Pubdate: Sat, 04 Dec 1999 Source: New York Times (NY) Copyright: 1999 The New York Times Company Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ Forum: http://www10.nytimes.com/comment/ Author: Sam Dillon JOINT TEAM BEGINS ANALYSIS OF BONES FOUND IN MEXICO CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - They were three middle-aged men, and when they were dumped into a desert grave, two were wearing boots and a third had on tennis shoes. Their heads were wrapped in cloth, and one appears to have been wearing only underwear. They were probably shot to death but might have suffocated. Top Mexican and United States law enforcement officials announced those preliminary conclusions Friday from an analysis of the skeletal remains of three of the six victims unearthed on a drug trafficker's farm here this week. If the findings were a bit sketchy, the Mexican government made them public with tremendous fanfare, perhaps in part to justify the scale of the operation and the Federal Bureau of Investigation's extensive involvement, which has been criticized by Mexican nationalists. Jorge Madrazo, Mexico's attorney general, and Louis Freeh, the director of the F.B.I., flew by helicopter to the farm, which hugs a bone-dry hillside on the southern outskirts of this border city facing El Paso. Working at this and another ranch since Monday, 65 F.B.I. forensic experts and hundreds of Mexican police officers and soldiers have been seeking the remains of people presumably executed on orders of the drug bosses in recent years. The operation is part of a three-year-old inquiry into the whereabouts of scores who have disappeared in northern Mexico after running afoul of the traffickers. The midmorning arrival of the two Russian-built Mi-17 helicopters carrying Madrazo and Freeh, along with dozens of assistants, kicked up a tremendous dust cloud, which swirled skyward for 1,000 feet, forcing the Mexican soldiers guarding the farm's perimeter to cover their faces with their fatigue jackets. After the dust settled, the two officials strolled smartly through the farm, kicking sand and chatting for a time at the edge of the grave, tucked between a granary and a towering masonry wall. Adding a surreal element to the encounter were a dozen young Mexican women, hired by the Mexican government and wearing black miniskirts, low-cut blouses, and high heels, who stood along the path leading to the grave as Madrazo and Freeh made their tour. The women, shivering a bit in the wind, wore nametags labeling them "hostesses." Later Freeh and Madrazo sat down together in a white circus tent erected for the occasion. They faced a bank of television cameras and scores of international journalists eager for news about advances in the investigation. Instead Madrazo, who has come under fire from nationalists on Mexican television for allowing the F.B.I. technicians 15 miles into Mexican territory to carry out the excavations, delivered a 20-minute speech justifying the joint operation as entirely legal. "This operation does not infringe upon our sovereignty in the slightest," Madrazo said. Freeh said that not just one but several F.B.I. informers had identified four ranches in the state of Chihuahua as places where traffickers had buried their victims. "Our preliminary view is that the information we have received about these sites is very accurate," Freeh said. The officials said the search for bodies at the ranches would last weeks. - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D