RAIDS AIM TO FIND KILLERS OF 3 IN MEXICO

MEXICO CITY - They carry both American passports and high-caliber
weapons, making them the perfect cross-border assassins. They confuse
the authorities by using a coded language that blends English,
Spanish and the Aztecs' ancient tongue of Nahuatl. The threat of
prison is no big fear for members of the Barrio Azteca street gang,
because they consider the cellblock to be home.

About 200 American law enforcement agents on Thursday cracked down on
Barrio Azteca in El Paso as suspicions grew that members of the
notorious Texas-based gang might have been behind the shooting deaths
of three people connected to the American Consulate in Ciudad Juarez
last weekend.

"It's an intelligence-gathering operation," said Special Agent Andrea
Simmons, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. field office in El Paso, as
local, state and federal officials interviewed about 100 people
suspected of being gang members in and around El Paso on Thursday and
arrested those with outstanding warrants.

A spokesman for the Mexican military in Ciudad Juarez, Enrique
Torres, said soldiers were conducting intelligence operations on the
Mexican side of the border. In addition, F.B.I. agents have been
deployed to Ciudad Juarez, which has become Mexico's murder capital,
to assist with the investigation.

Although the motive for the killings remains unclear, Mexican
officials have said that the Barrio Azteca gang, which supplies hired
killers for the drug traffickers who operate in Ciudad Juarez, may
have been behind the brutal shooting deaths on Saturday of the
husband of a consulate employee and, minutes later, of another
consulate employee and her husband.

One of the people being sought was Eduardo Ravelo, 41, a leader of
the Barrio Aztecas in Ciudad Juarez, who was put on the F.B.I.'s most
wanted list last year. Mr. Ravelo, the only major leader of the gang
who is not in prison, is accused of ordering killings and carrying
them out himself, according to federal law enforcement officials, who
are offering a $100,000 reward for information on his whereabouts.

Founded in the mid-1980s inside Texas prisons, the Barrio Aztecas
have morphed into a prime example of the cross-border nature of
Mexico's drug war, in which guns and money flow south and drugs flow
north in a sinister trade that costs thousands of lives, far more of
them Mexican than American. The gang's members are Mexican citizens
and Mexican-Americans.

"Horrifying and tragic as it is that three people associated with the
consulate were killed, last year there were 200 every month and seven
every day who died in Juarez," said Carlos Pascual, the American
ambassador to Mexico. "We have to keep focused on this bigger reality."

In an attempt to jump-start the joint American-Mexican fight against
drug traffickers, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will lead
a high-level delegation to Mexico City next week on a previously
scheduled trip.

Seeking to further buttress its support for President Felipe Calderon
of Mexico, whose antidrug strategy has come under criticism here, the
White House announced Thursday that Mr. Calderon would be invited to
a state dinner in May.

American law enforcement officials said they were following several
different lines of investigation as they searched for the killers of
the consulate employee, Lesley A. Enriquez, and her husband, Arthur
H. Redelfs, American citizens who were shot as they left a children's
birthday party on Saturday. Also killed in what appeared to be a
related episode was Jorge Alberto Salcido Ceniceros, the Mexican
husband of another employee at the consulate, who was on his way home
from the same party.

"Everything is on the table until we get further information," said
Ms. Simmons, indicating that investigators had not yet established
that the three were killed because of their connections to the consulate.

Still, the State Department had decided the day before the killings -
because of rising violence in northern Mexico and threats made
against some officials - to allow those who work at a number of
American consular offices along the border to send their families to
the United States.

"That's obviously the million-dollar question: are the people being
targeted because they work for the U.S. government, or was it a case
of mistaken identity?" Mr. Pascual said. "We all want to know that."

Barrio Azteca works for the Juarez cartel, which is run by Vicente
Carrillo Fuentes, and the drug gang's enforcement arm, which is known
as La Linea, or The Line. Their avowed enemies on the Mexican side of
the border are members of the Sinaloa cartel, which has been fighting
for control of the lucrative smuggling route through the northern
state of Chihuahua.

The gang's members move back and forth across the border and earn
money smuggling heroin, cocaine and marijuana to the United States.
Their criminal enterprises include smuggling immigrants, assault,
auto theft, extortion, kidnapping and killing for hire, F.B.I. officials say.