Pubdate: Fri, 10 Mar 2000
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2000 The Washington Post Company
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Author: Molly Moore Washington Post Foreign Service

OFFICIALS' DEATHS RAISE CONCERNS IN MEXICO

MEXICO CITY, March 9 - It started with a routine check of unclaimed
safe-deposit boxes in a soon-to-be-closed Mexico City branch of Citibank.
But what bank officials found was anything but routine: In a box rented to
a senior official of the federal attorney general's office, a public
servant with a modest salary, sat $700,000 in cash.

On Tuesday morning, just before a Citibank representative was to meet with
Mexico's attorney general to discuss what the banker described as a
"delicate and confidential matter," Juan Manuel Izabal was found dead,
slumped inside his black Chevrolet Suburban a block from his Mexico City
home. He was shot in the mouth, and his right hand held a 9mm pistol.

That was the scenario described by Mexican Attorney General Jorge Madrazo
Cuellar as he read what he said was his employee's suicide note Wednesday
night.

The note said the money "is difficult to explain" and added, "It is a
product of businesses I have made, but in my position as a public servant,
it would not be understood. It is not from drug traffickers, not at all,
but I did not declare it and circumstances have put me against the wall."

Photographs of Izabal's lifeless body inside his vehicle were splashed
across the front pages of Mexico City's daily newspapers this morning,
along with announcements that Mexican authorities have arrested six alleged
members of a drug trafficking mafia in connection with the unrelated
assassination last month of Tijuana's police chief.

The two incidents - both involving senior law enforcement authorities,
although in different circumstances and different cities 96 have rekindled
concerns over the growing power and corrupting influences of Mexico's
criminal organizations.

Alfredo de la Torre, killed Feb. 27, was the second Tijuana police chief to
be gunned down in less than six years. Assailants surrounded his black
Chevrolet Suburban and pumped dozens of bullets through the windows as he
drove along a busy highway in the bustling border city.

In announcing the arrests Wednesday night, Baja California Attorney General
Juan Manuel Salazar offered no specific motive for the shooting of
Tijuana's top police official. But he speculated that the drug traffickers
are trying to "create an atmosphere of confusion" in an effort to expand
into the territory of a rival drug mafia in the state, which shares a
border with the suburbs of San Diego.

Salazar also said the six men in custody confessed to participating in the
murders of 14 other people, including a former judge, his wife and son on
Feb. 9.

State law enforcement officials said in a news conference that the six
arrested men belonged to a drug cartel based in the northwestern Mexican
state of Sinaloa.

The authorities said members of that organization reportedly were
attempting to encroach on the Arellano Felix family, Mexico's
second-largest drug smuggling organization, which uses Tijuana as
headquarters. But that theory was questioned by other law enforcement
officials, who noted that smaller organizations would be unlikely to
attempt to cross a mafia as entrenched and violence-prone as the Arellano
Felix group.
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