MEXICAN DRUG LORDS LOOK TO SURGEONS FOR HELP

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- After their colleagues started turning up dead,
Mexico's plastic surgeons began checking their patients more carefully,
refusing those who wanted full facial transformations or the camera-shy
ones who didn't want their pictures taken.

Drug traffickers have turned increasingly to plastic surgery in recent
years to evade the law, and have proved to be all too willing to kill the
doctors who operate on them.

Sometimes doctors are killed to hide evidence, but at least one was
murdered out of vanity: A trafficker didn't like the way a liposuction
turned out.

At least eight doctors have turned up dead since 1994 after working on drug
suspects. The number of drug lords with surgically altered features led
Mexican prosecutors to issue a call this year for plastic surgeons to
cooperate with police and to report suspicious cases.

Warning Signs

Some doctors were apparently not aware their patients were drug
traffickers; others may have done it for the money. Plastic surgeons say
they watch prospective patients for warning signs: One who doesn't want a
traditional "before-and-after" photograph taken, or requests a total change
in appearance.

Most plastic surgeons try to avoid the dilemma.

"You can get out of the problem, by quoting a very high price, or telling
them their skin isn't right, or that they need more tests," said plastic
surgeon Hector Arambula.

"Sometimes it backfires, because if you quote a high price, these people
can pay it, whereas a normal patient wouldn't.

"But the amounts of money offered can be very tempting, and there is also
the problem that drug traffickers can bring pressure to bear," Arambula
said. "Between the police and the drug traffickers, plastic surgeons are
between a rock and a hard place."

Too Good To Refuse?

Sometimes, doctors get an offer too good to refuse.

The three plastic surgeons who operated on former drug lord Amado Carrillo
Fuentes in 1997 apparently not only knew who their patient was, but were
paid off to kill him with an injection of tranquilizers.

But then they were forced out of the operating room at gunpoint. A month
later, on a highway hundreds of miles away, their gagged, handcuffed and
tortured bodies were found packed into oil drums with dirt and concrete.

That same year, four other doctors were slain after they operated on a drug
gunman wounded in a shootout in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, across
from El Paso, Texas.

Those doctors showed signs of being strangled or suffocated.

At least two had bruises on their hands and knuckles, suggesting they tried
to fight off their attackers.

The choice -- to operate or not -- has cost the life of doctors involved in
operations as routine as liposuction, a common procedure that at least one
overweight trafficker used to change his appearance.

Known as "The Frog" because of his jowls and double chins, drug suspect
Humberto Rodriguez Banuelos was a bad bet as a patient.

Prosecutors say he ordered the 1994 killing of his doctor.

"He ordered the doctor killed, because he said he didn't like the way the
liposuction had turned out," said Horacio Montenegro, a former associate
who is facing drug charges.