Spate of violent slayings fuels fears of drug war in Mexico

Drug lord's death may signal fight for multibilliondollar turf

By ANDREW DOWNIE
Copyright 1997 Special to the Chronicle

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico For years, this bustling border city of assembly
plants, strip malls and drug smuggling rings belonged to Amado Carrillo
Fuentes. And like many ambitious landlords, the late gangland boss kept his
property in order.

Gangland murders happened with some frequency under Carrillo. But the
killings usually were lowkey compared with the spectacular bloodletting in
Tijuana, Culiacan or Mexico's other drug smuggling centers.

And when he killed, Carrillo, once considered the richest and most powerful
drug boss in the hemisphere, often went for the subtle touch.

Carrillo's gunmen seldom fired into crowds. They picked their targets with
precision and rarely dumped the bodies in public places. Instead, tortured
corpses appeared in the trunks of cars.

But that was then.

Carrillo, 42, died in July after undergoing extensive liposuction and other
plastic surgery at a Mexico City hospital. Since then, 18 people have met a
violent end in Juarez in what many see as a war to take over his
multibilliondollar cocaine empire.

Saying they lack proof, most Mexican authorities decline to conclusively
link any of the killings with Mexico's drug trade. But some admit that the
style of the recent Juarez violence screams drug war.

In the most gruesome incident, an assassin wielding an automatic rifle
gunned down six people, including an innocent couple celebrating a
birthday, at the upscale Max Fim restaurant earlier this month in Juarez.

"These type of actions are undeniably related to organized crime," said
Jorge Lopez Molinar, the assistant state prosecutor in Juarez and one of
the few Mexican officials who will say publicly what everyone is talking
about privately.

The Max Fim massacre "was not an isolated incident," he said. "That sort of
thing doesn't happen for no reason."

Although Mexican police contend there is no hard evidence to link the
killings to a turf war, U.S. officials believe rivals are vying for
Carrillo's top spot.

"Things are in a real state of flux right now," said a senior U.S. law
enforcement official who follows the situation on the border. "There is
going to be a period of turmoil while they try to figure out who is making
decisions."

Since the late 1980s, Carrillo's socalled Juarez cartel has smuggled
thousands of tons of Colombianproduced cocaine into the United States,
along the central U.S.Mexico border. As other Mexican drug bosses were
captured or killed, Carrillo became the most powerful smuggler, becoming
famous for bringing in tons of the narcotic on large jetliners, according
to law enforcement sources.

The gangsters now fighting for control of Carrillo's cartel have been major
players in the Mexican narcotics industry for a long time, those officials
said.

Jostling for position are former Carrillo associates Ismael Zambada Garcia,
Eduardo Gonzalez Quirarte, Juan Jose Esparragoza and Juan Jose Quintero
Payan and Rafael Munoz Talavera, U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials
said. Carrillo's brother Vicente is another potential heir to the throne,
analysts said.

The contenders list also is said to include Hector Luis "El Guero" Palma, a
boss of the smuggling organization based in the Pacific coast state of
Sinaloa, and Palma's former partner Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman, even though
both are in jail on various charges.

Carrillo's former archenemies in the drug trade, the Arellano Felix
brothers of Tijuana, may be looking to expand their territory east from
Tijuana, newspaper reports suggest.

With such a crowded field of challengers, officials on both sides of the
border agree it is difficult to say exactly which is allied with which or
who is killing whom.

"How can we know if (the recent killings) are related to drug trafficking
if no one talks?" asked Arturo Chavez Chavez, the attorney general of
Chihuahua state, where Juarez is located.

Police said the target in the Max Fim attack was Alfonso Corral Olaguez, a
cattle rancher from the northern state of Durango who has been identified
in Mexican newspaper reports as a member of the Herrera smuggling
organization.

Law enforcement officials said the Herreras are responsible for providing
much of the Mexican heroin smuggled into the United States each year. They
worked closely with Carrillo for about 10 years, exchanging information and
sharing trafficking routes and personnel, U.S. officials said.

One U.S. official confirmed that Corral was a "top lieutenant of
Carrillo's" and said authorities are seeking an indictment against him in
the Western District of Texas for drugtrafficking offenses.

A friend of Corral invited him to dine at the posh steak restaurant but
left the building minutes before the gunman entered, leading police to
believe Corral was set up. The "friend," Dr. David Portillo Dominguez, is
missing and is being sought by police.

Mexican police are holding two men in connection with the Max Fim killings.

On Friday, police said they have amassed enough evidence to indict one of
the two, a selfproclaimed volunteer soldier, in the massacre, according to
the Associated Press.

"We have a witness who saw Jorge Perez Garcia go into the restaurant five
minutes before the shooting and we have another witness who saw him fire an
AK47 rifle at the victims," said state judicial police spokesman Ernesto
Garcia.

Others wanted in connection with the recent wave of violence include the
crew of a jeep that rolled into an wealthy Juarez neighborhood July 19 and
killed Juan Eugenio Rosales Ortiz, a reputed local drug smuggler known as
El Genio.

But authorities remain unsure of a motive and have made little progress in
finding out who carried out the Rosales execution.

The failure to prevent or solve such crimes has sparked criticism of local
law enforcement agencies. Authorities last week transferred 16 state
judicial police agents, including the commanders in charge of homicides,
arrests and technical support, out of Juarez.

Two other judicial police agents who stood by and watched as the hit squad
assassinated Rosales have also been fired.

Such purges are nothing new in a state where police corruption and
inefficiency are endemic.

At least a fifth of Juarez's police force has been fired in the last three
years, while an even larger portion of the 1,000 strong Chihuahua state
judicial police has been removed since 1993.

Chihuahua Gov. Francisco Barrio ordered 40 additional state police agents
to the border region last week in a bid to curb the violence. Barrio also
has asked President Ernesto Zedillo to send more federal agents to back up
the army troops running the national government's antidrug efforts in Juarez.

Meanwhile, police last week broke up one U.S.based arm of the Juarez
cartel. Authorities arrested dozens of people and seized 11.4 tons of
cocaine and $18.5 million in cash over the course of an almost yearlong
investigation, Thomas Constantine, the administrator of the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration, said last week.

Despite the arrests and the killings and the record seizures authorities
grabbed 6 tons of Carrillo's cocaine in Arizona last December plenty of
people will continue fighting for the chance to smuggle cocaine across the
border.

It's a simple case of supply and demand, said Don Bludworth, assistant
special agent in charge of U.S. Customs in El Paso. Customs officials
searching for drugs smuggled across the bridges that span the Rio Grande
here are as busy today as they were last week or last year.

Said Bludworth, "Nothing has changed."

Andrew Downie is a freelance journalist based in Mexico City.