VIOLENCE RISES IN MEXICO'S DRUG TRADE

Now Judges, Lawyers And Others Are The Targets Of A Deadly Trafficking
Movement That Some Say Is Taking Citizens Hostage

MEXICO CITY -- The violence of Mexico's drug trade is beginning to seep
into all levels of society. No longer confined to high-rolling drug lords
in rough border towns and addicts on the streets, it is striking at
lawyers, judges, police, soldiers and doctors.

The latest attack came Nov. 11, when two federal judges and one of their
wives died in a hail of gunfire in the Pacific coast resort of Mazatlan, in
the worst attack on the courts in recent memory.

Judges Benito Andrade and Jesus Ayala were on their way to a baseball game
with their wives when they were ambushed.

Authorities quickly put police guards around judges in drug- and
violence-plagued Sinaloa state, and there were calls for the kind of
anonymous "hooded judges" that Colombia used to try dangerous suspects at
the height of its drug wars.

The two judges had presided over drug cases in another northern state,
Tamaulipas, and the nature of the slayings -- a lone gunman sprayed their
van with 40 rounds from an AK-47 assault rifle -- led police to believe
that jailed drug traffickers may have ordered the attack.

Just three days later, in the northern city of Monterrey, lawyer Silvia
Raquenel Villanueva, who has represented drug informers, survived her
fourth assassination attempt.

In the last 13 years, she has had a gasoline bomb thrown in her office;
suffered three bullet wounds in a 1999 attack; had 13 bullets fired at her
in her office last year; and, most recently, ducked a barrage of shots on a
Monterrey street.

The chief justice of Mexico's Supreme Court, Genaro Gongora, warns that
criminals are trying "to take Mexican society hostage."

To some, the social damage was already clear before the November killings
of the judges. The industrial-scale drug trade has transformed the once
largely nonviolent trafficking of marijuana into one of Mexico's deadliest
activities, while making more common crimes such as kidnapping ever more
violent.

The trade's most insidious effect is its ability to warp society, said
Jorge Chabat, a drug expert at the Center for Economic Development Research
in Mexico City.

"The drug trade is like AIDS -- it attacks society's antibodies, the immune
system," Chabat said. "The corruption focuses on law enforcement agencies,
and makes them extremely inefficient at combating any kind of crime."

Even something as seemingly unrelated as environmental law has become
susceptible to drug-related violence.

Navy patrols are wary of stopping and searching dozens of boats that
practice illegal dragnet fishing off the coast of Baja California because
that area has become a favored route for heavily armed drug traffickers.

Other crimes also have become more violent and destructive under the
influence of the drug trade. In many cases, common criminals seem to have
picked up the kind of secrecy and eliminate-all-witnesses attitude long
exhibited by drug traffickers.

Some kidnappers in southern Mexico, for example, are killing their victims
even after ransom is paid, apparently in order to cover their tracks.

Most attention directed toward the drug trade has focused on wildly
violent, cocaine-or heroin-fueled crime such as the "narco-satanic"
dismemberment killings carried out by a pseudo-cult of addicts along the
U.S. border in the late 1980s.

But the biggest change has come in activity present for centuries in
Mexico: the small-scale growth and consumption of marijuana, a tradition
immortalized in folk songs such as "La Cucaracha."

Traditionally, marijuana caused little violence and seldom spread beyond
the mainly lower-class users.

Luis Hernandez, 68, remembers the smell of marijuana smoke drifting over
the rooftops of his rough-and-tumble Tepito neighborhood in the 1940s.

"Mothers would just lie, and tell their kids that somebody was burning the
'hooves of the Devil,'" he said.

"If any little kid happened to find a guy smoking marijuana, the guy would
try to hide it, or scare the kid off. Now they just offer the kid some, try
to get him hooked," he said disapprovingly.

The increasing industrialization of the drug trade has made marijuana a big
business, with tanker trucks carrying multi-ton shipments north to the border.

And as profits soared, the marijuana trade became deadly. The biggest and
bloodiest drug massacres in the past three years have involved marijuana,
not harder drugs such as cocaine or heroin.

Rather than killing a few rivals at a time, as the big cocaine cartels do,
marijuana traffickers wipe out entire extended families.

Last February, a gang of gunmen stopped a truck carrying farmers to a town
festival in Sinaloa, and methodically shot to death every passenger -- 10
men and two teen-agers. The motive, according to police: One group of
farmers allegedly had robbed marijuana from another.

In September 1998, near Ensenada, gunmen rousted from bed an alleged
marijuana trafficker and 18 members of his family, including eight
children. They were lined up against a wall and shot with semiautomatic
rifles. The motive: The trafficker had infringed on rivals' business.

"Unlike the cocaine trade, where a few professionals pass imported drugs
through Mexico, marijuana involves a lot of farmers, a lot of peasant
growers," said Chabat, the drug expert. "That means there is a lot more
friction between the growers themselves, and the police."