2 BODIES FOUND IN SEARCH AT MEXICO FARM

More Victims Of Drug Trade May Be Dug Up At Other Sites

U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials searching the grounds at a farm
outside this city on the Texas border yesterday discovered the remains of
two people, Mexican Attorney General Jorge Madrazo told reporters last night.

The search party is looking for the bodies of more than 100 Mexican and
U.S. citizens who have disappeared. They are looking in Ciudad Juarez and
at three other sites in Chihuahua state.

Most of the missing people had some tie, even if peripheral, to the drug
trade before their disappearance, say government authorities, and it is
presumed that most were ordered executed by traffickers.

Dozens of FBI forensic experts were working with a backhoe and radar
equipment at a farm on the southern outskirts of Juarez, with Mexican
federal police and uniformed Mexican army infantrymen guarding the walled
perimeter.

Other FBI agents were working at the other sites, in Chihuahua state.

The search for bodies began Monday, after an informer led the FBI to the
site. The operation is one of the largest joint law enforcement operations
in recent years.

Its intensity and scope suggests that officials believe they have firm
leads that could begin to resolve the mystery surrounding scores of people
who have disappeared in the past several years. But until Madrazo's
confirmation last night in a live interview on TV Azteca, authorities had
not found any intact cadavers.

The joint operation was confirmed yesterday by Madrazo and FBI Director
Louis Freeh.

Jose Larrieta Carrasco, director of Mexico's Unit for Combating Organized
Crime, said in a news conference earlier yesterday in El Paso, Texas, that
some of the remains uncovered may be human and were being analyzed. He
expressed confidence that the search could bear results.

"We have very concrete information about these sites," Larrieta said.

David Alba, the special agent in charge of the FBI's El Paso office, who
appeared before reporters with Larrieta, said that 65 FBI agents were
taking part in the search at the several Chihuahua sites. The FBI has
established a command post in El Paso where it will bring the remains for
analysis.

Mexican officials have developed extensive files on at least 100 people who
have disappeared in and around Juarez. The Association of Relatives and
Friends of Disappeared Persons, based in El Paso, has compiled a list of
196 people who have disappeared, most from Juarez, and the Juarez newspaper
Norte has a list of 120 vanished people. The missing include 22 Americans,
officials from both nations said.

Nearly all the missing have disappeared after detention by Mexican federal
or Chihuahua state police. Evidence compiled by the association suggests
that in some cases the victims were arrested and killed by Mexican police
or soldiers, hired by traffickers to eliminate a rival or punish a debtor.
In other cases, the victims appear to have vanished when they were detained
for questioning by Mexican narcotics agents.

Juarez is the center of operations for one of Mexico's largest cocaine and
marijuana smuggling organizations, known as the Juarez cartel.

Authorities were led to the Juarez ranch and the other Chihuahua sites by
an informant whom the FBI debriefed early this year, according to a law
enforcement official in Washington.

"We have exchanged intelligence information and witness testimony, and
finally, with some statements we received recently and some very intense
analysis work that we've done both in Mexico and in El Paso, Texas, we
decided to carry out this operation in four points of Chihuahua," Madrazo
said yesterday.

The suggestion that mass graves may be discovered provoked anxiety in the
cramped El Paso office of the disappeared persons association, which has
been pressing authorities on both sides of the border for three years to
determine the whereabouts of the disappeared. The group's co-director,
Jaime Hervella, is an accountant whose godson has been missing since 1994,
along with the godson's wife.

The couple vanished the night they were to attend a play at a Juarez
theater. Hervella helped found the association after growing frustrated
with government apathy over his godson's case.