Pubdate: Sun, 17 Aug 1997 Source: Houston Chronicle, page 28A Contact: Spate of violent slayings fuels fears of drug war in Mexico Drug lord's death may signal fight for multibilliondollar turf By ANDREW DOWNIE Copyright 1997 Special to the Chronicle CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico For years, this bustling border city of assembly plants, strip malls and drug smuggling rings belonged to Amado Carrillo Fuentes. And like many ambitious landlords, the late gangland boss kept his property in order. Gangland murders happened with some frequency under Carrillo. But the killings usually were lowkey compared with the spectacular bloodletting in Tijuana, Culiacan or Mexico's other drug smuggling centers. And when he killed, Carrillo, once considered the richest and most powerful drug boss in the hemisphere, often went for the subtle touch. Carrillo's gunmen seldom fired into crowds. They picked their targets with precision and rarely dumped the bodies in public places. Instead, tortured corpses appeared in the trunks of cars. But that was then. Carrillo, 42, died in July after undergoing extensive liposuction and other plastic surgery at a Mexico City hospital. Since then, 18 people have met a violent end in Juarez in what many see as a war to take over his multibilliondollar cocaine empire. Saying they lack proof, most Mexican authorities decline to conclusively link any of the killings with Mexico's drug trade. But some admit that the style of the recent Juarez violence screams drug war. In the most gruesome incident, an assassin wielding an automatic rifle gunned down six people, including an innocent couple celebrating a birthday, at the upscale Max Fim restaurant earlier this month in Juarez. "These type of actions are undeniably related to organized crime," said Jorge Lopez Molinar, the assistant state prosecutor in Juarez and one of the few Mexican officials who will say publicly what everyone is talking about privately. The Max Fim massacre "was not an isolated incident," he said. "That sort of thing doesn't happen for no reason." Although Mexican police contend there is no hard evidence to link the killings to a turf war, U.S. officials believe rivals are vying for Carrillo's top spot. "Things are in a real state of flux right now," said a senior U.S. law enforcement official who follows the situation on the border. "There is going to be a period of turmoil while they try to figure out who is making decisions." Since the late 1980s, Carrillo's socalled Juarez cartel has smuggled thousands of tons of Colombianproduced cocaine into the United States, along the central U.S.Mexico border. As other Mexican drug bosses were captured or killed, Carrillo became the most powerful smuggler, becoming famous for bringing in tons of the narcotic on large jetliners, according to law enforcement sources. The gangsters now fighting for control of Carrillo's cartel have been major players in the Mexican narcotics industry for a long time, those officials said. Jostling for position are former Carrillo associates Ismael Zambada Garcia, Eduardo Gonzalez Quirarte, Juan Jose Esparragoza and Juan Jose Quintero Payan and Rafael Munoz Talavera, U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials said. Carrillo's brother Vicente is another potential heir to the throne, analysts said. The contenders list also is said to include Hector Luis "El Guero" Palma, a boss of the smuggling organization based in the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa, and Palma's former partner Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman, even though both are in jail on various charges. Carrillo's former archenemies in the drug trade, the Arellano Felix brothers of Tijuana, may be looking to expand their territory east from Tijuana, newspaper reports suggest. With such a crowded field of challengers, officials on both sides of the border agree it is difficult to say exactly which is allied with which or who is killing whom. "How can we know if (the recent killings) are related to drug trafficking if no one talks?" asked Arturo Chavez Chavez, the attorney general of Chihuahua state, where Juarez is located. Police said the target in the Max Fim attack was Alfonso Corral Olaguez, a cattle rancher from the northern state of Durango who has been identified in Mexican newspaper reports as a member of the Herrera smuggling organization. Law enforcement officials said the Herreras are responsible for providing much of the Mexican heroin smuggled into the United States each year. They worked closely with Carrillo for about 10 years, exchanging information and sharing trafficking routes and personnel, U.S. officials said. One U.S. official confirmed that Corral was a "top lieutenant of Carrillo's" and said authorities are seeking an indictment against him in the Western District of Texas for drugtrafficking offenses. A friend of Corral invited him to dine at the posh steak restaurant but left the building minutes before the gunman entered, leading police to believe Corral was set up. The "friend," Dr. David Portillo Dominguez, is missing and is being sought by police. Mexican police are holding two men in connection with the Max Fim killings. On Friday, police said they have amassed enough evidence to indict one of the two, a selfproclaimed volunteer soldier, in the massacre, according to the Associated Press. "We have a witness who saw Jorge Perez Garcia go into the restaurant five minutes before the shooting and we have another witness who saw him fire an AK47 rifle at the victims," said state judicial police spokesman Ernesto Garcia. Others wanted in connection with the recent wave of violence include the crew of a jeep that rolled into an wealthy Juarez neighborhood July 19 and killed Juan Eugenio Rosales Ortiz, a reputed local drug smuggler known as El Genio. But authorities remain unsure of a motive and have made little progress in finding out who carried out the Rosales execution. The failure to prevent or solve such crimes has sparked criticism of local law enforcement agencies. Authorities last week transferred 16 state judicial police agents, including the commanders in charge of homicides, arrests and technical support, out of Juarez. Two other judicial police agents who stood by and watched as the hit squad assassinated Rosales have also been fired. Such purges are nothing new in a state where police corruption and inefficiency are endemic. At least a fifth of Juarez's police force has been fired in the last three years, while an even larger portion of the 1,000 strong Chihuahua state judicial police has been removed since 1993. Chihuahua Gov. Francisco Barrio ordered 40 additional state police agents to the border region last week in a bid to curb the violence. Barrio also has asked President Ernesto Zedillo to send more federal agents to back up the army troops running the national government's antidrug efforts in Juarez. Meanwhile, police last week broke up one U.S.based arm of the Juarez cartel. Authorities arrested dozens of people and seized 11.4 tons of cocaine and $18.5 million in cash over the course of an almost yearlong investigation, Thomas Constantine, the administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said last week. Despite the arrests and the killings and the record seizures authorities grabbed 6 tons of Carrillo's cocaine in Arizona last December plenty of people will continue fighting for the chance to smuggle cocaine across the border. It's a simple case of supply and demand, said Don Bludworth, assistant special agent in charge of U.S. Customs in El Paso. Customs officials searching for drugs smuggled across the bridges that span the Rio Grande here are as busy today as they were last week or last year. Said Bludworth, "Nothing has changed." Andrew Downie is a freelance journalist based in Mexico City.