A Plane Is Buried in Baja --and Drug Ties Unearthed : Narcotics: Landing--and secret dismantling--points to failure in U.S.-Mexican efforts to control such flights.

Few local peasants gave it a second thought when they spotted the 80-seat passenger jet emerge in the midnight sky over Mexico’s Pacific Coast on Nov. 4 and then land on a dry lake bed near the southern tip of Baja California.

It wasn’t the first time, said the residents, who have assumed for months that Mexico’s drug cartels were using the 12-mile-long lake bed as a landing strip--one of dozens that U.S. and Mexican drug enforcement agents say are scattered across the countryside.

It was only at sunrise the following day, when they saw flames, that municipal police were alerted to the plane’s presence. But by the time they arrived at the site at 8:40 a.m. on Nov. 5, men in federal police uniforms were already there, saying they had the situation in hand.

Those uniformed men were chopping, burning and burying evidence: an aircraft the size of a Boeing 727 that burst its nose gear on landing, Mexican investigators said. They already had unloaded the cargo: pure cocaine, according to U.S. officials, who estimated its street value at a minimum of $200 million. Within hours, the cargo disappeared--along with the men in uniform, who investigators suspect were drug dealers.

On Friday, nearly two weeks after the converted French Caravelle landed near the remote Baja town of Todos Santos, Mexican authorities confirmed that they are intensively investigating the case. The chief federal prosecutor in Baja California Sur state, Hector Cruz, told The Times that counter-drug surveillance has been intensified along the border and that Mexican police and army units have set up roadblocks throughout the Baja peninsula to intercept any cargo that may have been headed for California and elsewhere.

Cruz refused to confirm or deny that there were drugs aboard the Caravelle. But U.S. officials said they have information that the plane was packed with as much as 15 tons of pure South American cocaine. And they said the landing, 35 miles north of Cabo San Lucas, showed how the cartels continue to operate with near-impunity, despite the efforts of Mexico, Colombia and the United States to stem the flow of drugs across America’s southern border.

In fact, earlier that same weekend, a U.S. official said, another Caravelle had been spotted flying up the Mexican coast, and it carried a load of cocaine they estimated at 10 tons. Mexican authorities took no action against it because it was flying along a previously filed flight plan from Peru before it disappeared. It presumably then landed, unloaded and took off again on Mexican territory, the officials said.

“It could have been a deliberate double-banger,” said one U.S. official, describing how the cartels may have been trying to confuse authorities in order to bring in as much as 25 tons of cocaine in a single weekend. “We knew all about it. It was very, very frustrating,” the official said.

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According to the accounts of U.S. and Mexican officials, both shipments slipped in despite the attack on drug trafficking launched by President Ernesto Zedillo, who has called the cartels’ activities the gravest national security threat facing Mexico today.

The plane that Mexican investigators found burned and buried in Todos Santos earlier this month also appeared to have originated in South America. Taken together, the two shipments have led U.S. drug agents to suspect that either the Colombian cocaine cartels continue to function at full strength despite the arrests in recent months of the top leadership of Colombia’s Cali cartel or that Mexico’s drug lords have taken over the Colombians’ huge export operations and their distribution into the United States.

Investigators could not explain how the jet that landed near Todos Santos entered Mexican airspace without detection or diversion by federal authorities, who have been cracking down on drug flights with some success in recent months.

That apparent lapse came just hours before airborne Mexican drug agents chased yet another drug plane--a much smaller King Air--through the skies for four hours Nov. 5. They forced it to land in the northern state of Jalisco, where, the attorney general’s office said, Mexican agents seized slightly less than a ton of cocaine from the twin-engine prop jet. But no arrests were made.

A spokesman for Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano said that in the Todos Santos case, authorities are still investigating whether the men local police encountered at the landing site were, in fact, federal police. “It would not be the first time we found drug traffickers wearing false uniforms and carrying false credentials,” the spokesman said.

But Lozano also has conceded in the past that key federal law enforcement officials routinely work with the drug cartels in a network of corruption known here as “narco-politics.”

U.S. law enforcement sources said the Todos Santos incident was the first time since March that a large jet is known to have landed on a clandestine airstrip. Sources in both countries said they had hoped that an intensive U.S.-Mexican effort to better police the air and ground had stymied the cartels’ strategy of using large, converted passenger jets to smuggle cocaine.

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The Nov. 4 incident was reminiscent of another Caravelle landing in the northern state of Zacatecas more than a year ago that several Mexican and U.S. investigators linked to official corruption. Mexican transit police reported that they seized a shipment of about 10 tons of cocaine from that aircraft. But, one senior police commander later stated, corrupt federal police intervened and hijacked all but 2.5 tons of it.

The Zacatecas case so enraged U.S. authorities--who later identified the same cocaine coming across the California border--that it became the subject of U.S. congressional testimony about lax drug enforcement under Carlos Salinas de Gortari, then Mexico’s president. These days, under Zedillo’s year-old administration, U.S. officials have praised the commitment and cooperation of Mexico’s counter-narcotics agencies.

Concern by Mexico’s anti-corruption forces over the Todos Santos incident goes beyond the possible involvement of federal police to the scale of the operation to destroy the crippled Caravelle. The drug smugglers apparently spent hours, working with large cranes and tractors, breaking up the aircraft, then burning and burying it, according to accounts by Mexican and U.S. officials based on what little evidence was found at the scene.

“They certainly were trying to hide something or protect someone very big,” said one Mexican agent in Baja California Sur.

Mexican and U.S. officials assumed at first that the shipment belonged to the Pacific cartel, the Tijuana-based organization headed by the Arellano brothers. That group traditionally has controlled smuggling routes through Baja California.

But the Pacific cartel, which was implicated in the 1993 assassination of Guadalajara’s Roman Catholic cardinal, has been badly hurt in recent years as the Mexican government has aggressively arrested its leaders.

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Intelligence officials on both sides of the border now say the Todos Santos operation may have been directed by Amado Carrillo Fuentes, whose Juarez cartel has emerged as the most powerful of Mexico’s five major drug-smuggling groups. It has done so largely by forming alliances with other cartels and sharing smuggling routes, equipment and intelligence with them, those officials said.

Carrillo, known here as “Lord of the Skies,” has been linked to all known cargo-jet drug shipments using clandestine Mexican airstrips in the past, including a Caravelle landing in which Mexican agents seized about 1.5 tons of cocaine in the state of Sonora in March--the last known Caravelle landing before Todos Santos. Intelligence agents suggested that the Todos Santos operation could be a sign of the effectiveness of Carrillo’s new alliances--a network that U.S. officials now call “the Mexican federation” of drug cartels.

For chief prosecutor Cruz, though, the location and condition of the Todos Santos landing site will make it difficult to trace that cargo’s owner.

“Whatever they had, they could have gotten rid of it by land, sea or air,” he said, noting that the lake bed is just 200 yards from the Pacific Ocean. “It’s going to take a long time to get to the bottom of this.”

Times staff writer Fineman reported from Mexico City, special correspondent Pyes from Washington. Times researcher Shasta Darlington contributed to this report from Baja California Sur.