DRUG CASE IN MEXICO TESTS PACT WITH U.S.

By Tim Golden

In a case likely to test Mexico's willingness to extradite powerful drug
traffickers to face American justice, U.S. officials said on Monday that
they would seek to prosecute a suspected Mexican cocaine smuggler who was
arrested in Tijuana over the weekend.

The suspected trafficker, Arturo Paez Martinez, was captured outside a
shopping mall on Saturday afternoon by Mexican federal police agents,
officials said. He was flown to Mexico City on Sunday for security reasons,
and was charged in an indictment unsealed in San Diego Monday with
conspiring to distribute more than 2,200 pounds of cocaine in the United
States.

Paez has been a longstanding target of an American effort to dismantle the
Tijuanabased drug organization run by the Arellano Felix brothers. Federal
officials describe the effort as probably the most ambitious criminal
investigation that the United States has ever directed across its southern
border.

"This is a chance for the Mexicans to prove themselves," said a senior U.S.
lawenforcement official who discussed the case on condition of anonymity.

In a telephone interview from Mexico City, a senior Mexican official
predicted that Paez a swaggering young man who moved among Tijuana's
most prominent families and is said to have run part of the Arellanos'
distribution network in the United States would indeed end up in the
United States.

Making good on that vow could bring an important turn in the relationship
between the two countries. The extradition of drug figures has caused
friction between Mexico and the United States, and Mexican officials have
mostly ignored a wish list of 20 suspected Mexican traffickers given to
them by American officials earlier this year.

Last month, the two governments completed work on a new protocol to their
existing extradition treaty, an addendum that would allow for the temporary
exchange of criminals who face charges in both countries. The protocol is
expected to be signed during a visit by President Ernesto Zedillo to
Washington this week.

Yet American officials acknowledge that the new arrangement will address
only a bit of the tension created by Mexico's unwillingness to extradite
its own citizens.

For example, the deal would allow Mexico to prosecute a Mexican drug
trafficker wanted in Guadalajara and then send him to Chicago for
prosecution there. If convicted in both countries, the smuggler would serve
his first sentence in Mexico and then be shipped back to the United States
to serve the other.

Now, even if Mexico agrees to extradite its own citizens in such cases,
they can be sent north only after serving any prison time they face at
home. By then, witnesses in the American cases may have disappeared,
evidence may have grown stale, and effective prosecutions may be impossible.

The new agreement has no bearing on the extradition cases in which American
officials say Mexico has traditionally been most reluctant to cooperate:
those in which a Mexican citizen faces drugtrafficking charges only in the
United States.

Paez, who is believed to be 31, is such a case.

He is described by Mexican and U.S. investigators as a son of Tijuana's
elite, one of about two dozen young men who have joined the ranks of the
Arellano Felix organization as traffickers, front men and enforcers.

Investigators say Paez has specialized in transporting drugs into the
United States and their wholesale distribution. He is said to have risen to
the 10man "council" that acts as a kind of board of directors for the
Arellano Felix gang.

In his interrogation by the Mexican authorities, one official said, Paez
acknowledged spending much of his time in Southern California. But he
claimed that he had only a social acquaintance with Benjamin and Ramon
Arellano Felix, the bosses of their family gang. Ramon Arellano, 33, was
put on the FBI's tenmostwanted list in October.

Mexican officials said Paez was with three other men when he was caught.
His companions ran at the sight of the police agents, but he remained
calmly in place, offering his captors the $1,200 he had in his pocket in
exchange for his freedom. Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company