Pubdate: Sun, 09 Jul 2000
Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA)
Copyright: 2000 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
Contact:  PO Box 120191, San Diego, CA, 92112-0191
Fax: (619) 293-1440
Website: http://www.uniontrib.com/
Forum: http://www.uniontrib.com/cgi-bin/WebX
Author: Robert Caldwell, Insight Editor
Note: Part 2 of a 6 part special report on the Arellano Felix Cartel

THE ARELLANO FELIX ORGANIZATION RULES TIJUANA BY RUTHLESS TERROR

Josee "Pepe" Patino Moreno, a special prosecuctor for the Mexican attorney 
general's elite anti-narcotics unit, and two fellow drug agents were 
running an hour late last April 10th for a scheduled meeting at a 
prosecutors' office in Tijuana. Patino had called ahead twice on his 
cellphone. "I'll be there in a minute," he said in the second call.

He never made it.

Patino's mangled body, together with those of special prosecutor Oscar 
Pompa Plaza and Mexican army captain Rafael Torres Bernal, was found a day 
and a half later. The three bodies lay near the wreck of Patino' s newly 
purchased Chevrolet Lumina 200 yards down the steep slope of a ravine along 
the mountain highway between Tecate and Mexicali.

Shortly after the bodies were said to have been discovered, a Mexican 
Highway Patrol deputy commander in Mexicali promptly described the deaths 
as "a lamentable traffic incident."

But the clumsy attempt to make the three deaths appear accidental proved 
unconvincing.

Autopsies showed conclusively that the three Mexican agents did not die in 
any automobile crash or traffic mishap. In fact, they had been abducted, 
savagely tortured and murdered.

In the months since, these three murders have remained officially unsolved. 
Yet, U.S. law enforcement officials note that certain presumptions are 
obvious. Whoever betrayed Pepe Patino and his two deputies to the drug 
traffickers they were investigating had to know what secret work the agents 
were doing, what schedules they kept and where they were going that fateful 
Monday morning.

Clearly, say these sources, that suggests a betrayal from within the ranks 
of Mexican law enforcement. Late last month, Mexican authorities arrested 
four federal drug agents affiliated with the national anti-narcotics unit 
known by its Spanish acronym as FEADS. Mexican officials aren't saying 
publicly whether the four are believed linked to the abduction or 
torture-murder of Patino' s team. But U.S. law enforcement sources rate 
such a connection as likely.

What isn't in any doubt is the ghastly ordeal that Patino, Pompa and Torres 
suffered at the hands of their captors before they died. Their battered 
corpses told a grisly tale.

A U.S. prosecutor was told by his Mexican counterpart that Patin's wife 
could not identify her husband's remains, even by his feet. A veteran 
investigator who saw photographs of the bodies said of one: "They told me 
it was a body. I've never seen anything like that." A third investigator 
said Patino's corpse was "like a bag of ice cubes, every bone broken."

The Mexican autopsy reports were more precise.

The cause of death for all three agents was listed as "cranialencephalic 
trauma." Essentially, their faces had been battered to pulp, after which 
their heads were crushed. Their other injuries, including arm and leg 
fractures, broken ribs and skin ripped from their limbs, were additional 
evidence of severe and prolonged torture.

Who could have committed such vile, horrendous crimes?

No secret there. From Mexican Attorney General Jorge Madrazo Cuellar and 
Mexico's anti-drug chief, Mariano Herran Salvatti, to U.S. law enforcement 
officials and investigators, the consensus culprit is the narco-trafficking 
Arellano Felix Organization, a.k.a. the Tijuana cartel.

Patino and his team had been personally assigned by Madrazo and Herran to 
target the Arellano Felix cartel's leadership. Patino reportedly played an 
investigative role in the arrest in Tijuana last March of Jesus "Chuy" 
Labra Aviles, the alleged financial mastermind of the Arellano syndicate 
and an uncle by marriage to the Arellano brothers. Moreover, Patino had 
been working directly with U.S. authorities, including officials and agents 
from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement 
Administration offices in San Diego, on the Arellano cases.

So dangerous was their mission that Patino, Pompa, Torres and several other 
Mexican drug agents developing evidence against the Arellanos had been 
spending nights at a safe house in the San Diego area. That highly unusual 
precaution was deemed necessary for their protection from Mexico' s most 
violent narco-trafficking cartel. Obviously, it could not protect them in 
Mexico.

For U.S. and Mexican officials alike, the ambush, abduction and murder of 
the three Mexican agents underscored another grim, maddeningly frustrating 
reality in the decade-long fight against the Tijuana cartel. With a bribery 
payroll that former DEA Administrator Thomas A. Constantine puts at an 
estimated $1 million a week, the Arellanos had been buying multiple layers 
of protection from Mexican police, prosecutors and politicians for years. 
They almost always knew in advance of any move planned against them, and 
how it could be countered.

Patino' s mission had been betrayed to his drug-trafficking targets. So had 
his schedule and route that Monday morning after he entered Mexico at the 
Otay Mesa border crossing. His abductors, said to number as many as 10 men, 
perhaps resembling Mexican police, knew where to intercept the Patino team.

Pepe Patino, Oscar Pompa and Rafael Torres paid with their lives for the 
chronic corruption that gives Mexico' s narco-traffickers a winning edge 
over the Mexican government.

Powerful, violent

The DEA officially describes the Arellano Felix Organization as "one of the 
most powerful, violent, and aggressive trafficking groups in Mexico . . . 
responsible for the transportation, importation, and distribution of 
multi-ton quantities of cocaine and marijuana, as well as large quantities 
of heroin and methamphetamine."

"More than any other trafficking organization from Mexico, this 
organization extends its tentacles directly from high-echelon figures in 
the law enforcement and judicial systems in Mexico to street-level 
individuals in United States cities the AFO operates primarily in the 
Mexican states of Sinaloa (their birth place), Jalisco, Michoacan, Chiapas, 
and Baja California South and North. From Baja, the drugs enter California, 
the primary point of embarkation into the United States distribution network."

Former DEA administrator Constantine describes the Arellano Felix family as 
"a mafia organization, only in many ways much more powerful, much more 
wealthy and I believe more dangerous than even some of those old 
organizations of the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s in the United States."

Constantine sees the Arellanos as quite literally challenging the Mexican 
government for de facto sovereignty over their operational areas, including 
Baja California. What is more, Constantine thinks the drug traffickers are 
winning.

"Specifically, in Tijuana and in Baja, they in essence have become more 
powerful than the instruments of government in Mexico. That is why they are 
able to operate in the fashion that they operate presently and that is why 
they are seldom if ever brought to justice," Constantine says.

Edward W. Logan, special agent in charge of criminal investigations for the 
U.S. Customs Service in San Diego, adds up the ways in which the Arellanos 
have built their present power over a decade:

"Obviously, they are a very well-financed organization. They've penetrated 
the institutions of law enforcement in Mexico, penetrated business, 
penetrated the media in Mexico, and they are very well protected by an 
armed force. As an organization, they are robust, well funded, violent and 
very intimidating," Logan says.

William D. Gore, special agent in charge of the FBI' s San Diego office, 
believes the Arellanos now may be the biggest of Mexico' s half-dozen major 
drug-trafficking cartels.

Gore and others note that the Arellanos have long since seized control of 
the "Plaza," the Tijuana-San Diego border gateway into the United States. 
Controlling the Plaza gives the cartel a dominant position from which to 
move its own narcotics north and extract payment from any other traffickers 
seeking to use the route.

Ruling by terror

But geography would mean nothing if the Arellanos' cartel had not 
established a reputation years ago as practiced and eager killers of anyone 
it perceives as a threat.

"There is no doubt in my mind that they are the most violent of the Mexican 
cartels. They are just ruling by terror down there," Gore says, referring 
to the escalating drug-linked violence in Tijuana and Baja California.

Phillip E. Jordan, retired former director of the DEA's El Paso 
Intelligence Center, calls the Arellanos "without doubt the most brazen, 
violent, ruthless (drug traffickers) in the Western Hemisphere."

A U.S. law enforcement intelligence source, speaking on condition that he 
not be identified, calculates that the Arellano organization is moving tons 
of narcotics into the United States every month and reaping at least 
hundreds of millions of dollars, if not a billion dollars or more in annual 
drug profits.

He describes the cartel's use of violence as sadistic yet calculated, and 
wholly unrestrained.

No one outside the cartel knows exactly how many murders are attributable 
to the Arellanos and their squads of assassins over the past decade. But 
none of the investigators, intelligence analysts, prosecutors and law 
enforcement officials interviewed for these articles put the number of 
cartel murders at anything less than hundreds.

"About 500 would be a good estimate, a safe estimate," says one 
investigator with extensive knowledge of the Arellanos' operations.

That estimate is roughly confirmed by Vincent DelaMontaigne, a recently 
retired FBI special agent who supervised the inter-agency task force 
investigating the Arellano Felix cartel from 1997 to 1999. DelaMontaigne 
says U.S. law enforcement never attempted to document an exact tally 
because the cartel did most of its killing in Mexico. But information 
provided by Mexican authorities added to what U.S. law enforcement has 
learned on its own suggests a total of perhaps 500 to 700 murders by the 
Arellano Felix cartel over the decade of the 1990s, according to DelaMontaigne.

"Sixty or 70 of those have happened this year, from January to April," 
DelaMontaigne adds. "The Arellanos are shaking down rival drug dealers who 
are trying to move dope through their territory. Anyone who does that 
without paying the Arellanos risks being killed."

Other analysts -- citing, for example, the hundreds of Tijuana homicides 
each year that are believed linked to drug trafficking, plus Arellano 
operations in other Mexican states -- put the cartel' s killing toll even 
higher.

"At least a hundred a year, maybe 200 a year, and this has been going on 
throughout the 1990s," says an intelligence source. "They are prolific 
killers. Their ruthlessness knows no bounds.

"And they don't just kill. They torture. They're flat out sadistic," he adds.

As but one example of the extreme brutality of Arellano-style killings, he 
cites the 1997 assassination in Tijuana of Baja California state prosecutor 
Hodin Armando Gutierrez Rico.

Gutierrez, an energetic young prosecutor who had been working on several 
drug-related cases, was ambushed in front of his home and shot 120 times by 
four assassins firing automatic weapons. Gutierrez' killers then repeatedly 
ran their utility vehicle back and forth over his body and finally dragged 
his riddled corpse several blocks down the street before dumping him.

As with so many other killings linked to Mexico' s murderous drug trade, 
Gutierrez' murder remains unsolved.

However savage, Gutierrez' death was less terrible than those of many 
others among the Arellano cartel' s victims. Gutierrez died quickly. Untold 
numbers of others have suffered agonizingly slow and excruciatingly painful 
deaths, all quite deliberately inflicted to obtain information, serve as an 
object lesson, or simply to punish.

Gonzalo P. Curiel, assistant United States attorney in San Diego and chief 
of the narcotics enforcement section, describes it as "killing for effect."

Torture is an Arellano cartel trademark.

"They torture to intimidate, to terrorize, to extract information," 
explains an intelligence source.

Cutting and bleeding victims during interrogation is a frequent practice of 
the cartel's designated enforcers. A U.S. investigator tells of seeing 
photographs of one torture victim who bled so profusely before he was 
killed that his underwear was completely dyed red.

"They're just cruel," says a U.S. investigator. "They abduct, torture, kill 
at will. There is a special place in hell for these people."
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