MEXICO ARRESTS A KEY FIGURE IN DRUG CARTEL

MEXICO CITY, March 28 -- Adding to an extraordinary string of antidrug
successes, Mexican authorities announced the arrest of a top lieutenant
today in the cocaine trafficking organization known as the Gulf cartel.

The suspect, Adan Medrano Rodriguez, 32, was wanted in the United States
and Mexico on charges of drug conspiracy. He was last seen by the
authorities in November 1999, when he confronted and nearly killed two
agents, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement
Administration, during an armed standoff in the Mexican border town of
Matamoros, south of Brownsville, Tex.

The United States had offered a $2 million reward for his arrest. He was
captured Wednesday night in Matamoros, and informants working in secret
with Mexican authorities would receive some of the reward, said a federal
prosecutor, Estuardo Bermudez Molina.

In the last year, the government of President Vicente Fox, working
increasingly closely with American officials, has arrested major drug
suspects from each of four large cocaine cartels, dealing traffickers a
string of defeats that American officials say are unlike any they have seen
in Mexico's drug war.

The last major figure to fall was Benjamin Arellano Felix, chief of the
Tijuana cartel, arrested March 9. He confirmed that his brother, Ramon
Arellano Felix, had been killed a month earlier in a shootout.

Others now in prison include Miguel Caro Quintero, identified as the head
of the Sonora cartel, one of Mexico's oldest drug syndicates, who was
arrested last December. Mario Villanueva, the former governor of the state
of Quintana Roo on Mexico's Caribbean coast was arrested in May 2001. He is
charged in New York with helping to smuggle 200 tons of cocaine into the
United States on behalf of the Juarez cartel.

Officials said that Mr. Medrano was second-in-command to Osiel Cardenas
Guillen, the leader of the Gulf cartel, which operates out of Mexico's
northeast. Mr. Cardenas Guillen, still at large, is accused of shipping
tons of Colombian cocaine from Mexico's Gulf coast into the United States
since 1997.