U.S. SEES NEW RESOLVE IN MEXICO

Drug Cartels Feel Crackdown's Force

PUEBLA, Mexico -- When they finally caught up with him, the undercover
soldiers did not find Benjamin Arellano living like a rich drug capo
presumably lives, in luxury and behind a protective cordon of vicious gunmen.

Instead, the head of the cartel that controls much of the cocaine traffic
into the United States was hiding in an unimpressive yellow house in this
quiet colonial town, hundreds of miles from his Tijuana base. He was alone
except for his family and one bodyguard.

Despite his 69 cell phones and other means of evading the law, a special
unit of army agents had been relentlessly closing in on him for months.

Arellano's capture, like the arrest over the weekend of a top Gulf Coast
drug lord, dramatically shows Mexico's new resolve in overcoming corruption
and in cooperating more closely with the United States in the war on drugs,
according to officials from both sides of the border.

U.S. officials cautiously call it a new era in which they have come to
trust their Mexican counterparts with sensitive intelligence that
previously would have ended up in the hands of the traffickers. The
improved partnership not only helped the army follow a money courier to
Arellano's hide-out in March, but it also has resulted in gains against all
the cartels operating along the border and a major combined bust this
spring against the emerging heroin trade.

"I thought we would never see these things go down," said Donald Thornhill,
a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officer who worked for many years in
Mexico. "It used to be that the corruption was so bad, you would be
hesitant to pass anything along."

Mexico's new cooperation is attributed to many cumulative elements, not
least of which is President Vicente Fox's freedom to pursue drug lords
without worrying that he might implicate his own regime. In recent years,
there had been suspicions and allegations that some leaders of the
country's longtime ruler, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, were
involved in or turned a blind eye to drug trafficking.

Also, a "handful" of key government operatives have recognized the drug
gangs' challenge to Mexico's rule of law, U.S. officials said.

For the first time, efforts to maintain two units of specially screened
drug crime investigators appear to be successful. And a string of arrests
of the cartels' middle-management figures has had a snowball effect:
weakening gang operations and leading to some of the kingpins' doors.

For now, the success may have helped postpone a turf war that was expected
over the weakened Arellanos' lucrative Tijuana smuggling routes. Some
analysts believe other cartel chiefs, such as Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada,
have held back out of fear that the army is lying in wait for them.

"Zambada hasn't raised his head because he knows one thing," said Jesus
Blancornelas, editor of Tijuana's Zeta magazine and the target of a 1998
Arellano assassination attempt in 1998. "If the army could take out
Benjamin Arellano, who is more powerful than him, then it could do the same
to him."

Others are less convinced.

In the past, official crackdowns on one drug cartel turned out to be on
behalf of another cartel. And some argue that, although seemingly beheaded,
the Arellano family still controls a vast criminal network that undoubtedly
will keep the drugs flowing into the U.S.

"I will believe in Fox when he arrests all the white-collar guys, the
important politicians and bankers who are part of the network," said Victor
Clark Alfaro, a human-rights activist in Tijuana.

The Arellano brothers, once known for their flashy nightclub lifestyle, had
become legends because of their cartel's longevity and the almost limitless
influence of their money. But, having eluded authorities since being
implicated in the 1993 murder of Roman Catholic Cardinal Juan Jesus
Posadas, their own vicious streak may have helped lead to their current
troubles.

The cardinal's assassination and the execution of eight children along with
their families over a drug debt in 1998 outraged Mexicans. After the
killing of an undercover Mexican prosecutor, Jose "Pepe" Patino, whose
crushed body was found in a ditch after he returned from a safe house in
San Diego in April 2000, Mexican and U.S. agents redoubled their
anti-cartel efforts.

Murder probe reopens

On Friday, Mexican prosecutors confirmed that they had reopened the
investigation into the killing of the cardinal. They noted many
abnormalities in previous official probes of the crime, which is still
cloaked in mystery.

A senior U.S. official involved in the drug war said the recent efforts
reflect "an unprecedented level of cooperation and trust," which he
attributed in part to Fox. He said it was in stark contrast to years past,
when there was a "nasty" relationship between U.S. and Mexican agents who
were constantly blaming each other for failures.

Even more than the Arellano bust, he cited the joint effort's biggest
success as the so-called Operation Landslide in March, which netted 700
pounds of heroin and 81 of its dealers. A month before the raids, U.S.
agents notified the Mexicans, who this time did not leak the information
but identified 15 of the top suppliers and arrested five of them; they are
hunting for the other 10.

"In the past, we would have said, `What, are you kidding?'" the official
said. "It is highly important to take down the likes of Benjamin Arellano,
but to be able to sustain those operations, to be able to take down the
next Benjamin Arellano, depends on our ability to work jointly."

Weekend arrest reported

On Monday, Mexican authorities said they had apprehended Jesus Albino
Quintero Meraz, a Gulf Coast drug lord who had bragged he had been shipping
more than a ton of cocaine into the U.S. each month. Officials said
Quintero and six accomplices were arrested early Sunday by army
intelligence agents after a three-month investigation, and after being
surrounded during a meeting in the port city of Veracruz.

"I want to reiterate that, with this arrest, we have achieved another
powerful blow against the international criminal organizations dedicated to
drug smuggling," said Mexican Atty. Gen. Rafael Macedo de la Concha.

The attorney general confirmed that Mexican officials are receiving
intelligence from the U.S. as part of a "permanent exchange of
information," and that the DEA and other U.S. agencies had considered
Quintero's gang "very active" in drug running for a Colombian cartel.

"The name will appear to you very unknown, but he is a capo at the level of
`Chapo' Guzman, `Mayo' Zambada, Osiel Cardenas himself and Benjamin
Arellano himself, [although] he always kept himself hidden," said Mexican
Defense Minister Ricardo Vega Garcia.

In the Arellano case, many of the kingpin's lieutenants already were in
custody by the time he was arrested. And his brother and the gang's feared
enforcer, Ramon, had been shot dead four weeks earlier.

Another key development was the arrest in Tijuana last year of Ivonne "The
Panther" Soto Vega, a currency exchange owner who was accused of being the
cartel's chief money launderer. Soon after, information about money
couriers and other "anecdotal" leads were passed along to the army drug
unit's fugitive-trackers, officials said.

In March, after months of investigation, the soldiers traced one of the
couriers to Puebla, a town known more for the invention of mole poblano
sauce than being the home of a drug kingpin.

"The credit really belongs to the military," the U.S. official said. "They
hung in for a long, long time on leads where they could have just said
`This is not working out.'"

In Puebla, startled locals could only speculate on why Arellano had been
living for seven months in the town's La Escondida neighborhood, which
means "hidden" in Spanish. He was known as Manuel Trevino, a businessman
with a north Mexican accent who drove a Volkswagen.

A second man living in the $88,000 house, who once introduced himself as
Trevino's son when complaining about a plumbing problem, turned out to be
Manuel "La Mojarra" Martinez, Arellano's well-armed bodyguard. He also was
arrested.

Blancornelas, the Tijuana journalist, said he was told that Puebla was just
the latest place where Arellano was stashing his family, after the army had
zeroed in on previous hide-outs around the country. The agents actually
raided three houses in Puebla, and neighbors said several children were
living in a second, more expensive home.

An unanswered question is why the chief of the most powerful drug cartel in
Mexico was so relatively unguarded. Blancornelas and others are asking a
similar question about why Arellano's brother, Ramon, had few of his
notorious pistoleros with him when he was gunned down by police in Mazatlan
in February.