Man linked to drug ring held
Mexico arrests member of notorious family on weapons charge

MEXICO CITY Mexican authorities were holding a member of Mexico's top
methamphetamine trafficking family on Monday, seeking to draw up drug and
other charges against him after his arrest at a highway checkpoint on the
charge of illegal possession of a pistol.

But it remained unclear whether Mexico's antidrug agencies have collected
sufficient evidence to put Adan Amezcua Contreras, 28, on trial for alleged
work with his older brothers' smuggling group, which a senior American
official told a Senate Committee last month was a ``trafficking organization
of global proportions.''

The Amezcua family's aggressive methamphetamine production and smuggling
activities, pioneered by Adan's older brothers Luis, 33, and Jesús, 32, have
stoked a major ``speed'' epidemic in the United States, American authorities
said. Adan has been involved in the trafficking but has kept a lower
profile, officials said.

``Adan may not be up to his eyeballs in the drug trade, but he's at least up
to his chin,'' an American law enforcement official who tracks the Amezcua
family said Monday. ``This arrest could be the break we've wanted, the
beginning of the end; that's what we're hoping for.''

The Mexican attorney general's office said in a statement Sunday that
soldiers arrested Amezcua in the Pacific coast state of Colima, discovered
that he was carrying a .38caliber pistol and turned him over to federal
prosecutors. The statement did not say when he was arrested.

The prosecutors persuaded a federal judge to issue an order placing Amezcua
under house arrest as a ``cautionary measure,'' the statement said,
apparently to allow prosecutors time to assemble a case. A spokesman for the
attorney general declined to provide further details.

Luis and Jesús were arrested on drug charges in the early 1990s in Southern
California, where both are now wanted on drug charges. Adan Amezcua,
however, is not wanted in the United States, and it appears that he was not
facing charges in Mexico before his arrest.

The family has specialized in smuggling vast quantities of ephedrine, the
main chemical ingredient in methamphetamine, into Mexico from countries all
over the globe, officials say.

The family has used the ephedrine to produce methamphetamine for export to
the United States, and has also sold ephedrine to other traffickers, an
official said.

In recent years the family has operated freely in several western Mexico
states; such activities are only possible as the result of protection
payments to the authorities.

The detention is the latest of several incidents, including the arrest of an
important cocaine smuggler in Tijuana on Nov. 8, that have led some U.S.
officials into tentative optimism about Mexico's antidrug efforts.