MEXICO HOLDS TWO U.S. STUDENTS FOR GUN-RUNNING

MEXICO CITY -- The Mexican authorities said Tuesday that they are holding
two American college students for questioning in connection with the
transfer of more than 1,000 automatic rifles and other firearms to drug
traffickers.

Hugo Ambriz Duarte, 26, a business student at El Paso Community College,
and his brother Rene, 24, a business administration student at the
University of Texas at El Paso, were detained by an elite federal police
unit Saturday in Ciudad Juarez, which forms a single metropolitan area with
El Paso. They were then flown to Mexico City.

Officials familiar with the investigation said the apparent involvement of
the American students in gun-running appeared to exemplify the increasing
tendency by Mexican traffickers to recruit collaborators among youths
living north of the border. In another case, a San Diego man who had been
recruited as a teenager by Mexican traffickers died in Tijuana as he
attempted to assassinate a newspaper publisher in November.

Under police questioning, the brothers acknowledged having sold arms to the
Juarez drug cartel, according to a statement issued Tuesday by the federal
attorney general's office. Relatives of the brothers who spoke to
reporters in El Paso, however, said the two were innocent.

The statement said the men were detained after a complaint presented by the
U.S. authorities, who have asserted that the ``the Ambriz Duarte brothers
introduced into Mexico more than 1,000 firearms, including hundreds of
AK-47 rifles.'' The report said some of the weapons were later confiscated
from members of the cartel.

The brothers' detention initially caused a furor in Juarez because they
were reported kidnapped. A senior Mexican official, however, said the
detention was carried out in a strictly legal fashion.

The brothers were seized by eight federal agents traveling in two unmarked
vehicles, who blocked their Dodge Ram Charger on a Juarez street, dragged
the two out and drove them away, along with their Dodge, which was later
found abandoned. A young woman who had been with them was temporarily
stranded.

The brothers were among nine people detained by armed men in several
incidents in Juarez on Saturday. Four businessmen who were seized have
reappeared, saying they were robbed by the armed men who detained them.
Three men are still missing, although police are trying to determine
whether a body found Sunday, bound and bearing signs of torture, is one of
the missing.

Nearly 100 persons have disappeared in Juarez in recent years, most of them
after having been detained by state or federal agents.

In some cases, a special prosecutor who is investigating the
disappearances, says, the agents carrying out the detentions appear to have
been working for narcotics traffickers. In other cases, the victims appear
to have been detained for interrogation by drug agents as part of official
investigations before they vanished.

Against this backdrop, the Ambrizes' detention was initially reported in
newspapers as part of a new wave of drug-related kidnappings. But a U.S.
Embassy officer was allowed to visit the Ambriz brothers in Mexico City, an
official said Tuesday.

Details first became public when, under questioning by reporters Monday,
Arturo Chavez Chavez, the attorney general of the state of Chihuahua, where
Juarez is located, expressed displeasure that officials based in Juarez had
not been advised of the brothers' detention.

He said he would protest the detention because the commando unit of federal
agents had not notified state or local police that they were traveling to
Juarez to seize the suspects, an action that risked provoking a battle with
the other law enforcement organizations.

Several times in recent years, blood has been shed during armed clashes
between federal and state police in Juarez.

``We have a serious problem again because the federal agents didn't notify
us, and if there had been a unit of the state judicial police or another
force, probably there would have been a battle,'' he said.