Source: Houston Chronicle Contact: Pubdate: Fri, 07 Nov 1997 Page: 24A Website: http://www.chron.com/ Three slain doctors had been charged in death of Carrillo Surgeons indicted on Oct. 30, found dead Sunday By Dudley Althaus Houston Chronicle Mexico City Bureau MEXICO CITY Plastic surgeons found brutally slain this week had been charged recently by federal officials with killing Mexican cocaine smuggler Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Mexico's top drug enforcement official said Thursday. The official, Mariano Herran Salvatti, said three doctors were charged Oct. 30 with murder in the July 4 death of Carrillo in Mexico City following plastic surgery to dramatically alter his appearance. The bodies of three men, two positively identified as attending physicians at Carrillo's surgery and the other presumed to be one of them, were found stuffed into oil drums on the side of a southern Mexico highway on Sunday. Coroners estimated they had been dead for three to five days. Carrillo survived the July surgery, witnesses say, but succumbed the following morning to a fatal mix of sedatives and anesthetics. Herran said the three doctors administered the drug cocktail "with the intention of taking the life" of Carrillo. One of the men found dead Sunday has been identified as Jaime Godoy, 37, a Guadalajara physician who, his family says, disappeared Oct. 17 after being detained by men identifying themselves as federal police agents. Godoy's brother and father identified his body Wednesday. Herran identified the second body as that of Ricardo Reyes, a Colombian plastic surgeon who reportedly coordinated Carrillo's surgery. Godoy's lawyer, Ruben Tamayo, told a news conference Thursday that the third body is that of Carlos Avila Melgem, a physician who also attended Carrillo's surgery. Both Reyes and Avila were medicalschool friends of Godoy's, Tamayo said. All three had been tortured, their fingernails yanked out and their torsos showing burn marks. Two were strangled, and the third was shot through the head. Herran "emphatically" denied that any of the men had been in federal police custody prior to their deaths. The nature of the physicians' killings and the fact they were tortured to death almost on the same day they were charged with Carrillo's murder will likely add fuel to the stubborn popular belief that the billionaire trafficker remains among the living. Many Mexicans believe Carrillo faked his own death. Persistent news reports and street rumors hold that Carrillo, 42, either entered the U.S. witness protection program or in some other way was taken under the wing of Mexican or U.S. law enforcement in exchange for information. Herran insisted again Thursday that Carrillo whose body was subjected to DNA tests, fingerprint examinations and three autopsies died in the Mexico City clinic July 4. He produced a brief letter at the news conference from Thomas Constantine, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, supporting those claims. "There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that Mr. Carillo Fuentes is alive and in DEA custody," the letter states. "The rumor has as much credibility as the millions of sightings of the late Elvis Presley." At the time he underwent plastic surgery, Carrillo was widely considered the most powerful trafficker in the multibilliondollar cocaine industry, responsible for moving tons of narcotics across the U.S.Mexico border. Recognized as a visionary in the world of drug trafficking, Carrillo was considered less violent than many other Mexican gangsters even though he became known for his sometimes distinctive style of eliminating opponents. Traffickers with less flair might simply have their enemies shot and left in the street. But Carrillo, law officials say, sometimes tied yellow ribbons on his victims, pinned warnings to their corpses or forced them to dig their own graves. The belief that the drug boss simply slipped away has been reinforced by evidence that Carrillo visited Chile, Cuba, Europe and Russia, apparently looking for a new home far from Mexico, in the months before he died. According to some Mexican press reports, he had offered to get out of the cocainesmuggling business and relinquish much of his wealth, if Mexican authorities would let him retire peacefully. The government reportedly rejected that offer. A Chilean press report last week alleged that Carrillo was living in Central America. But a U.S. law enforcement official who identified the body in July said he "bet my badge" that the body belonged to Carrillo. "In our opinion the Mexican authorities were rigorous and comprehensive in their identification process," Constantine's statement said. "We agree completely with the confirmation of the death of Amado Carrillo Fuentes." Whatever its circumstances, Carrillo's demise has been hard on the medical profession. Four physicians were strangled in late August in Ciudad Juarez, the city across the Rio Grande from El Paso that served as Carrillo's base, reportedly after treating a gangster wounded in the bloody conflicts to succeed him. Press reports later linked the hospitals in which the doctors worked to money laundering and other narcotics related crimes. The killings caused outrage in a city grown numb by drug violence, sparking street protests and marches. The brutality of the killings of the doctors found Sunday raised eyebrows even in Guerrero, a poor and raucous state known for its beach resorts, police massacres and armed uprisings. "This is not a style of killing we have ever seen before in Guerrero," said Gustavo Menije of the Guerrero state attorney general's office. "The technique used is different." Guerrero officials said they believed the men were killed outside the state and brought to Guerrero to be dumped.