INVESTIGATORS DIG FOR MASS GRAVES AT U.S.-MEXICO BORDER

Mexican authorities, working with a team of FBI agents, began to excavate
sites near the Texas border Monday that they believe may hold the bodies of
scores of Mexicans and Americans who disappeared in the last 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 Monday and that, as
yet, no human remains had been recovered. Officials said that while they
find the informer's claims credible, and they have confirmed that many of
informants for the FBI, drug agencies and Customs Service have disappeared
in recent years in mysterious circumstance, 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 Monday night confirming the search for bodies, which
was first reported by CBS News.

"This investigation is focuses on resolving a series of assassinations and
disappearances related to drug trafficking, perpetrated against Mexican and
United States citizens, apparently by members of the so-called cartel," the
attorney general's statement said. "Over the last four years and possibly
longer, in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, citizens of both nationalities have
disappeared without a trace."

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 policemen who worked as hired assassins for
the drug gangs that operate from Juarez, which is one of the main gateways
for cocaine and other drugs being shipped through Mexico into the United
States.

American officials said about 20 FBI specialists were waiting in El Paso to
receive and examine any bodies recovered in the investigation.

The officials said they had been working closely with Madrazo, who is a
former human rights lawyer. Officials said the FBI began quietly examining
the case several months ago. The Mexicans were informed about three weeks
ago, officials said.

A United States official said the FBI had begun its investigation, focusing
on American citizens who had been among those who disappeared. On Monday,
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.

Mexican officials said they had established a joint base for the inquiry in
El Paso. According to CBS, one ranch was about 10 miles south of the border,
and the other 30 miles south of the first.

Many of those who have disappeared in Juarez since early 1994 vanished after
being detained by men in police uniforms, or carrying police credentials.

The gritty city, 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 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.

With huge sums at their disposal, the drug traffickers long have long had
the upper hand in Juarez over government law enforcement agencies, whose
officers were often on the cartel's payroll.

But the large number of people who have disappeared in recent years led to
the creation of the Association of Relatives of Disappeared Persons, which
began putting pressure on Mexican officials to take action. One result was
the appointment of a 20-man unit under Jorge Castaneda Espinoza de los
Monteros to review all reported disappearances. Juarez has also been torn by
the killings of more than 200 women since 1993, thought to be victims of
serial killers, gangs and violent spouses. Many have been found but about 30
have not been identified.

The official said that the sites were large and that the digging would
proceed with shovels and heavy machinery.