Date: Tue, 30 Nov 1999 09:11:53 -0800 Pubdate: Tue, 30 Nov 1999 Source: Oakland Tribune (CA) Copyright: 1999 MediaNews Group, Inc. and ANG Newspapers Contact: 66 Jack London Sq., Oakland, CA 94607 Feedback: http://www.newschoice.com/asp-bin/feedback.asp?PUID486 Website: http://www.newschoice.com/newspapers/alameda/tribune/ Author: Esther Schrader and James F. Smith, Times Staff Writers MASS GRAVES IN MEXICO MAY HOLD 300 VICTIMS Dozen Americans may be buried MEXICO CITY -- Police and soldiers are preparing to exhume 100 to 300 bodies from two mass graves near the Mexican border city of Juarez thought to contain the remains of victims of a notorious drug cartel, law enforcement officials said Monday. At least a dozen U.S. citizens are thought to be among the victims, who include former informants for the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI, said U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity. If the mass graves do yield so many victims, it would be by far the most dramatic evidence yet of the heights to which the drug-trafficking violence that has ravaged cities and towns across Mexico in recent years has soared. The grave sites, on two remote ranches south of Juarez across the U.S. border from El Paso, were brought to the attention of U.S. law enforcement officials just three days ago. Since then, an FBI task force of forensic experts who helped exhume mass graves in Bosnia-Herzegovina has been working with Mexican army officials to plan the recovery of the bodies. The corpses are thought to be buried in ravines and trenches, some as deep as 12 feet, U.S. law enforcement officials said. More than 200 FBI forensic experts and several hundred Mexican soldiers armed with heavy digging equipment are to begin exhuming the bodies today, the officials said. Dozens of DEA agents are aiding the investigation. One senior U.S. law enforcement official in Washington said investigators think the graves contain between 100 and 300 bodies. "We have agents working with Mexican authorities on at least two sites near Juarez, exhuming sites in search of human remains," FBI spokesman Jim Davis said. "It is possible that we could be talking U.S. citizens here." The Mexican attorney general's office said the probe sought to solve "a series of killings and disappearances related with drug trafficking, perpetrated against Mexicans and U.S. citizens, apparently by members of the so-called Juarez cartel." The office said Mexico had requested the FBI to assist with the "humanitarian action" to recover the remains of the victims, who are believed to have been killed during the past four years. Most of the victims are believed to have come from Juarez, base of the cartel that funnels billions of dollars' worth of cocaine, marijuana and heroin into the United States each year. Many of the drugs are grown and processed in Colombia. The Juarez cartel has generated fierce violence since the death of its leader, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known as the Lord of the Skies, in July 1997 while he was undergoing plastic surgery to change his appearance. An apparent struggle for control of the cartel has produced seemingly endless violence. Mexican and U.S. officials have said the cartel split into three branches after Carrillo's death: one based in Cancun in the southeast, another in the north led by Carrillo's brother, Vicente, and a third branch on the west coast under the command of Juan Jose Esparragosa, known as "El Azul" (The Blue One). One of the northern branch leaders, Rafael Munoz Talavera, was assassinated in September 1998. Mexican authorities announced in September that they had arrested another of the cartel's major figures in western Mexico, Joan Jose Quintero Payan, when he arrived at a house in Guadalajara for a tryst with his lover. Mexico's top drug prosecutor, Mariano Herran Salvatti, said at the time that the western cell of the cartel was left "headless" thanks to the arrest. The Juarez drug gang and the Tijuana cartel are the most infamous of Mexico's seven known organized drug-smuggling cartels. Mexican officials reported last December that they had issued more than 100 arrest warrants for leaders of the Juarez cartel. The most prominent arrest was that of army Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo in February 1997. Gutierrez Rebollo was then head of the anti-drug police. But the drug turf war has also engulfed ordinary citizens, especially in Juarez. In February 1998, then-Mayor Enrique Flores pleaded for federal help, complaining in an open letter to President Ernesto Zedillo that "Juarez has become a battleground for drug- trafficking groups that are fighting to control this area." - --- MAP posted-by: Greg