Pubdate: Tue, 28 May 2002
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2002 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Section: International
Author: Tim Weiner

DRUG SUSPECTS ARE ARRESTED, ATTESTING TO A CHANGING MEXICO

MEXICO CITY, May 27 - Four years ago, American intelligence officers gave 
their Mexican counterparts the address and home telephone for Jesus Albino 
Quintero Meraz, a man they believed was shipping tons of Colombian cocaine 
from the state of Quintana Roo, on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, to the 
United States.

But nothing happened. In those days, Quintana Roo was a veritable 
narco-state. Authorities from the governor down through the ranks of the 
police were bought and paid for by Mr. Quintero and his associates in the 
Juarez-based cartel, American and Mexican officials say, giving them 
control over much of the multibillion-dollar drug trade on the Gulf of Mexico.

Now, it seems, things have changed in Mexico. Mr. Quintero, characterized 
as an unremarkable thug who nonetheless rose to the top of one of the 
nation's biggest drug gangs, was arrested on Sunday along with six 
associates, including a federal police officer, in the gulf city of 
Veracruz, the defense secretary and the attorney general announced today.

"He wasn't famous. He wasn't glamorous," said the defense secretary, Gen. 
Clemente Vega Garcia. "But he was a very important figure in the cocaine 
trade."

General Vega said that Mr. Quintero shipped, on average, 100 pounds of 
cocaine daily to the United States, often working in coordination with 
Osiel Cardenas, the head of another major Mexican drug organization, the 
Gulf Cartel.

The arrest of Mr. Quintero, 42, which was carried out by military commandos 
who are part of a federal drug enforcement unit, is the latest in a series 
that has transformed the drug wars in Mexico. The demand for drugs in the 
United States remains high and the overall supply essentially unchanged. 
But Mexican authorities, working closely with American law enforcement and 
intelligence officers, have jailed leaders and lieutenants from all four of 
Mexico's major drug cartels in the last year, disrupting the gangs' chains 
of command.

The chiefs of the Tijuana and Sonora cartels are under arrest, as is the 
second-in-command of the Gulf Cartel. Mr. Quintero is believed to have 
become the chief operating officer of the Juarez cartel after the arrest 
last year of Alcides Ramon Magana, a former federal police officer.

Taken together, the arrests are a remarkable reversal from the 1990's, when 
the gangs clearly had the upper hand over the authorities.

The Juarez cartel, whose leadership Mr. Quintero inherited, was once run by 
Amado Carrillo Fuentes, perhaps the nation's most powerful cocaine kingpin 
in the early and mid-1990's. Mr. Carrillo Fuentes, known as "the Lord of 
the Skies" for flying tons of cocaine to Mexico from Colombia in converted 
commercial jetliners, died in 1997 during botched surgery aimed at altering 
his appearance.

The gang guarded its shipments by bribing Mexico's drug czar, Gen. Jesus 
Gutierrez Rebollo, several sitting governors, and scores of senior state 
and federal police commanders. When Mr. Carrillo Fuentes died, his 
lieutenants kept his operations going, focusing on controlling Colombian 
drug shipments that reached the Yucatan peninsula by air, land and sea en 
route to the United States.

That control was maintained with money and guns. Court records and the 
accounts of Mexican and American investigators describe an organization 
capable of shipping hundreds of tons of cocaine, buying protection from 
politicians and police, and physically intimidating those who opposed them. 
The editor of a weekly newspaper in the northern state of Sonora, Pulso, 
was threatened with death after reporting links between Mr. Quintero and 
Mario Villanueva, governor of Quintana Roo from 1993 to 1999.

In the late 1990's, officials have charged, the Juarez cartel, run by Mr. 
Quintero and Mr. Magana, and protected by Governor Villanueva, was 
singlehan dedly importing roughly 15 percent of all the cocaine consumed in 
the United States. Tons of the drug flowed through airstrips, beaches and 
businesses in and around the resort city of Cancun, they say.

Mr. Villanueva and Mr. Magana were arrested separately last July. The 
ex-governor is the highest-ranking Latin American politician facing cocaine 
charges in a United States court since the arrest of Gen. Manuel Noriega, 
the dictator of Panama, in 1989.

Federal indictments against them in Manhattan say they smuggled 200 tons of 
cocaine to the United States, worth more than $2 billion wholesale. The 
authorities charge that Mr. Villanueva took a $500,000 bribe for every 500 
kilograms of cocaine shipped through his state.

Neither man has been extradited to the United States. A recent ruling by 
Mexico's Supreme Court bars extraditions of suspects facing life sentences. 
The United States has not yet asked for Mr. Quintero's extradition.
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens