MEXICAN DRUG KINGPIN FOUND SLAIN, REVENGE KILLINGS FEARED

Crime: Largest Cache Of Cocaine Ever Seized Is Believed To Have Been The
Property Of The Trafficker.

Mexico City-Rafael Munoz,who fought for control of a major drug cartel
after he was freed from charges of being the master smuggler behind
the largest cocaine seizure in history,has been found dead,police said
Friday.

Authorities in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas,
discovered the body of Munoz, 45, in a parked Jeep Cherokee at dawn
Thursday. He was tied and had several gunshot wounds.

Munoz's father identified the body Thursday evening, but authorities
said they would investigate further to be sure of its identity.

U.S. officials have accused Munoz of leading a violent campaign to
take control of the Juarez drug cartel after the death of its leader,
Amado Carrillo, during plastic surgery in July 1997. But in an open
letter to President Ernesto Zedillo that Munoz paid to have published
in several Mexican newspapers in December, he denied those
accusations, calling himself "a simple, hardworking man."

Munoz'a death could provoke new revenge killings in Juarez, which has
seen scores of drug slayings in the past year, one law-enforcement
official said Friday.

But other people familiar with the drug underworld said Munoz's death
- - which they said confirmed their sense that he had lost his battle
for the cartel months ago - might usher in a calmer period in which
his rivals control the billion-dollar narcotics commerce that passes
through Juarez into El Paso.

"He who lives by the sword truly dies by it," said Glenn McTaggert, an
assistant U.S. attorney who worked for seven years collecting evidence
against Munoz. "They've certainly terminated a kingpin. This changes
the whole complexion of the drug landscape."

Until fall 1989, Munoz was known in Juarez as a sober restaurateur
from a leading local family. Agents of the Drug Enforcement Agency in
El Paso were suspicious of a $3 million estate he had built in E.
Paso, but he was not known as a major trafficker.

But in September of that year, authorities seized 21 tons of cocaine
in a warehouse in the Los Angeles suburb of Sylmar, and several
traffickers arrested in connection with that seizure identified Munoz
as their leader.

The amount of cocaine seized at Sylmar was more than has ever been
found in one place.

After weeks of U.S. pressure for Munoz's arrest, Mexican authorities
arrested him and put him on trial in Mexico.

A Mexican judge acquitted Munoz after a trial in Juarez in 1991. The
next year he was re arrested in connection with the same charges in
Hermosillo, and a judge there convicted him in 1995. But an appellate
panel freed him in 1996, noting that he had been tried twice for the
same crime.

After his release, testimony that emerged in several U.S. trials and
in Mexican court records showed that Munoz's acquittal in his first
trial, in Juarez, had been arranged by the corrupt Mexican police
commander who had arrested him and by the deputy attorney general who
had supervised his prosecution. Both Mexican officials were on Munoz's
payroll, witnesses have testified.

Francisco Barrio Terrazas, the governor of Chihuahua, said in an
interview this year that after his release, Munoz forged an alliance
with exceptionally violent traffickers from Tijuana, hoping to seize
control of the Juarez drug trade from Carrillo's followers.

Months of killings followed. One grisly slaughter that Barrio
attributed to Munoz and his Tijuana henchmen came in August 1997, when
a Juarez restaurant was sprayed with gunfire, killing six people.

Checked-by: Patrick Henry