Pubdate: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA) Copyright: 1999 San Jose Mercury News Contact: 750 Ridder Park Drive, San Jose, CA 95190 Fax: (408) 271-3792 Website: http://www.sjmercury.com/ Author: Ricardo Sandoval, Mercury News Mexico City Bureau MEXICAN RANCH YIELDS FEW BODIES, FEW ANSWERS MEXICO CITY -- Families of the missing are reeling and some American drug agents are scratching their heads after the FBI and Mexican authorities recently denied that scores of bodies might be at remote ranches outside of Ciudad Juarez, not far from the border with El Paso, Texas. After two weeks of digging at two of four ranches that some officials initially called possible mass grave sites with as many as 100 bodies buried, remains of only eight men have been unearthed. They are being studied by FBI forensics specialists in El Paso. With Mexican Attorney General Jorge Madrazo signaling that the digging may end in two weeks, officials are saying they're not sure how many bodies they will turn up. The total may be well below original estimates. Mexican and FBI sources at first suggested that as many as 100 bodies might be found, victims of a long war between drug gangs over illicit cocaine supply routes in Mexico said to be worth $10 billion a year. A media crush ensued, dozens of FBI specialists were granted permits to work in Mexico, and a forensics lab was set up in El Paso. Buoyed by the official ruckus, families of the missing began hoping authorities could finally close ugly chapters in their lives. But it soon became clear that scores of bodies might not be buried at the ranches after all -- souring hopeful families on the spectacle. ``The families are calling me, wondering what is going on, and I can't tell them a thing,'' said Jaime Hervella, who directs an El Paso group that has tracked nearly 200 unsolved border area disappearances and kidnappings back to 1994. ``If the authorities would stay with it and dig up all the ranches said to belong to drug traffickers, and all the abandoned wells around Juarez, they might turn up 100 bodies. But that could take years.'' Agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, left on the sidelines in this case by the FBI, privately doubt the existence of burial sites with high concentrations of drug-war victims. ``I wonder if people moved too quickly,'' said one Texas-based official. ``Everyone is jumping to conclusions, and there is really nothing yet to indicate drug-related burials at the scale they've advertised.'' Last week Madrazo was careful to point out that neither he nor the FBI ever issued an official body-count estimate. Yet in a meeting with reporters just days after the digging began, Mexican prosecutors said they were working with a list of 100 people -- including up to 22 American citizens -- reported missing between 1994 and 1997. Many of the missing were last seen in Mexican police custody, or being hustled away by men wearing black uniforms of federal police. None of those disappearances has been solved, despite a task force and four special prosecutors assigned to the mystery by Mexican officials. Madrazo says investigators are not ruling out the possibility that some people on the list may be alive ``and perhaps even working in the United States'' -- a suggestion scoffed at by Juarez human rights activists. ``I am afraid we're all going to be disappointed again, just as we have with police and politicians who do nothing about rampant abuse of women and children in Juarez, and the many unsolved murders of young women,'' said Esther Chavez, an activist who counsels families of almost 200 young women found dead over the last six years in and around Juarez. Most of those killings are blamed on domestic violence, crimes of passion and drug traffickers. But at least 30 of the murdered women remain unidentified, and locals suspect that serial killers -- perhaps corrupt police officers -- roam the streets of Juarez. Locals see it as a given that Juarez police are crooked, and that a booming export manufacturing industry only slightly obscures the danger of the city. Just days before a horde of Mexican soldiers, hooded federal agents, and 46BI agents descended on Juarez, remains of five more women were discovered in a remote site outside the city. And even as authorities dug up the ranches, dubbed ``narco-cemeteries'' by locals, drug dealers kept on shooting each other. Last week, a known drug informant was gunned down in daylight on a downtown street in a small city west of Juarez. ``Drug dealers don't stop for anything,'' Hervella said. ``They shoot people and leave them where they fall as calling cards -- warnings to others not to talk.'' - --- MAP posted-by: Derek Rea