JUAREZ DRUG CARTEL KNOWN FOR RESILIENCE

Organization Endures Turf War, Sting Operations, Death Of Leader

MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's infamous Juarez drug cartel has taught U.S.
and Mexican law enforcement officials a stinging lesson: The gang will
not go away any time soon.

The cartel, which was the dominant drug-smuggling organization in
Mexico for most of the 1990s, has survived everything that police on
both sides of the border could throw at it.

The organization, made up of at least three independent cells, has
adjusted amoebalike to the unexpected death of its boss in 1997, to a
vicious turf war that followed, and then to aggressive sting
operations aimed at midlevel leaders by both the United States and
Mexico.

U.S. drug-enforcement officials estimate that the cartel, based in
Ciudad Juarez across the international border from El Paso, remains
responsible for half the cocaine that enters the United States from
Mexico.

"The point is that the same amount of drugs are getting into the
U.S.," said Jorge Chabat, an expert on Mexico's drug trade who works
at CIDE, a Mexico City think tank.

"There is no sign that impunity of the cartel to act is any less," he
said. "There is no sign that the Juarez cartel is any weaker."

The disappearance of more than 100 people off the streets of Juarez
over the past few years attest to the gang's power, not its weakness,
analysts say.

On Tuesday, FBI forensic experts joined ski-masked Mexican police and
troops in searching two desert ranches near Juarez where the bodies of
more than 100 Mexican and U.S. citizens were suspected to have been
buried.

After the death of the gang's boss, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, during a
risky plastic surgery operation in July 1997, anti-drug agents in
both the United States and Mexico expected that the cartel would begin
to wither.

What followed, though, was a blood bath in which more than 70 people
were killed in gangland assassinations in Juarez alone. Cartel
soldiers were shot to death while dining in fine restaurants, driving
their expensive cars or even strolling in middle-class neighborhoods
that are found throughout the fast-growing industrial city of about 1
million people.

The killings turned the city known for its assembly factories into one
of the bloodiest districts in Mexico.

Over the last few years, more than 150 people have disappeared in
circumstances that may be drug-related, according to an organization
for family members set up in El Paso. Many of the victims likely were
low-level members who became threats to the cartel's security.

"It looks like many of the disappearances took place because the
victims were no longer useful to the cartel or too dangerous to be
allowed to live," said Sigrid Arzt, an expert on organized crime in
Mexico City.

A couple of the Americans who disappeared were specialists in
telecommunications who, Arzt suspects, may have been selling equipment
to the cartel.

But in the end, the organization has not been weakened substantially.
U.S. law enforcement agents believe that Carrillo's brother, Vicente,
has gained overall control of the cartel and that the organization
continues to function despite becoming the main target of Mexico's
anti-drug forces.

One reason, according to experts, is that Carrillo left behind a
highly disciplined organization that changed the way of Mexico's drug
syndicates look and operate.

Rarely seen in public and a man who eschewed the flashy lifestyle of
the country's other kingpins, Carrillo shaped the cartel into cells
that operate with separate structures in different regions.

The cartel's members also appeared to be highly trained along the
model of a paramilitary group, according to officials in the country's
special anti-drug unit quoted in the Mexican news magazine Proceso.
Gang members are known to receive intense training in security and the
handling of small arms.

That forced Mexican drug enforcement agencies to divide their forces
to tackle each cell.

The most high profile of those investigations has been in the
Caribbean coastal state of Quintana Roo, where a former governor named
Mariano Villanueva has been charged with protecting the cartel's
operations -- even to the point of allowing traffickers to use
government hangers to transfer shipments of cocaine.

Villanueva disappeared only days before he was scheduled to leave
office, and his whereabouts are unknown.

Analysts outside government say the intense investigation into the
cartel's operation illustrates both the pressures of ambitious Mexican
prosecutors on the gang and the extent to which the gang has
infiltrated local governments and the federal and state police forces.

The names on the more 100 arrests warrants include those of federal
prosecutors and police who worked in the state.

"The cartel has control over federal police forces at the level of
regional commanders," said Arzt. "Often (drug kingpins) meet the
commanders while they are serving as head of prisons, develop
relationships, and continue those when the commanders are promoted."

While this week's operation may be a positive sign of U.S. agencies'
increased access to drug investigations in Mexico, experts here say it
may also prove to be a double-edged sword.

Mexico still faces the torment of undergoing annual certification in
the U.S. Congress of its actions in the fight against drugs.
Decertification would almost certainly result in a loss of U.S.
support for Mexico's political and economic systems.

"If it is confirmed that there are some American bodies there, perhaps
even the bodies of (Drug Enforcement) agents or whatever, then that
will affect U.S.-Mexican relations in a very significant way," said
Chabat, of the CIDE think tank.

"It would provoke a very strong reaction from the American public," he
said. "The Clinton administration will come under a lot of pressure
from the public to review its drug policy toward Mexico."