BORDER FAMILIES AWAIT WORD OF THE MISSING

U.S., Mexican Officials Continue Excavations

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico, Nov. 30 - One couple vanished on the way to a play
at a local theater. Two brothers disappeared on the way to a restaurant.
Many victims were seen by witnesses being stuffed into official-looking
vehicles by assailants wearing Mexican police or military uniforms.

"It's an incredible, horrible thing," Jaime F. Hervella, who lives in El
Paso and is a founder of the Association of Relatives of Disappeared
Persons, said today in response to the discovery of suspected graves at two
ranches near this border city. "[The bodies] have got to be ours."

U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials today continued excavations in
at least two of four sites that authorities believe could contain the
remains of dozens of Americans and Mexicans who have vanished during an
unsettling spate of crimes near the international border shared by Ciudad
Juarez and El Paso, Tex.

Until Monday, when authorities announced the investigations of possible
burial sites, the families of nearly 200 people who have disappeared over
the past five years searched for clues with little assistance from either
Mexican or U.S. law enforcement authorities, relatives said. Now, while no
victim has yet been identified, there's hope that the mystery may be near
an end as authorities reported finding what could be human remains at one
of the sites (See story, Page A39).

"This is the closest we've gotten to something that is real," said Claudia
Sanchez, 21, whose parents vanished May 24, 1994, while waiting to enter a
Ciudad Juarez theater. "I will suffer in some ways, but it will be a relief
to know they're there, that we have a place to go and take flowers and pray
for them."

Many, but not all, of the people who disappeared in the Ciudad Juarez-El
Paso area are believed to have had some association with the drug trade.
Many were thought to have been abducted by corrupt Mexican law enforcement
and Army officials who may have been on the payroll of drug cartels,
according to family members and human rights organizations.

"In many cases someone saw them being taken," said Hervella. "There was a
lot of precision and weaponry and dark funeral-like Suburbans."

The 196 names of missing people compiled by the association cover a broad
spectrum of lifestyles, backgrounds and professions: U.S. citizens, Mexican
citizens, Mexican law enforcement agents, informants, drug traffickers,
low-level drug peddlers, restaurant owners, an auto mechanic and Sanchez's
father--who once served in the U.S. Navy and was a communications whiz.

Although Ciudad Juarez, center of operations for Mexico's most powerful
drug cartel, has always had high murder rates along with occasional
disappearances, the rate at which individuals vanished over the last five
years was staggering, according to groups monitoring the crimes. And while
activists conceded that many of the disappearances may have been the work
of cartels seeking revenge on those who betrayed them, they noted a telling
difference that they say points to the involvement of law enforcement agents.

"The bodies [of those] killed by the mafia are always found," said Victor
Clark of the Tijuana-based International Commission on Human Rights. "It's
their way of sending messages."

In Ciudad Juarez, by contrast, the victims simply disappeared and only now
may be found buried beneath the isolated and harsh desert surface--possibly
the work of abductors trying to hide evidence. Law officials may have been
involved not only as corrupt agents of the drug cartels but also as
vigilantes targeting narcotics traffickers, activists say.

"The families always hoped that their relatives would come back alive, that
they were being held in clandestine military jails or that they were in
witness protection programs," said Alberto Medrano Villarreal, a lawyer for
families of the disappeared and president of the Ciudad Juarez Bar
Association.

"As a lawyer this is a terrible discovery because you suppose that you live
in a just society where even the worst criminal, even the most hardened
drug trafficker has the right to a trial," said Medrano. "We had suspected
that police were involved in the disappearances. . . . Our society can't
just say, 'He was a narco-trafficker and it's good that he was executed.'
If judges can be wrong, the triggermen can be wrong, too."

Ramon Alonzo peered through the metal gates of a small desert ranch today,
searching for the answers he has sought--and dreaded finding--in the 30
months since his older brother, Jose, disappeared after several men came to
his Juarez house to discuss a car they wanted the auto mechanic to repair.

His brother, wife and six children never heard from Jose, then 33, again.

"We just want to know what happened," said Alonzo, 36, echoing the weary
sentiments of most of the families.

But it could be weeks before identifications are made because of the
advanced state of decomposition of the remains removed today by U.S. agents
and Mexican federal police wearing black uniforms and ski masks to hide
their identities.

Saul Sanchez Jr. was 39 when he disappeared in 1994 outside the theater
with his wife, Abigail, 38. The U.S. Navy veteran and engineer had invented
a device that could track cellular phones calls, which he sold to the
Mexican federal police for use in drug investigations, according to his
family.

His father, Saul Sr., said in a telephone interview today that he had tried
to persuade his son to move out of Ciudad Juarez and to El Paso because he
feared the federal police's reputation for corruption. He remembers the day
he hectored his son: May 17, 1994. "A week later, he and his wife had gone
to the theater. Someone from the Mexican federal police said he had the
tickets for the theater, and he wanted to meet them there," said the older
Sanchez. "That was the last time he was seen."

Since then, Sanchez has nagged the FBI to investigate his son's
disappearance. "The FBI doesn't care. They have never cared about anything
to do with this," he said.

Esperanza Gomez de Ontiveros, 56, a retired teacher, has had similar
experiences with Mexican authorities since the disappearance of her son,
Victor Hugo Ontiveros Gomez Sept. 2, 1996. He had been a shooting and
firearms instructor for the Chihuahua state judicial police academy.

"Since my sons worked for the state police I thought we would get a lot of
institutional support, but the authorities haven't told us anything," said
Gomez. "We've been like this for three years. We don't know what they've
found in those graves. I just hope something comes out of this. You're just
waiting to hear anything, that they have found a grain of sand, anything to
be able to say, 'there he is.' "

Staff writers Paul Duggan in El Paso, Lorraine Adams in Washington and
researcher Garance Burke in Mexico City contributed to this report.