seen
in the custody of people believed to be members of Mexican security
forces -- state or federal police or perhaps the military.

The family of an American citizen who disappeared here five years ago
is convinced he was set up by federal police working for Mexican drug
dealers. Claudia Escobedo Martinez of Juarez says her stepfather, Saul
Salinas, provided Mexican federal police eavesdropping gear capable of
monitoring cell-phone calls. She said he was paid at least $30,000 for
the device. Salinas, 38, a U.S. Navy veteran and inventor, also
created a secure phone system for the Mexican attorney general's
anti-narcotics office.

Mexican anti-drug police had used Salinas' equipment to penetrate and
bust two large drug operations in southern Mexico. Because of the
apparent success of the first device, they sought Salinas' technical
assistance again.

Escobedo Martinez says her stepfather and her mother, Abigail Salinas,
vanished in May 1994 after being invited out to a theater by a man who
Martinez is convinced was a Mexican police commander.

Salinas' godfather, Jaime Hervella, is hoping the Salinases are
alive.

''I don't want those to be the bodies of my loved ones. That would be
the worst tragedy ever,'' says Hervella, who founded a group for
relatives of 196 people who have disappeared from the Juarez area in
the past five years.

Many in the group hope the missing are alive and perhaps being held
captive.

Hervella says he often spoke to his godson, Salinas, about how to deal
with Mexican police. He says that on numerous occasions, Mexican
authorities flew Salinas to Mexico City to meet with high-ranking
government officials.

Mexican Attorney General Jorge Madrazo has said in several broadcast
interviews that he has a list of about 100 people reported missing
from 1994 to 1996 -- 22 of them Americans. U.S. officials have
suggested that the number of missing Americans is smaller.

Madrazo has said repeatedly that officials do not believe that bodies
of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration or FBI agents are at the ranches.

The size of the burial ground has raised few eyebrows in this arid
border region.

''No, we're not at all surprised'' by the possibility of 100 bodies,
says Sam Ponder, assistant U.S. attorney and chief of federal
prosecutors in west Texas. ''We've had people reported 'disappeared,'
kidnapped or lured over there, and they never come back.''

Ponder added that the drug cartels ''couldn't hold that many captives
for so long, so they have to be dead. The question has been, where
were they?''

Although Mexican authorities have no tally of drug-related killings,
figures compiled last year by The Los Angeles Times from journalists
and human-rights activists in Mexico's most drug-plagued states
indicated at least 500 deaths in 1998 alone.

The private Mexican Institute for Organized Crime Studies estimated a
far higher number: 1,500 to 2,000.