Pubdate: Wed, 01 Dec 1999
Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer (WA)
Copyright: 1999 Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Contact:  http://www.seattle-pi.com/
Author:  THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Resource: additional articles on Mexico are available at 
http://www.mapinc.org/mexico.htm

ONCE-DREADED JUAREZ CARTEL IS LOSING ITS STRENGTH

MEXICO CITY -- The two ranches that police say were used as clandestine 
graveyards for perhaps 100 or more victims of the drug war are apparently a 
legacy of what was once Mexico's best-organized and most violent 
trafficking gang: the Juarez cartel.

The cartel was so organized it could fly old passenger jets over the border 
stuffed with tons of cocaine. It was so far-flung that it set up a branch 
operation on the Caribbean coast.

And it was so violent that when cartel founder Amado Carillo Fuentes died 
in 1997 while in the care of his own doctors, soon afterward the doctors' 
tortured bodies were found stuffed in oil drums.

Shootouts and killings raged in Ciudad Juarez during the battle to succeed 
Carrillo. The violence reached a climax in August 1997, a month after his 
death, when a gang of gunmen opened fire on nine people at a table in a 
Ciudad Juarez restaurant. Police estimated that more than 100 rounds of 
.45-caliber bullets were fired. Five people were killed and three wounded.

The leadership fight culminated on Sept. 10 when the body of Carrillo's 
successor, Rafael Munoz Talavera, was found shot to death in a bulletproof car.

Carrillo's brother, Vincent, is now believed to control the remnants of the 
cartel. Vicente Carrillo is wanted in Mexico on drug-trafficking charges 
and in the United States on a 26-count indictment for trafficking and money 
laundering.

Bodies were supposedly buried at the two Ciudad Juarez ranches between 1994 
and 1996, during the cartel's heyday. So many people disappeared in Juarez 
during those years that the Mexican government sent an elite task force to 
Ciudad Juarez in 1997 to investigate.

But in May 1998 the Attorney General's office recalled the unit after three 
of its members -- soldiers assigned to police duty in hopes of stamping out 
corruption -- were arrested themselves for allegedly staging a kidnapping.

Relatives said many of the missing persons whose bodies are being sought on 
the ranches were last seen being taken away by men dressed as police.

The belief that the cartel long had ties with some Mexican police officers 
was strengthened yesterday when prosecutors announced the arrest of Mario 
Silva Calderon, a former federal agent who allegedly served as one of the 
cartel's "moles" inside police forces.

Officials have said the Juarez cartel is somewhat weaker now.

"It cannot be as strong as it once was because it's under so much scrutiny 
right now," said Dave Alba, special agent in charge of the FBI office in El 
Paso. "They don't have the same strength." 
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