Pubdate: Thu, 13 Apr 2000
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Copyright: 2000 San Jose Mercury News
Contact:  750 Ridder Park Drive, San Jose, CA 95190
Fax: (408) 271-3792
Website: http://www.sjmercury.com/
Author: RICARDO SANDOVAL

DRUG TRAFFICKERS SUSPECTED IN AGENTS' DEATHS

Anti-drug Czar Promises Probe Of Tijuana Cartel

MEXICO CITY -- Mexican officials suspect that drug traffickers are behind 
the mysterious deaths in Tijuana of three agents from the federal Attorney 
General's Office in what authorities privately say is a war between Mexican 
prosecutors and the Tijuana-based Arellano-Felix drug cartel.

The mangled bodies of investigators Jose Patillo Moreno and Oscar Pompa 
Plaza and Federal Police Capt. Rafael Torres Bernal were found in their car 
early Wednesday at the base of a cliff in a rugged mountain pass east of 
Tijuana, which is across the border from San Diego.

The investigators' deaths followed the discovery of yet another body -- 
still unidentified -- in the same area over the weekend. Other recent 
incidents include a failed assassination attempt last month by gunmen on 
Cuauhtemoc Herrera, a former prosecutor who is under investigation for 
alleged ties to drug dealers.

That shooting followed the Feb. 27 ambush killing of Tijuana Police Chief 
Alfredo de la Torre and the March 15 slaying in Mexico City of a lawyer for 
Jesus Labra Avila. Labra is the reputed financial wizard for the 
Arellano-Felix cartel.

Officials refused to say specifically that the agents were killed by drug 
dealers or how they died, but the country's anti-drug chief and two of his 
lieutenants appeared stricken as they met with reporters Wednesday and 
showed off grisly pictures of the agents' mangled bodies. The bodies showed 
signs of torture and severe head wounds.

The agents had been missing since Monday, when they failed to show up for a 
meeting in Tijuana about their investigation into the slaying of Labra's 
lawyer.

Labra has been jailed in Mexico City since soldiers arrested him March 11 
at a Tijuana soccer field where Labra was watching his son play.

In the course of the investigation, Moreno had issued some 60 arrest and 
search warrants in cities in northern Mexico, said Mariano Herran Salvatti, 
chief of Mexico's anti-drug task force, which is part of the attorney 
general's office.

Herran Salvatti, known as Mexico's anti-drug czar, said he knew Moreno and 
considered him one of the toughest homicide investigators on his team. He 
said Moreno was directing the work of 12 special investigators in Tijuana 
assigned to the Arellano-Felix cartel.

``We are in mourning,'' Herran Salvatti said, adding that the agents' 
``sacrifice will not be in vain.''

At least 100 violent deaths in Tijuana this year are attributed to drug 
traffickers and to a growing market of drug users who congregate around 
wholesale drug-sale sites known in Spanish as ``picaderos'' -- places where 
people go to inject drugs. Police also report a surge in crime related to 
the city's growing methamphetamine business, whose product known as 
``crank'' is exported to California.

``There is no stopping our investigations into border region drug 
organizations,'' Herran Salvatti said. ``If we determine that these deaths 
were due to their work on these investigations, we will redouble our work 
and get to the bottom of who killed our agents.''

Such deaths are ``now so common that people hardly blink anymore when, day 
after day, one or two bodies are found with signs of executions,'' said 
Heriberto Garc(acu)a, deputy director of the law school at the University 
of Baja California, who has studied the drug trafficking business. ``These 
murders, if they are determined to be murders, are part of an internal 
fight between clean government agents and the agents of the drug cartels.''

For years, the area east of Tijuana, along a windy mountainous road called 
La Rumorosa, has been known as a dumping ground for the victims of drug 
dealers.

Mexican prosecutors said the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the 
FBI were helping in the investigation into their agents' deaths.
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