Pubdate: Sun, 08 Apr 2001 Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA) Copyright: 2001 Union-Tribune Publishing Co. Contact: http://www.uniontrib.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/386 Author: Robert J. Caldwell Note: Caldwell is editor of the Insight section. STILL AT LARGE Within the past year, two presidents of Mexico have vowed to break the Tijuana-based narcotics-trafficking cartel known as the Arellano Felix Organization and arrest its leaders. On this side of the border, U.S. law enforcement, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, lists bringing the Arellanos to justice and combating their massive narcotics smuggling as top priorities. Yet, the Mexican presidents' announced deadlines for breaking the Tijuana cartel's power and apprehending its leaders come and go without effect. U.S. law enforcement, while achieving some successes against the AFO and helping Mexico to accomplish several others over the past year, has also failed to score anything close to a knockout blow. Errol J. Chavez, chief of the DEA's San Diego office and a veteran narcotics officer, says he believes that recent efforts "have the AFO on the run." Chavez lists several indicators suggesting that the Tijuana cartel's drug smuggling, narcotics production, financial and security operations have all been disrupted. But Chavez's optimistic assessment stops short of claiming any decisive victories over the cartel. William D. Gore, special agent in charge of the FBI's San Diego office, says he is "cautiously optimistic" that Mexico's new government under reformist President Vicente Fox will, in fact, prove a tougher foe of narcotics trafficking than past Mexican administrations. "I truly believe that he (Fox) would like very much to eliminate that cartel," Gore says. Citing several recent arrests in Mexico of suspected AFO operatives, plus the pending extradition to the United States of alleged AFO lieutenant "Kitti" Paez, Gore muses that "they're looking over their shoulders now." Nonetheless, there is still an undercurrent of discouragement running through the ranks of others enlisted here in the U.S. government's campaign against the Arellano Felix cartel. Privately, some paint a rather more bleak picture than that sketched by Chavez and Gore. They describe a flagging effort in the long, frustrating campaign to defeat the Tijuana cartel. They complain that neither U.S. law enforcement agencies here nor their Washington superiors have a specific strategy for defeating the AFO. And some grumble about what they see as a lack of aggressive overall leadership among the welter of federal agencies -- DEA, FBI, U.S. Customs and the Justice Department's U.S. Attorney's Office in San Diego, among others -- that share responsibility for countering the Tijuana cartel's myriad criminal activities. "There's no local strategy and no national strategy. There's just too little being done," says one knowledgeable source who spoke on condition of anonymity. What is undisputed by anyone is that the Arellano Felix Organization remains very much in business. It continues shipping annually literally tons of cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine, plus Mexican black-tar heroin, across the Southwest border into the United States. The AFO is believed to supply more than a fifth of all cocaine consumed in the United States. The Tijuana cartel's profits from this illicit trade in addiction, misery and death still reach into the billions of dollars each year. Cartel leaders Benjamin and Ramon Arellano Felix, despite being international fugitives wanted by the U.S. and Mexican governments, defiantly retain their headquarters and principal residences in Tijuana or the northern Baja California area, according to U.S. law enforcement officials. Their continued operations and seeming impunity mock the law enforcement campaigns against them. Ramon Arellano Felix has been on the FBI's 10-Most Wanted List since 1997, when he was first indicted by a federal grand jury in San Diego on drug trafficking and related charges. Benjamin and Ramon were indicted last May by another San Diego federal grand jury on 10 counts of drug trafficking, money laundering and aiding and abetting crimes of violence. The U.S. State Department has authorized $4 million in rewards for information leading to the arrest or conviction of the brothers. So why are the apparently determined efforts of two governments still not sufficient to break a notorious drug ring operating under their noses along their mutual border? On Mexico's side of that border, the reasons remain drearily familiar. The State Department's recent report on Mexico's drug-fighting efforts provided this summary analysis: "Chronic problems of corruption, weak police and criminal justice institutions, budget constraints, and severe poverty in rural areas where drug crops are cultivated hamper Mexico's ability to combat drug trafficking." Of these deficiencies, corruption is by far the most ruinous to effective action against the powerful, wealthy Arellano Felix Organization. Billions of dollars in drug profits allow the AFO to buy protection at every level of Mexico's government. Notwithstanding President Vicente Fox's evident sincerity and determination to attack corruption in Mexican law enforcement, no one expects that he can succeed quickly, and perhaps not at all, in nullifying the corrupting influence the AFO has been buying since the 1980s. For an object lesson, President Fox might review the latest evidence of how insidiously and effectively this corruption shields the cartel. Almost exactly one year ago, a highly promising investigation of the Arellano Felix Organization by the Mexican attorney general's office ended in grisly tragedy. The mangled bodies of Mexican drug prosecutors Jose "Pepe" Patino Moreno, Oscar Pompa Plaza and Rafael Torres Bernal were found last April 11 in a ravine off the Tijuana-Mexicali highway. They were victims of unspeakable torture. Their killers were presumed to be from the Arellano Felix Organization they had been investigating on special assignment from Mexico's then-attorney general, Jorge Madrazo Cuellar, and the head of his anti-narcotics task force, Mariano Herran Salvatti. There was widespread speculation at the time that Patino and his team had to have been betrayed by someone inside the attorney general's organization. How else could the killers have known of the Patino team's unpublicized assignment? And how else could they have learned the details of a work schedule kept confidential by a team so security conscious that Patino, Pompa and Torres spent nights sleeping at a safe house in the San Diego area? Now investigators in Mexico and the United States say they know. Pepe Patino's team was betrayed by officials of the Mexican attorney general's elite anti-narcotics task force, known by its Spanish acronym, FEADS. The chief suspect cited in the U.S. State Department's annual report on Mexico's drug certification is identified as Cesar Jimenez, a senior FEADS commander formerly assigned to Tijuana. "It's clear that Mexican law enforcement viewed him as a suspect in the abduction and murder of Pepe Patino," the FBI's Gore said in an interview last week. Other U.S. law enforcement sources echo Gore's comments. On at least two occasions, a source said, Jimenez's superiors were warned by U.S. officials that their Tijuana comandante was cooperating with the Arellano Felix Organization. Jimenez was finally relieved of duty and recalled to Mexico City following the murders of Patino, Pompa and Torres, according to U.S. officials. Placed under active investigation and questioned about the Patino team's demise, Jimenez disappeared and is now a fugitive, these sources report. U.S. investigators believe Jimenez and a second FEADS comandante in Tijuana were on the AFO's payroll. Jimenez, sources say, answered to the Tijuana cartel's powerful and ruthless chief of operations, Ismael Higuera Guerrero, a.k.a. "El Mayel." Patino and his two deputies were intercepted just as they crossed into Mexico at the Otay Mesa border checkpoint on the morning of April 9. Their apparent abductors were described as heavily armed members of Mexico's Federal Judicial Police, who serve under the jurisdiction of Mexico's attorney general. Sources say Patino's car was probably boxed in and stopped by two or more vehicles whose occupants abducted Patino's team only a few blocks from the Otay Mesa checkpoint. Some 48 hours later, the three hideously tortured bodies were found dumped in the ravine. Presumably, their interrogator/torturers extracted everything that Patino, Pompa and Torres had learned and reported about their investigation of the AFO. Patino and his two deputies also presumably confessed their close collaboration on the AFO investigation with the DEA and FBI. Corruption is one half of the bribery-or-death choice commonly offered those who might threaten the AFO. The other half is savage and lethal retribution. There is reason to suspect that the cartel recently turned its killers loose on several of its own family members, possibly to protect the organization from a perceived threat. As reported in The San Diego Union-Tribune last October, two unidentified women and a child were abducted at gunpoint by eight armed men at a busy intersection in Tijuana. Little more was known publicly and the case faded from view when, according to sources, relatives of the kidnap victims declined to cooperate with police. But a member of U.S. law enforcement's local task force on the Arellano Felix Organization says that the two women were the mother-in-law and sister-in-law of Eduardo Arellano Felix. Eduardo is the brother of cartel leaders, Benjamin and Ramon, and is considered a lesser cartel figure by U.S. officials. The child was identified as Eduardo's six-year-old daughter, now reportedly in her father's custody. Sonia Martinez, Eduardo's common-law wife, and her mother and sister have disappeared, the task force source reported. All are feared dead, other sources say, presumed victims of the Arellanos' deadly paranoia. Sonia and her two small children were badly burned in a propane cooker explosion in Tijuana in November 1998. They received extended treatment at UCSD Medical Center's Regional Burn Center in San Diego. Last year, according to sources, Sonia's infant son died in Tijuana of his injuries and Sonia's relationship with Eduardo apparently dissolved. Law enforcement sources theorize that the security-obsessed Arellanos may then have decided that an embittered and burn-disfigured Sonia, angry over the failure of her marriage and grieving for an infant son whose death she may have blamed on Eduardo and the underground life they led, presented a threat of betrayal to the authorities. Their brutally cold answer, sources speculate, may well have been to dispose of Sonia and her mother and sister permanently. If so, it would demonstrate yet again that the Arellano Felix Organization's ruthlessness and brutality recognize no limits. But, then, that comes as no surprise. A cartel conservatively estimated to have committed perhaps 500 murders keeps killing on a regular basis. Drug-linked murders in Baja California alone (just one of the six Mexican states where the Arellanos operate) are currently running at about 20 or so per month. That's counting only the numbers officially reported, which may be well below the actual totals. Most of these Baja killings are in the Tijuana area and most, it's safe to assume, are the day-to-day work of the Arellano Felix Organization. Mexican President Vicente Fox vowed bravely last December to defeat the Arellanos and restore "peace" to Tijuana within six months. "There is absolutely no doubt that we can and will defeat them. The problem is that they are hidden by the society they live in. They are hiding with their laundered narco-trafficking money, and the challenge is to find them. That is why we need to saturate the city (with law enforcement authorities)," said Fox. The highly publicized subsequent sweep of Tijuana by 750 paramilitary Federal Judicial Police, like past such efforts, proved largely an exercise in public relations. That isn't how the Arellanos are ever likely to be caught. What Fox and his government need is more of the patient intelligence and investigative work and, reportedly, the close collaboration with U.S. intelligence that resulted in two spectacular successes against the Arellanos last spring. The arrest of Jesus "Chuy" Labra Aviles, reputedly the Arellanos' chief financial adviser and money launderer, was an undoubted shock and a serious setback to the Tijuana cartel. An even bigger success was the spectacular capture near Ensenada last May of Ismael Higuera Guerrero, the infamous "El Mayel." Higuera allegedly ran all of the cartel's daily operations. He reportedly answered directly to Benjamin and Ramon and was the cartel's third-most-important figure. Bagging Higuera ranks with the 1997 arrest in Tijuana of alleged Arellano lieutenant Everardo Arturo Paez Martinez. If, as U.S. officials earnestly hope, Paez becomes the first Mexican drug kingpin extradited to the United States to face trial here, the potential adverse consequences for the Arellano Felix Organization could be immense. For all this to work, Washington needs to help, too. What's been lacking in recent years in efforts against the AFO are strong direction and priority emphasis from the White House, Justice Department and State Department, plus the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies. The Bush White House recognizes that only reducing the demand for drugs in this country offers any hope of "winning" the war against drugs. But, in the meantime, the AFO and Mexico's other drug cartels threaten to destabilize that country. In the Baja region, the Arellano Felix Organization continues to operate as a de facto state within a state. It usurps the authority of legitimate government in Tijuana, Baja and beyond. It challenges and mocks the rule of law without which the historic reforms now under way in Mexico cannot ultimately succeed. For Mexico and the United States alike, failure to defeat the Arellano Felix Organization must not be an option. Caldwell is editor of the Insight section. - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D