IN MEXICAN DRUG WAR, INVESTIGATORS ARE FEARFUL

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- The hit men moved in on their target, shot
him dead and then disappeared in a matter of seconds. It would have
been a perfect case for Jose Ibarra Limon, one of this violent border
city's most dogged crime investigators -- had he not been the victim.

Mexico has never been particularly adept at bringing criminals to
justice, and the drug war has made things worse. Investigators are
now swamped with homicides and other drug crimes, most of which they
will never crack. On top of the standard obstacles -- too little
expertise, too much corruption -- is one that seems to grow by the
day: outright fear of becoming the next body in the street.

Mr. Ibarra was killed on July 27 in what his bosses at the federal
attorney general's office consider an assassination related to a case
he was investigating. As if to prove the point, less than a month
later, one of the lawyers who had worked for Mr. Ibarra also turned
up dead. Two days afterward, an investigator named to replace Mr.
Ibarra insisted on being transferred out of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's
murder capital.

The current prosecutor investigating Mr. Ibarra's cases is working
anonymously, his or her name kept secret by the government.

The Mexican government knows that revamping its problem-plagued
justice system is an essential part of breaking the cartels that
control vast areas of Mexico. Major efforts are under way to make the
judiciary faster and fairer, and the United States has contributed
millions of dollars to help bring more criminals to justice.

But even with training programs by American lawyers and judges,
American aid to improve forensics and screen more effectively for
corruption, as well as other cross-border initiatives, the
traffickers and the cumulative pressures they are putting on the
judiciary are straining it as never before.

"Obviously what happened affects us," said Hector Garcia Rodriguez,
the federal prosecutor in Juarez and the supervisor of the slain
investigator. "We're still working. We can't stop. But we know the
dangers we face."

President Felipe Calderon points to the arrests of more than 50,000
people on drug charges since he began his antidrug offensive in
December 2006. Many of the arrests appear to have come from top-notch
detective work. Other suspects, though, are quietly released after
they have been paraded before the news media.

The federal government refused to provide statistics on how many
arrests had resulted in convictions, how many suspects were still
under investigation or how many arrests had proved to be mistakes.
But independent reviews by scholars suggest that only about a quarter
of crimes in Mexico are ever reported and that only a small fraction
ever result in convictions.

Compounding matters is the sheer number of crimes, especially
murders. On a single September night in Ciudad Juarez, 18 men were
shot to death in a drug treatment center near the border, more than
the number of killings all year long in El Paso, just across the Texas border.

"Law enforcement is overwhelmed," said David A. Shirk, a professor at
the University of San Diego and the principal investigator for the
Justice in Mexico Project, a binational research initiative. "If you
have murders with 13 bodies one day and then you have 4 more the
next, there's not a lot of investigation into who pulled the trigger
specifically."

Fear Gets in the Way

One of the two dozen or so cases that Mr. Ibarra had been
investigating involved the killing of a journalist, Armando Rodriguez
Carreon, 40, who had produced a string of scoops as the longtime
crime reporter for the newspaper El Diario. Mr. Rodriguez was shot to
death last Nov. 13 as he prepared to take his 8-year-old daughter to
school. She was at his side and saw her father struck by at least 10 bullets.

"It was similar to hundreds of homicides we've had here," remarked
Mr. Garcia, Mr. Ibarra's supervisor. "It was an execution."

It is also similar in that the perpetrators remain at large. Fear
prevents many cases from being solved because investigators hesitate
to dig too deeply, and witnesses refuse to talk.

"Nobody cooperates with anything," Mr. Garcia complained. "They're
too afraid. Nobody wants to say what they saw. Nobody wants to give
you a plate number."

Mexico is promoting confidential telephone lines and rewards to
encourage witnesses, but resistance lingers, especially when news
reports circulate about threats made to those who do call in. And
there is considerable doubt that the reward money is worth the risk.

The attacks on investigators only magnify the problem.

"If you had a difficult case, you went to him and said, 'Ibarra, what
do you think?' " Mr. Garcia said. Now in trying to solve Mr. Ibarra's
murder, his colleagues wonder aloud how he might have pursued his
killers, possibly four men in all, who shot him many times in the
head with .45-caliber and 9-millimeter weapons.

The slain journalist's wife, Blanca Martinez, said that she had met
once with Mr. Ibarra, but that she did not think he had been murdered
for closing in on her husband's killers, despite his reputation for
solving difficult crimes.

"I don't think he was really investigating," she said. Prosecutors
had asked once to interview her young daughter, a witness, but had
never followed up, Ms. Martinez said.

Pedro Torres, Mr. Rodriguez's editor and close friend, was similarly
unimpressed with the government's effort to find the killers of his
top police reporter.

Investigators waited for months before visiting the newsroom,
interviewing some of Mr. Rodriguez's co-workers and getting copies of
his articles. The government has not yet established whether Mr.
Rodriguez's killing stemmed from his work as a police reporter,
infuriating his colleagues, who are convinced that such a connection is clear.

"He's the godfather of my child," Mr. Torres said. "I've known him
for years. They've never talked to me. What kind of investigation is that?"

Slipshod Investigations

One of the forensic specialists who photograph bodies, lift
fingerprints and count spent bullets at Juarez homicide scenes
complained that by the time he arrived at a site, significant
tampering had already taken place.

"The soldiers come in and walk over everything," complained the
specialist, who spoke anonymously in an out-of-the-way steak
restaurant because his supervisors had not authorized him to give an
interview. "They leave their fingerprints all around. They want to
know who died, so they move the body. They kick the bullets. They
don't realize they're contaminating the crime scene."

Thousands of soldiers, deployed by the president in his war against
the cartels, patrol the streets of Juarez alongside the local police.
Trained to take on enemy combatants, they are far less familiar with
the sanctity of crime scenes, the rules of evidence and other basics
of law enforcement.

Many police officers also meddle with crime scenes, sometimes out of
incompetence, but sometimes to throw off the investigation or to
enrich themselves.

"If the victim's watch is missing, that could be important because it
could mean it was a robbery," the forensic specialist said. "But we
can't rule out that one of the police officers at the scene took it."

The joint military-police mission now combating traffickers in Juarez
presents a more positive picture. It cites the recent arrests of
three men suspected of being hired killers, who in August implicated
themselves and a fourth suspect in 211 homicides, an eye-popping
number even in Mexico.

To trumpet the breakthrough, the government took out newspaper ads
listing all the people the suspects were accused of killing. One man
alone was linked to 101 murders.

The authorities said the arrests resulted from ballistics
investigations, which are modern enough here in Chihuahua State that
the El Paso Police Department used them for years for its own
investigations. But the men also confessed to the murders, the
authorities said, and questions were raised in the local news media
about whether the detainees had been coerced, a frequent problem in Mexico.

"We solve our crimes with evidence, and they solve them with
confessions," said the El Paso County sheriff, Richard D. Wiles. "We
have strict rules to follow on how to get confessions. The rules are
looser over there."

In a recent assessment of Mexico's adherence to human rights, the
State Department noted that 21 torture complaints and 580 complaints
of cruel or degrading treatment had been made against the Mexican
authorities in 2008, a significant increase from the year before.

And yet, the report said: "Since 2007, we are not aware that any
official has ever been convicted of torture, giving rise to concern
about impunity. Despite the law's provisions to the contrary, police
and prosecutors have attempted to justify an arrest by forcibly
securing a confession of a crime."

Without a Trace

Along the border, many victims are never found, leaving relatives --
and investigators -- in a state of limbo.

Fernando Ocegueda Flores, a founder of an advocacy group in Tijuana
for relatives of the disappeared, felt an odd mixture of despair and
relief in January, when the police announced that a suspect, Santiago
Meza Lopez, had admitted to disposing of the remains of 300 bodies
for a drug cartel by dissolving them in barrels of lye.

Mr. Ocegueda thought that maybe his son, abducted in 2007, had been
one of the victims of the Pozolero, a nickname for Mr. Meza that
translates roughly as the stew maker. Mr. Ocegueda thought his years
of trying to learn his son's fate might end.

Federal authorities took Mr. Meza to Mexico City for questioning and
began testing some remains. But the bones were so corroded by the lye
that no DNA was found, the authorities have said.

Mr. Ocegueda contends that the investigators should be doing more,
like digging up the yard where Mr. Meza said he had disposed of the
bodies after boiling them, to search for more bones to test. The yard
is guarded by the federal police, but a human jaw bone with a tooth
attached and various suspicious mounds of earth were visible inside.

Frustrated, Mr. Ocegueda said that if the site was not properly
investigated soon, he and other relatives planned to storm the place
with shovels and begin digging themselves.

But a coroner's investigator who has reviewed some of the remains
from such barrels in other cases said the traffickers covered their
tracks well.

"You can't tell by looking that it's a human being," said the
investigator, who was not authorized to speak publicly. "It's a glob
of something, and the DNA is gone."

Cross-Border Police Work

Every month, law enforcement officials from both sides of the border,
whether from the F.B.I. or the Tijuana police, gather to talk shop at
a chain restaurant in southern California.

"Without cooperation, so many cases would sit still," said the
California investigator who convenes the sessions, Val Jimenez,
executive director of the International Law Enforcement Officers
Association. Cross-border policing has caught child molesters, car
thieves and murderers.

It also helped solve one particularly grisly missing person case.

Daniel LaPorte, 27, disappeared after heading across the border to
Baja California from San Diego last year. Eventually, his green
Cadillac was found south of Tijuana, outside Rosarito Beach, with
four dead people in and around it. None were Mr. LaPorte.

As the family's private investigator looked into the case with police
officers from San Diego and Baja California, a Mexican detective
mentioned that a barrel apparently containing human remains had been
discovered not far from the location of the quadruple homicide.

Luck played a role in identifying the remains. It had rained heavily
after the barrel had been abandoned on a remote hillside,
investigators said. The barrel had fallen over and some of the bones
had been washed away by the rain, diluting the corrosive solution and
preventing all the DNA from being stripped away. Laboratory tests
conducted in Tijuana showed that the remains were Mr. LaPorte's.

Investigators eventually determined that Mr. LaPorte had been
involved in trafficking marijuana from Mexico to Rhode Island, some
of it in surfboards. He had probably bought several tons of marijuana
a year, the family's investigator said.

Mr. Jimenez and some of the other law enforcement officials who work
on these joint investigations are sympathetic to the policing
challenges their Mexican counterparts face.

"We don't think we're going to die when we go to work, but over there
it is a real possibility," Mr. Jimenez said. "A lot of them want to
do good police work, but there are some cases they can't do because
of the pressure of the cartels."

Arresting the Wrong People

Alejandra Gonzalez Licea said the only conceivable ties she had ever
had to drug trafficking were purely academic ones. A linguistics
professor who wrote her thesis on narcocorridos, the Mexican ballads
that often extol the exploits of drug bosses, Ms. Gonzalez found
herself blindfolded and handcuffed by soldiers this year and
interrogated about which drug cartel was employing her.

Her answer -- the Autonomous University of Baja California -- did not
impress her interrogators. The professor and her husband endured
months of detention before the charges were quietly dropped. The
$28,000 in cash they were caught carrying was a gift from an uncle in
the United States to help them remodel their home, it was determined,
not illicit drug profits they were laundering.

After her initial detention, Ms. Gonzalez was led to a news
conference, where journalists were gathered to photograph her. She
stood next to her husband and two men she did not know. On the table
before them, much to her surprise, was nearly half a million dollars.

It turned out that she was being grouped with two money-laundering
suspects arrested the same night with a much larger amount of cash.
It would take two and a half months before a judge would throw out
the case against her and her husband for lack of proof.

Mexico has approved a sweeping overhaul of its judiciary to replace
its closed-door judicial proceedings with trials in which defendants
like Ms. Gonzalez are considered innocent until proved guilty. But
revamping the system is no easy feat. It requires retraining lawyers
and judges, rebuilding courtrooms and improving forensic technology,
all while trying to keep on top of a flood of new cases.

Police forces are also getting an overhaul. Officers in Tijuana and
Juarez, two of the most violence-prone cities, have been fired en
masse after being linked to organized crime. The two federal police
agencies have been reorganized under a single commander. Beyond that,
a new police training institute has been established and the
government has set up a national database to share information and
intelligence.

Still, Ms. Gonzalez, now back at her teaching job, shook her head
when asked about the Mexican government's competence. She doubts the
official statistics, since she figures she was one of the 50,000
people that the president cited as drug suspects.

"They didn't even find out that I wrote my thesis on narcocorridos,"
she said of those who were prosecuting her. "Good thing they didn't find out."

Doing What Police Won't

The authorities discourage civilians from investigating their own
cases because of the obvious dangers involved. But many grow tired of
waiting for the police and, having no luck with private
investigators, conduct their own inquiries.

Cristina Palacios, president of the Citizens' Association Against
Impunity, recounted how one of her members, a Tijuana woman whose
brother had been kidnapped, offered a reward herself, furious at how
little had been done to investigate the disappearance.

Shadowy men contacted the woman, and she agreed to be taken away with
a blindfold, Ms. Palacios said. Soon the woman found herself in a
room where a man tied to a chair was being beaten by a group of men.
The man confessed to killing her brother.

The next day, the woman, who declined to speak on the record about
what occurred, saw in the newspaper that a body had been found. It
looked like the man in the chair, Ms. Palacios said.

Mr. Ocegueda, in search of his missing son, had a similar experience.
One night, in the course of his personal investigation, he allowed
himself to be led away with his eyes covered and driven for about 40
minutes by a man he met who had links to traffickers.

Eventually, he was led into a home, where he said a gruff man told
him, "You're very brave to come here."

Apparently impressed by his gumption, the man gave Mr. Ocegueda a
shot of whiskey and told him that his son had been killed and would
never be found. His remains had been destroyed in lye, the man said.

But Mr. Ocegueda, continuing to investigate, later found another
organized crime figure, who led him in another direction. This time,
he was told his son was alive and working for traffickers. Now, he
does not know what to think.

"The police are supposed to be doing this, not me," he said. "But
they don't want to investigate because they don't want to solve these
crimes. They might be killed if they find the truth. I don't care if
they kill me."