MASS GRAVES IN MEXICO MAY HOLD 300 VICTIMS

Dozen Americans may be buried

MEXICO CITY -- Police and soldiers are preparing to
exhume 100 to 300 bodies from two mass graves near the Mexican border
city of Juarez thought to contain the remains of victims of a
notorious drug cartel, law enforcement officials said Monday.

At least a dozen U.S. citizens are thought to be among the victims,
who include former informants for the Drug Enforcement Administration
and the FBI, said U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.

If the mass graves do yield so many victims, it would be by far the
most dramatic evidence yet of the heights to which the
drug-trafficking violence that has ravaged cities and towns across
Mexico in recent years has soared.

The grave sites, on two remote ranches south of Juarez across the U.S.
border from El Paso, were brought to the attention of U.S. law
enforcement officials just three days ago. Since then, an FBI task
force of forensic experts who helped exhume mass graves in
Bosnia-Herzegovina has been working with Mexican army officials to
plan the recovery of the bodies.

The corpses are thought to be buried in ravines and trenches, some as
deep as 12 feet, U.S. law enforcement officials said. More than 200
FBI forensic experts and several hundred Mexican soldiers armed with
heavy digging equipment are to begin exhuming the bodies today, the
officials said. Dozens of DEA agents are aiding the
investigation.

One senior U.S. law enforcement official in Washington said
investigators think the graves contain between 100 and 300 bodies.

"We have agents working with Mexican authorities on at least two sites
near Juarez, exhuming sites in search of human remains," FBI spokesman
Jim Davis said. "It is possible that we could be talking U.S. citizens
here."

The Mexican attorney general's office said the probe sought to solve
"a series of killings and disappearances related with drug
trafficking, perpetrated against Mexicans and U.S. citizens,
apparently by members of the so-called Juarez cartel."

The office said Mexico had requested the FBI to assist with the
"humanitarian action" to recover the remains of the victims, who are
believed to have been killed during the past four years.

Most of the victims are believed to have come from Juarez, base of the
cartel that funnels billions of dollars' worth of cocaine, marijuana
and heroin into the United States each year. Many of the drugs are
grown and processed in Colombia.

The Juarez cartel has generated fierce violence since the death of its
leader, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known as the Lord of the Skies, in
July 1997 while he was undergoing plastic surgery to change his
appearance. An apparent struggle for control of the cartel has
produced seemingly endless violence. 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's brother, Vicente, and a third branch on the west coast
under the command of Juan Jose Esparragosa, known as "El Azul" (The
Blue One).

One of the northern branch leaders, Rafael Munoz Talavera, was
assassinated in September 1998. Mexican authorities announced in
September that they had arrested another of the cartel's major figures
in western Mexico, Joan Jose Quintero Payan, when he arrived at a
house in Guadalajara for a tryst with his lover.

Mexico's top drug prosecutor, Mariano Herran Salvatti, said at the
time that the western cell of the cartel was left "headless" thanks to
the arrest.

The Juarez drug gang and the Tijuana cartel are the most infamous of Mexico's seven known organized drug-smuggling cartels.

Mexican officials reported last December that they had issued more than 100 arrest warrants for leaders of the Juarez cartel. The most prominent arrest was that of army Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo in February 1997. Gutierrez Rebollo was then head of the anti-drug police.

But the drug turf war has also engulfed ordinary citizens, especially in Juarez.

In February 1998, then-Mayor Enrique Flores pleaded for federal help, complaining in an open letter to President Ernesto Zedillo that "Juarez has become a battleground for drug- trafficking groups that are fighting to control this area."