MEXICO, U.S. DIG UP POSSIBLE MASS GRAVES

Scores Of Victims Of Drug Lords May Be Buried

Mexican authorities, working with a team of FBI agents, began to excavate
sites near the Texas border yesterday that they believe may hold the bodies
of scores of Mexicans and Americans who have disappeared in the past
several years and who are thought to have been killed by drug traffickers.

The search for bodies, an American law enforcement official said, was
spurred by a tip from an informant recruited by the FBI, who acknowledged
complicity in several killings and identified the locations of what he said
were at least two mass graves on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez, the
Mexican city just over the border from El Paso.

The informant, a former Mexican police officer, said as many as 200 people
might be buried in several graves. An American official said the informer
had passed a lie detector test.

The informant told American investigators that many of those killed had
been providing information to the FBI and other American law enforcement
agencies.

Mexican and American officials said the digging began yesterday and that no
human remains had been recovered yet. Officials said that while they find
the informer's claims credible, and they have confirmed that many
informants for the FBI, drug agencies and Customs Service have disappeared
in recent years under mysterious circumstances, they have no independent
corroboration that drug traffickers killed so many people.

In recent years, while murders have occurred in Ciudad Juarez by the
hundreds, scores of other people have simply vanished from the area,
sometimes after being seized in broad daylight by men dressed in the
uniforms of Mexican federal or state police forces or the military.

Prosecutions of Mexican drug traffickers along the Texas border have also
been undermined by the disappearances of witnesses and informants, some of
whom have been kidnapped from American soil.

According to American officials, some of those missing had no apparent
connection to the drug trade.

The Mexican attorney general's office, the country's chief law enforcement
arm, issued a statement last night confirming the search for bodies, which
was first reported by CBS News.

The Mexican authorities said they had set up toll-free telephone lines in
both countries for relatives and others with information on missing people.
The numbers are 800-338-5856 and 800-716-7852.

Prodded by citizens in both countries, including the Association of
Relatives of Disappeared Persons, the Mexican authorities carried out a
long inquiry into the disappearances but had little success. In January,
the Mexican attorney general, Jorge Madrazo Cuellar, acknowledged that drug
traffickers had infiltrated a police agent into the special unit that was
investigating the disappearances.

The informer who described the killings to the FBI said some had been
carried out by Mexican federal police officers who worked as hired
assassins for the drug gangs that operate from Ciudad Juarez, which is one
of the main gateways for cocaine and other drugs being shipped through
Mexico into the United States.

U.S. officials said the FBI began quietly examining the case several months
ago. The Mexicans were informed about three weeks ago, officials said.

Yesterday, the Mexican authorities gave permission to 25 FBI agents to
cross into Mexico to join the government's excavation efforts, a law
enforcement official said.

Ciudad Juarez, which forms one metropolitan area with El Paso, straddling
the Rio Grande border, was dominated by a drug gang controlled by Amado
Carrillo Fuentes. A Mexican informer told the FBI that some of the killings
had been ordered by Carrillo Fuentes, who died in July 1997 after
undergoing plastic surgery. After his death, a wave of killings swept
through Ciudad Juarez and authorities attributed them initially to a
succession struggle among his lieutenants. At least some of those killings,
it now appears, may have involved attempts by the traffickers to eliminate
informers from their ranks.