Pubdate: Fri, 8 Aug 1997 By Henry Tricks CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico, Aug 7 (Reuter) Drugrelated killings have escalated on the U.S.Mexican border, signalling the end of a code of honour among Mexican druglords to keep their turf battles in the shadows. Mexican and U.S. officials said drug violence took a new turn this week when two slicklydressed hitmen sauntered into an elegant steakhouse in this border city near El Paso, Texas, and cut down six people in a burst of automatic gunfire. Amado Carrillo Fuentes, head of the socalled Juarez cartel whose death last month has sparked the vicious turf war, owned the Maxfim restaurant where the massacre occured, a U.S. antinarcotics official said. The official, who asked not to be identified, said the hit on Sunday night, as diners rounded off a day watching bull fighting across the road, was linked to a bitter struggle for control of the multibillion dollar cocaine trade. ``Of course it's related to the Carrillo Fuentes drug wars,'' the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration official said. The gangsterstyle killing the gunmen pumped 150 rounds from AK47 assault rifles into their victims before fleeing in a black limousine followed more than 12 reported drugrelated ``executions'' in Juarez since Carrillo's death on July 4. Three men, including one local policeman, were arrested early on Thursday with AK47s that appeared to be the same as those used in the shooting, police spokesman Ernesto Garcia said. He said they would be charged in the shooting. He named the suspects as policeman Jorge Perez, Jesus Barvill and Pedro Cardero. But he said authorities still lacked a motive. The attack was particularly horrifying to citizens of Juarez because five of the six victims appeared to be unconnected to drugs smuggling caught in the crossfire of a war that had been kept within the confines of the underworld. ``This is now no man's land, a land of the strong. And the strong are the narcos,'' said Antonio Ochoa, a mourner at the funeral of Teresa Herrera, 26, one of the victims who was buried on Wednesday. ``This is not going to stop.'' Newspapers in Juarez demanded an end to the violence, and the city's main business organisations this week ordered a halt to any voluntary contributions to government projects until security in the city was beefed up. ``Like Chicago in the prohibition years, since last Sunday this border zone abandoned its old position as a trampoline for drug trafficking and became the new battle ground for drug mafias,'' El Diario de Juarez said in a frontpage editorial. Elsewhere in Mexico, Carrillo's demise has had similarly bloody consequences. An exbeauty queen, Irma Ibarra, was gunned down in the western city of Guadalajara last week after she received threats from Carrillo's former inner circle. Until his death after a plastic surgery operation in Mexico City, experts say Carrillo had sought to keep intercartel bloodshed quiet, organising a ``federation'' of top cartel bosses to map out and divide up territories. Now he is out of the picture, officials say the truce is unravelling. In Juarez, so many bodies have turned up in car boots and vacant desert lots recently that police talking by radio now use a special code number for executions, 85. The mafiastyle Maxfin massacre was not Carrillo style, and officials were investigating whether a more violent band of druglords, the Tijuanabased Arellano Felix brothers, may be muscling into his former territory. ``The cartels all work together except the (Arellano Felix) brothers. They don't get along with anyone,'' the DEA official said. Authorities said the target of the Maxfin killings was Alfonso Corral Olaguez, 36, also known as ``Green Feet'' because of the green crocodileskin cowboy boots he used to wear. Mexican officials were investigating his links to Jaime Herrera, head of a local cartel operating in the Mexican state of Durango that apparently has close ties with the Juarez Cartel. There were also reports Corral was a DEA informant. REUTER 20:30 080797