Mexico Widens Dragnet for Drug Lords : Crime: Leaders of notorious Arellano cartel are prime suspects in last week’s slaying of former state prosecutor.

Police intensified a nationwide hunt for the leaders of Mexico’s notorious Arellano drug cartel Saturday after state and federal prosecutors named them as prime suspects in last week’s murder of former Jalisco Atty. Gen. Leobardo Larios Guzman.

Confirming that arrest warrants have been issued for the brothers who head the cartel, as well as for several of their hired guns, Mexico’s top law enforcement official also linked Larios’ murder to the 1993 assassination of Guadalajara’s Roman Catholic cardinal, Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo.

“Some of the people we have found to have participated in the murder of the former attorney general are linked with the homicide of Cardinal Posadas Ocampo; there are arrest warrants for them,” federal Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano told reporters late Friday in Acapulco, where he is chairing a weekend convention of top state prosecutors.

“And there is a link between the (Arellano) organization and the former prosecutor’s assassination.”

Larios, as chief prosecutor in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city, led the investigation into Posadas’ murder two years ago. On Wednesday, two months after resigning his post, Larios was shot at least seven times outside his home.

It was the latest in a series of high-profile assassinations that prosecutors believe are linked to Mexico’s powerful drug cartels. And Lozano’s statement appeared to confirm investigators’ initial suspicions that Larios’ brazen, daylight murder was meant as a message to Mexico’s law enforcement community.

If so, it was a message clearly received at the attorney generals’ weekend conference.

The prosecutors unanimously condemned the slaying of their former colleague, and Lozano vowed an intensive effort to capture and punish his assassins. He also used the occasion to call “urgently” on President Ernesto Zedillo and the Mexican Congress to allocate funds for federal protection for current and former prosecutors.

Other prosecutors were less enthusiastic. Underscoring the extent of the nexus between organized crime and federal corruption, known here as “narco-politics,” the top prosecutor from the state of Zacatecas pointed out that officials may be in greater danger with such protection than without it. To illustrate, he cited former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1984 by her federal bodyguards.

Larios, who stepped down as prosecutor when Jalisco’s state government changed hands March 1, did not use bodyguards, according to family members.

His successor, Jalisco Atty. Gen. Jorge Lopez Vergara, has said there were no eyewitnesses to the slaying.

But Vergara added that a sketch of one of the gunmen, based on descriptions of two men seen near Larios’ home before the murder, resembles one of the Arellano gang members identified by investigators.

Federal investigators are stepping up surveillance at the nation’s airports and borders, Lozano said, in search of the suspected assassin and the brothers who control the Arellano gang. Benjamin, Ramon and Javier Arellano are also believed to have masterminded Posadas’ murder, and they have been fugitives since. The search, he said, is focusing on Tijuana, the gang’s base.

The cardinal was killed along with six other people during a shootout between rival drug gangs--led by the Arellanos and by Joaquin (Chapo) Guzman--at Guadalajara’s airport on May 24, 1993. The cardinal was dressed in black clerical garb when he was shot 14 times; officially, the government called his killing a case of mistaken identity.

Guzman and scores of low-ranking hired guns and allegedly corrupt state and federal officials aligned with the two cartels were jailed for their roles in the cardinal’s slaying.

But the Arellano brothers escaped on a flight to Tijuana immediately after the shooting, apparently with the aid of police allies in both Guadalajara and the border city.