HUNT GOES ON FOR BODIES IN MEXICO;

Families Voice Fears

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - American and Mexican law enforcement officials
searching a farm Tuesday outside this city on the Texas border discovered
some remains that could be human, authorities said.

The search party is looking here and at three other sites in Chihuahua
state for the bodies of more than 100 Mexican and American citizens who
have disappeared. Most had some tie, even if peripheral, to the drug trade,
government authorities say, and it is presumed that most were executed by
traffickers or their agents.

Dozens of F.B.I. forensic experts worked with a backhoe at a farm on the
southern outskirts of Juarez, with Mexican federal police and uniformed
Mexican Army infantrymen guarding the walled perimeter. Other F.B.I. agents
were working at the other sites in Chihuahua, officials said.

The search began on Monday after an informer led the Federal Bureau of
Investigaion to the site here.

The search is one of the largest joint law-enforcement operations
undertaken by the two countries. Its intensity and scope suggested that
officials believe that they have firm leads to help them begin to resolve
the mystery surrounding the scores of people who have disappeared in the
last several years.

But so far, authorities said, they have not found a body.

The joint operation was confirmed today by the Mexican attorney general,
Jorge Madrazo Cuellar, and the F.B.I. director, Louis J. Freeh.

Jose Larrieta Carrasco, director of Mexico's organized crime unit, said at
a news conference in El Paso that some remains had been found that may be
human. They are being analyzed, he said, and he expressed confidence that
the search could bear results.

"We have very concrete information as to these sites," he added.

David Alba, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.'s office in El Paso,
who appeared with Larrieta, said 65 agents were taking part in the search
at the four sites. The bureau has set up a command post in El Paso where it
will bring any 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. The missing include 22 Americans, officials from
both nations said.

Nearly all the missing have disappeared after detention by the Mexican
federal police or the Chihuahua state police.

Evidence compiled by the family association suggests that in some cases the
victims were arrested and killed by Mexican police officers 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, which forms a single metropolitan area with El Paso, is the center
for one of Mexico's largest cocaine and marijuana smuggling organizations,
the Juarez cartel.

Authorities were led to the ranch and the other sites by an informer whom
the F.B.I. interviewed early this year, according to a law enforcement
official in Washington cited by The Associated Press.

The attorney general, Madrazo, said in an interview broadcast Tuesday, "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."

The F.B.I. agents arrived at the Juarez farm Tuesday morning in a convoy of
16 vehicles, including several Chevrolet Suburbans, a Ryder panel truck, a
tractor trailer loaded with the backhoe and a Winnebago, which is
apparently to be used as a temporary office. The farm is about 2 miles
south and west of the Juarez airport, on the side of a highway lined with
junkyards.

Passing through a steel gate, the agents drove down a gravel lane to a
cluster of buildings, including what appears to be a granery and a stable
set alongside a white-fenced corral. They parked the backhoe, and later
operated it, in a narrow space between the granery and a cinderblock wall
topped with concertina wire that surrounds the compound. The property is
the size of several football fields.

Six members of a Mexican family who lived at the site, apparently as
caretakers, were being held by the Mexican federal police in a cottage at
the front of the property. A lawyer who identified himself as a
representative of the property owner visited the buildings Tuesday and said
he was trying to obtain the family's release.

The suggestion that mass graves may be discovered provoked anxiety in the
cramped El Paso office of the family 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 F. Hervella, is an accountant whose godson
and the young man's wife have been missing since 1994. The couple vanished
the night they were to attend a play at a Juarez theater. Hervella helped
found the association after growing frustrated with what he felt was
government apathy over the case.

Hervella said most of the missing were people caught up with the Mexican
drug cartels, but he said he believed that many innocent people were also
abducted.

Since the association began to press for an official accounting, the
Mexican government has appointed five consecutive special prosecutors. The
first was fired when he did not carry out an investigation aggressively in
Juarez. The second was fired after his unit was infiltrated by traffickers.
The last prosecutor, Enrique Cocina Perez, left in October without a public
explanation.

In his accounting office Tuesday, besieged by reporters, Hervella met with
a man who arrived carrying a homemade "missing" poster of his son, Victor
Hugo Ontiveros Gomez, who disappeared in Juarez several years ago.

"He came in and said, 'I have given this information to the F.B.I., and I
hope in my heart that they will not find my son's body,' " Hervella said.

In his efforts to prod the authorities, Hervella said he has always assumed
that the missing were locked up in Mexican prisons, not dead. He said the
suggestion that they may turn up in mass graves had provoked "tremendous
confusion in my own feelings."

The news reverberated among family members and friends of missing people
from the region.

Leandra Pfieffer left her home in Albuquerque, N.M., at 8 a.m. Tuesday,
driving to the farm in Juarez to watch the search operation. Reached en
route on her cell phone, Mrs. Pfieffer said her son, Ricardo, a real estate
agent in Juarez, was abducted at his home in August 1996. She said that two
people who organized the kidnapping have been convicted of the crime in a
United States trial, but that his body had yet to be found.

Omar Castano, an El Paso resident whose brother disappeared in Juarez in
June 1996, complained Tuesday that no official from either government had
been helpful in pursuing his brother's whereabouts.

Castano said he was "almost certain" that his brother's remains would now
be discovered. Asked why, he said, "Because it is just too coincidental:
almost exact amount of persons missing and almost exact amount of persons
buried at those sites," at least according to the early speculation.