MASS-GRAVE HUNT TURNS UP REMAINS

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - U.S. and Mexican authorities have unearthed the
remains of two people during an intensive search of border ranches where an
FBI informant has indicated that as many as 100 victims of a powerful drug
cartel could be buried.

FBI forensic experts worked with Mexican soldiers and ski-masked police
searching two desert ranches near the city of Ciudad Juarez, home to the
Juarez drug cartel, at one time Mexico's largest and most violent drug
traffickers.

Authorities were led to the ranches by an informant who approached the FBI
early this year, a federal law enforcement official said. The informant said
there might be as many as 100 bodies there, including people who had been
providing information to U.S. drug agents.

Bones, clothing and shoes were found at the Rancho de la Campana, 10 miles
southwest of Ciudad Juarez, Attorney General Jorge Madrazo told TV Azteca.

Madrazo said officials do not believe that any bodies of U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration or FBI agents are at the ranches, but he said
agents of the Mexican federal judicial police could be buried there.

Madrazo told the Televisa television network that investigators suspect the
victims were killed by the Juarez drug cartel.

He said that while the number of bodies in the ranches was unknown, the
number of people reported missing in the area was around 100 people -
including 22 Americans.

Assistant FBI Director Thomas Pickard in Washington said that it was "a
pretty good assumption" that Americans are among those buried at the
ranches, given "the proximity to the border."

Pickard said the FBI believes the victims whose bodies were being sought
"were killed for their knowledge of or for being witnesses to drug
trafficking."

Sixty-eight FBI agents and forensic experts and other U.S. personnel were
working at the ranches, Pickard said.

Pickard said elaborate preparations were required to decide where to start
digging, to secure the sites and to "make sure we thoroughly cover the sites
with ground-piercing radar," using techniques the FBI developed looking for
evidence of war crimes in Kosovo.

"Most of the information we have shows these individuals were buried there
at least two to three years ago, so it's not a recent situation," he said.

That would mean the killings occurred during the height of the Juarez
cartel's power in the mid-1990s, when kidnappings of suspected informants,
drug rivals or civilian bystanders were rife in the area - often, it is
suspected, with the involvement of police officers in the cartel's pay.

At the time, the cartel was flourishing, sending planeloads with tons of
cocaine over the border and extending its operations to the Caribbean coast.

At its height, the Juarez cartel had the chief of Mexico's anti-narcotics
forces, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, on its payroll, Mexican prosecutors
said. Gutierrez Rebollo was arrested in 1997 and sentenced to 32 years in
prison.

The Juarez cartel has triggered fierce violence since the death of its
leader, Amado Carrillo Fuentes - nicknamed "Lord of the Skies" for using
large planes to transport drugs - in July 1997 while he was undergoing
plastic surgery.

Mexican and U.S. officials have said the cartel split into three branches
after Carrillo's death, one based in Cancun in the southeast, another in the
north led by Carrillo Fuentes' brother, Vicente, and a third on the West
Coast.

Hit men wielding AK-47s killed more than a dozen people in several
high-profile assassinations in Juarez restaurants in 1997. And more and more
people began simply disappearing in Juarez, a city of about 1.5 million
across the border from El Paso, Texas.

About 200 people have disappeared in Juarez since 1993, most believed to be
the victims of drug traffickers. The news of the gravesites come as U.S. law
enforcement authorities say Mexican drug traffickers are sending larger
quantities of drugs into the United States. Seizures of marijuana by U.S.
agencies along the southwestern border - where 70 percent of all illicit
drugs enter the country - are up 33 percent over last year.