MEXICO'S DRUG TRAFFICKERS TAKE AIM AT FEDERAL JUDGES

Once-Cozy Relationship With Criminals Ends

MAZATLAN, Mexico - The three couples were on their way to a baseball game
on a Sunday afternoon earlier this month. Jose Manuel de Alba and two other
federal judges were looking forward to a break from their heavy workload.
They stood chatting in front of de Alba's bungalow, waiting for his wife,
when a red Chevrolet pulled up. Out stepped a man who leveled an AK47
assault rifle and sprayed them with at least 40 bullets.

In seconds, two judges and the wife of one lay dead.

De Alba escaped by running into his garden. A few days later, at his desk
in a federal office building, armed bodyguards stood outside his door and
he pondered how violent drug traffickers who have bloodied so much of
Mexico have changed him forever.

"Until now, I hadn't thought about the danger, but now I am afraid," said
de Alba, 46. He vowed he will no longer ride his mountain bike to work
along the palm-lined streets of this breezy Pacific beach town in Sinaloa
state.

"I have to be like a bullfighter controlling my fear," he said, his hands
trembling. "I have to have the courage to overcome this and to try to serve
society. Because if we let violence, not laws, govern us, then my security
doesn't mean anything."

The killing of two federal judges is a dramatic escalation in Mexico's war
with organized crime, which had left the judicial branch largely untouched
while claiming police officers, informants and some prominent political
figures.

No killer has been publicly identified in the judges' slayings, nor is one
likely to be. The recent murder of a prominent human-rights lawyer in
Mexico City also is unsolved, as is the attempted slaying last week of a
lawyer in Monterrey who had represented key witnesses against a major drug
cartel.

The shootings, and the impunity surrounding them, have added to Mexicans'
anxiety about security. They also challenge the effectiveness of President
Vicente Fox's promised "war without mercy" against organized crime.
Authorities say organized-crime gangs almost certainly were behind the
judges' killings.

"The message to judges is perfectly clear," said Jose Lavanderos, a Mexico
City lawyer who serves on a municipal board that oversees the conduct of
judges. "It says: 'Here we are. We have more power than you. We can destroy
you whenever we want to.' "

Genaro Gongora Pimental, president of the Supreme Court, has called for
police guards for all judges in the federal judiciary, which handles drug
and major organized-crime cases. He called the killings a "crime against
the state" and urged Fox to investigate aggressively.

"It seems to me that we wouldn't be sending any message of strength if we
say, 'This can be done and nothing will happen,' " Gongora told Proceso
magazine. "We would be opening the door to the forces of crime." Sinaloa
Gov. Juan Millan this week ordered police protection for all 24 federal
judges in this state. "These types of political killings could once only
happen in places like Colombia, but now they are happening in Mexico,"
Millan said.

Since Fox came to power one year ago, many high-profile drug arrests have
been made. U.S. law-enforcement officials said they are encouraged by
noticeably better coordination and cooperation with the Mexicans. They say
Mexican officials, who in the past have turned out to be secretly on the
drug traffickers' payroll, now appear to be making a genuinely tougher
effort against the cartels.

Some believe that the drug-related violence seen now is a response to a
government crackdown. They say one reason judges had not been targeted by
drug traffickers very often in the past is that they frequently were bought
off. In a state where drug lords coldly offer public officials "silver or
lead" - take a bribe or take a bullet - judges have tended to take the money.

Raul Mejia, a law professor at the Autonomous Technical Institute of
Mexico, said he believes the killings resulted from the government's
struggle against the impunity often enjoyed by Mexican criminals. He said
violence is a "clear sign of decomposition" of the previous relationship
between organized crime and corrupt officials.

Jorge Fernandez, of the Institute for Judicial Studies in Mexico City,
which helps train judges, said it was too soon to know why the judges were
killed. He said he could not remember the last time a judge was murdered,
and it is not clear why drug traffickers changed their long-standing habit
of not killing judges.

Fernandez said that unlike Colombia, where drug gangs kill judges as a
method of doing business, Mexico's powerful criminals usually have found it
easier to pay to avoid prosecution.

"Organized crime's greatest penetration has been among police and
politicians," Fernandez said. "In Mexico, there are ways to evade justice
that don't necessarily need a judge's decision."