By Henry Tricks

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico, Aug 7 (Reuter) Drugrelated killings have escalated
on the U.S.Mexican border, signalling the end of a code of honour among
Mexican druglords to keep their turf battles in the shadows.

Mexican and U.S. officials said drug violence took a new turn this week when
two slicklydressed hitmen sauntered into an elegant steakhouse in this
border city near El Paso, Texas, and cut down six people in a burst of
automatic gunfire.

Amado Carrillo Fuentes, head of the socalled Juarez cartel whose death last
month has sparked the vicious turf war, owned the Maxfim restaurant where the
massacre occured, a U.S. antinarcotics official said.

The official, who asked not to be identified, said the hit on Sunday night,
as diners rounded off a day watching bull fighting across the road, was
linked to a bitter struggle for control of the multibillion dollar cocaine
trade.

``Of course it's related to the Carrillo Fuentes drug wars,'' the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration official said.

The gangsterstyle killing the gunmen pumped 150 rounds from AK47 assault
rifles into their victims before fleeing in a black limousine followed
more than 12 reported drugrelated ``executions'' in Juarez since Carrillo's
death on July 4.

Three men, including one local policeman, were arrested early on Thursday
with AK47s that appeared to be the same as those used in the shooting,
police spokesman Ernesto Garcia said. He said they would be charged in the
shooting.

He named the suspects as policeman Jorge Perez, Jesus Barvill and Pedro
Cardero. But he said authorities still lacked a motive.

The attack was particularly horrifying to citizens of Juarez because five of
the six victims appeared to be unconnected to drugs smuggling caught in
the crossfire of a war that had been kept within the confines of the
underworld.

``This is now no man's land, a land of the strong. And the strong are the
narcos,'' said Antonio Ochoa, a mourner at the funeral of Teresa Herrera, 26,
one of the victims who was buried on Wednesday. ``This is not going to
stop.''

Newspapers in Juarez demanded an end to the violence, and the city's main
business organisations this week ordered a halt to any voluntary
contributions to government projects until security in the city was beefed
up.

``Like Chicago in the prohibition years, since last Sunday this border zone
abandoned its old position as a trampoline for drug trafficking and became
the new battle ground for drug mafias,'' El Diario de Juarez said in a
frontpage editorial.

Elsewhere in Mexico, Carrillo's demise has had similarly bloody consequences.
An exbeauty queen, Irma Ibarra, was gunned down in the western city of
Guadalajara last week after she received threats from Carrillo's former inner
circle.

Until his death after a plastic surgery operation in Mexico City, experts say
Carrillo had sought to keep intercartel bloodshed quiet, organising a
``federation'' of top cartel bosses to map out and divide up territories.

Now he is out of the picture, officials say the truce is unravelling. In
Juarez, so many bodies have turned up in car boots and vacant desert lots
recently that police talking by radio now use a special code number for
executions, 85.

The mafiastyle Maxfin massacre was not Carrillo style, and officials were
investigating whether a more violent band of druglords, the Tijuanabased
Arellano Felix brothers, may be muscling into his former territory.

``The cartels all work together except the (Arellano Felix) brothers. They
don't get along with anyone,'' the DEA official said.

Authorities said the target of the Maxfin killings was Alfonso Corral
Olaguez, 36, also known as ``Green Feet'' because of the green crocodileskin
cowboy boots he used to wear.

Mexican officials were investigating his links to Jaime Herrera, head of a
local cartel operating in the Mexican state of Durango that apparently has
close ties with the Juarez Cartel. There were also reports Corral was a DEA
informant. REUTER

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