COLUMN ONE : Barons of a Bloody Turf War : Rich and ruthless, the Arellano Felix brothers reportedly control narcotics traffic on the Baja border. Their battle to fend off Mexico’s biggest drug kingpin may have cost a cardinal his life.

The first sign of a mob turf war came early last year with the discovery of six bound, tortured bodies alongside Baja California highways. The victims, shot in the head at close range, were lieutenants of a drug mafia from the state of Sinaloa.

The violence escalated with a spate of machine-gun murders on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border and a commando-style raid on a Puerto Vallarta discotheque targeting Tijuana traffickers.

Then a cardinal was killed, gunned down at the Guadalajara airport last week in a luxury car that hit men mistook for one belonging to Mexico’s top mafia boss.

The airport assault reportedly was the work of the Arellano Felix brothers, handsome thugs who control narcotics trafficking along the Baja California border, the principal port of entry for illegal drugs shipped to the United States.

The Arellanos are multimillionaires who move tons of South American cocaine across the border each month, according to American and Mexican officials. The family has reportedly employed an entourage of police, rich kids and San Diego gang members to fend off a challenge from the nation’s most powerful and sophisticated trafficker, the Sinaloa-based Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman.

“Tijuana is the most-used port on the border, and everyone wants a piece of it,” said an American drug official. “The Arellanos insist the northwest is theirs and no one is going to operate there without going through them. Guzman is arrogant. No one is going to tell him what to do. . . . The Arellanos survive not because they are smarter, but because they are more violent.”

Little is known about the shadowy Arellano family, who, unlike many other drug-dealing barons, have not strutted their wealth and influence. But a glimpse of the brothers as brutal businessmen locked in a deadly drug war emerges from conversations with American and Mexican officials and Tijuana journalists.

The Arellanos belong to an old marijuana and contraband smuggling family from the rough-and-tumble state of Sinaloa. They are said to be related to Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, Mexico’s biggest drug trafficker until he was jailed in 1989.

Officials are uncertain whether the Arellanos ever worked for Felix Gallardo, but they believe the four brothers now answer to a silent boss who is more worldly than they are and who has his own bankers and legitimate businesses. Sources declined to reveal the identity of the reputed leader.

Francisco, 44, works primarily out of Mazatlan, where he owns a discotheque and other businesses. Benjamin, 41, is said to run Tijuana smuggling operations along with brother Ramon, 27. The youngest, Javier, works with both ends of the organization.

Benjamin, called by the diminutive “Min,” has movie-star looks with a full head of dark hair and thick black eyebrows. Officials have circulated portraits of him in a tuxedo posing with his wife and toddler.

They describe the Arellanos as rich and ruthless.

“You know how they say there’s old money and new money,” said a U.S. official. “Well, the Arellanos are new money.”

“But they’re handsome,” added another official. “That in itself opens a lot of doors. And they dress well. Of course, they should with all that money.”

The Arellanos moved into Tijuana in the early 1980s and consolidated their control of the underground as the Mexican government jailed drug lords such as Rafael Caro Quintero, convicted in the killing of U.S. drug agent Enrique S. Camarena, and Felix Gallardo. The brothers trafficked in South American cocaine, as well as Mexican heroin and marijuana.

They recruited a number of young men from wealthy families, known in Mexico as “Juniors,” to work as their henchmen. The rich kids were attracted by the kingpins’ money, their private parties and underworld notoriety. And the promise of big profits.

The brothers also reportedly ventured into nominally legitimate businesses such as trucking, construction and sports promotion, according to police sources.

While their presence in Tijuana was widely known, they kept a low profile, avoiding fancy restaurants and night spots, unlike the swashbuckling traffickers who may openly cruise towns like Ciudad Juarez, Hermosillo and Culiacan surrounded by gun-toting bodyguards. The more flamboyant drug dealers even have been honored by local minstrels with corridos about their exploits.

But mafia chiefs must keep their heads down in Tijuana, a more cosmopolitan border city with a binational business elite and 25 million tourists a year. The onset of the kind of brazen drug slayings common in places like Sinaloa shocked and angered Tijuanans.

So did machine-gun assaults, such as the one in May, 1992, when six gunmen allegedly working for the Arellanos piled out of a van and sprayed a taxi with automatic rifles. A boxing promoter and three associates reputedly involved in the drug trade were killed.

The violence also spilled across the border. Alejandro Cazares Ledesma, a prominent businessman with investments in Tijuana and San Diego, was gunned down in Imperial Beach late last year in what officials also believe was a drug-related killing.

“There has been a tremendous increase in violence,” said Bobby Sheppard, supervising agent in the DEA’s San Ysidro office. “The border is no longer the barrier. It’s beginning to transcend the border.”

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Chapo Guzman, the Arellanos’ rival for control of the border, is the most important trafficker in Mexico, according to a police source.

Guzman, once also an associate of Felix Gallardo, has replaced him as the country’s best-connected mob boss.

“Chapo has the highest level protection in Mexico, and he provides it to others,” the source said.

Observers got a hint of that protection last November when Guzman launched the spectacular raid against the Arellanos at the Christine discotheque.

After arranging for the 14 Puerto Vallarta-based federal police agents to be out of town that night, about 40 of Guzman’s men surrounded the disco, cut telephone lines and burst inside, claiming to be police.

They shot up the restaurant with hundreds of rounds of machine-gun fire aimed at Javier Arellano, who was partying with friends--state police and San Diego gang members among them. Six people died; Arellano escaped.

The federal police commander for the zone, Adolfo Mondragon Aguirre, was arrested but released by a local judge. He is no longer on the job.

The Arellanos decided to strike back in Guadalajara. To put together their hit team, they hired Alfredo (El Popeye) Araujo, 33, a member of a well-established street gang from San Diego’s Logan Heights barrio, according to American and Mexican police.

Araujo recruited 15 triggermen, including at least one other known Barrio Logan gang member. It is unclear whether the San Diego gunmen are U.S. citizens. One American official called them, “young, violent, proven kids.”

In the days preceding the airport attack, Guzman stayed at the five-star Holiday Inn in Guadalajara, often accompanied by someone he called comandante-- the title for a police commander.

Guzman was the alleged target of the May 24 shootout at Guadalajara’s international airport that claimed the lives of Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo and six others. The Arellanos’ hit team reportedly mistook the cardinal’s white Mercury Grand Marquis for one of Guzman’s.

Eight Arellano gunmen, including at least one of the brothers, fled the airport after the shooting in a Tijuana-bound Aeromexico flight that had been held for them for 20 minutes, Mexican officials said. Several of the alleged gunmen boarded the flight with black canvas bags, presumably containing their weapons, and no boarding passes.

Mexican police have arrested several people suspected of involvement in the killings and trafficking organizations, including Juan Enrique Vazcones, 19. The youth, who goes by the name “El Puma,” belongs to the same San Diego gang as Araujo, according to San Diego police.

In raids following the airport assault, officials have come to understand the degree to which Guzman was challenging the Arellanos’ control of the border and his position as a conduit for Colombian cocaine bound for the United States.

Officials say the Colombian cocaine producers now pay Mexican smugglers with up to half of every shipment.

Mexican police have found at least 15 drug safehouses around Tijuana, about half of them belonging to Guzman. The Arellanos’ fancy houses were well-stocked with weapons and police and military uniforms. But the Guzman houses contained clandestine chambers beneath pullout bathtubs, hidden money vaults and sophisticated eavesdropping equipment.

Guzman had grenade launchers, automatic rifles and night vision scopes.

And then there is his tunnel--a 1,500-foot passage that was being built beneath the U.S.-Mexican border. The lighted, ventilated, concrete-reinforced tunnel began near Tijuana’s airport at a warehouse for a construction company allegedly belonging to Guzman. It was a multimillion-dollar project that would have made much easier the movement of tons of illegal drugs into the United States.

“After the discovery of the tunnel, I see why Guzman is moving in,” said an American drug enforcement agent.

“He has a construction company in Mexico and a tunnel. He moves drugs up to the United States and the money back. It’s perfect.”

But maybe not. The killing of a cardinal, like the murder of an American drug agent eight years ago, appears to have violated unwritten rules by which traffickers operate in Mexico.

Generally, they are left alone to kill each other. But they suffer the government’s wrath when they take down prominent outside victims.

The airport shooting was a special embarrassment to President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who was on his way to the United States to promote a North American free trade agreement.

He has cracked down on both the Arellano and Guzman smuggling organizations, costing the mafias millions of dollars, interrupting their operations and inadvertently revealing the extent of Guzman’s challenge to the Arellanos, officials say.

Police have yet to capture any mafia chiefs from the Arellano or Guzman organizations.

But officials and political observers believe public pressure may be sufficient to force the government to follow through until they do.

“Salinas needs to recoup his image and credibility inside and outside of the country,” said Baja California’s human rights ombudsman, Jose Luis Perez Canchola.

“The conditions are there now for the Mexican state to act with all its force to capture these guys. . . . It’s just too bad it had to come to this--killing a cardinal for them to react. There have been many dead before this,” Perez Canchola said.