Arellanos Carry Mystique of Being ‘Untouchable’

They are handsome and ruthless, generous with their plentiful cash but pitiless to those caught poaching in their territory. They have outlasted--or outlived--anyone who has come after them.

Such is the growing legend of the Arellano Felix brothers, the reputed overlords of a multimillion-dollar cocaine empire known as the Tijuana cartel, whose brutal embrace reaches from Baja California to the Mexican capital.

Law enforcement officials on both sides of the border say the Arellanos and their rivals are engaged in a high-stakes battle for control of the Baja border, a leading port of entry for illegal drugs channeled into the United States, the most lucrative narcotics market in the world.

The brothers from Sinaloa--Benjamin, Javier and Ramon--are among Mexico’s most notorious fugitives because of their organization’s alleged involvement in a bloody wave of violence whose victims are said to include a Roman Catholic cardinal, federal police commander Ernesto Ibarra Santes, and possibly some of the six other senior law enforcement authorities from Baja slain this year.

But there are no visible “most wanted” posters for the Arellanos here in Tijuana, the adopted enclave where their capture would seem most likely.

“Untouchable” is the word chosen by Ernesto Ruffo Appel, the former state governor, to summon up the image of impunity that fuels their dark mystique.

“The only thing that is certain is they have not captured them,” Ruffo said. “They appear to be phantoms. People say they see them in public, in cantinas, driving in their cars, in restaurants. Police say they are in Tijuana but that they never see them.

“So that leads one to believe they don’t want to capture them,” Ruffo said.

Mexican authorities, however, say they are ready to strike back.

On Wednesday, they announced the arrest of four alleged Arellano henchmen they said had roles in the Ibarra killing and the apprehension of a man they described as a top Arellano aide.

“We are closer to being able to efficiently combat [the Arellano organization] and disband it,” Mexican Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano Gracia said.

U.S. officials, who are pressing Mexico to take action against the Arellanos, say that remains to be seen. If Mexican authorities do take action, they will be attacking a formidable fiefdom that has long been shrouded in myth and mystery.

That shroud was abruptly ripped off by Ibarra in interviews before his slaying Sept. 14. During his 28-day stint as Baja federal police commander, Ibarra effectively brought the Arellanos out of the closet, naming prominent Tijuana citizens he said were their associates and announcing his intentions of apprehending them. “This is their sanctuary. They are the directors of the Tijuana cartel,” he said.

Ibarra also broke the code of silence shielding corrupt federal police, who, he said in an interview, were “not just the friends of the traffickers, they were their servants.”

Two days later, he was gunned down in Mexico City, and his recruits--55 young police agents he trained and trusted--were flown out of Tijuana under heavy guard.

Despite his death, his insights into the alleged criminal organization--which he had investigated for three years--continue to paint a powerful portrait of the clan.

In an unusually candid interview before he was killed, Ibarra said he believed the Arellanos had won their Tijuana turf wars and become the czars of the most powerful drug empire on the Pacific corridor, and possibly all of Mexico. The millions they earned, he said, are invested in a business empire with 150 properties in Tijuana alone--security houses, safe houses, drug warehouses, hotels, pharmacies, nightspots--which employ 500 people, from foot soldiers and money launderers to front men.

“I don’t believe it,” said attorney Carlos Maldonado, who represents the only Arellano brother in prison, Francisco, 48.

Maldonado said the Arellanos are being made scapegoats for explosive police strife triggered by a nationwide sweep targeting more than 700 corrupt federal agents--including half of the 120-strong Baja force--in August.

“They’re blaming the [Arellanos] for everything now,” Maldonado said. “It’s easier to point the finger at them than to admit there are internal problems within the police forces. It’s easy to blame them, since they can’t defend themselves.”

All the bad publicity, Maldonado said, has the Arellanos’ mother “tremendously anguished, naturally.”

Over the years, Ibarra said, the Arellanos acquired distinctive reputations.

Ramon, 30, is the hothead, Ibarra and others said, with a taste for motorcycles, splashy print shirts, discos and fast living. Three months ago, Ibarra said, he was seen shopping at Horton Plaza in San Diego.

Authorities say an Arellano aide has named Ramon as the leader of a commando force that killed Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo at the Guadalajara airport in May 1993 after mistaking the clergyman’s car for the vehicle of a rival trafficker, Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman.

Ramon is said to have eluded arrest on the highway in Jalisco state in July 1995. Federal agents blocked the Arellano caravan with a van, but bodyguards wounded the police and spirited Ramon away, according to a statement from the attorney general’s office.

Javier, in his 20s, has been spotted driving a white Mercedes with darkened windows in Playas de Tijuana, a drowsy seaside suburb whose placidity has been shattered by the gangland killings of wealthy youths, police say.

He was arrested and held briefly, Ibarra said, by anti-narcotics commander Alejandro Castaneda Andrade in a notorious March 1994 shootout. As Javier lay handcuffed on the pavement, wounded in the leg, swarms of corrupt police came to his aid, shooting Castaneda in the back. Ibarra said: “There is an old saying, God helps the bad when they outnumber the good.”

Benjamin, or “Min,” 44, is said to be “the most discreet,” with a cool head for business, Ibarra said. Photos show him posing respectfully as a priest baptizes his infant, or in a tuxedo with his wife and toddler.

The Arellanos’ fugitive top lieutenant is Ismael Higuera, according to Ibarra. The late commander said Higuera is “the one who executes those who don’t pay the cuota [the tariff that narcotics traffickers impose on drugs shipped through Baja by outsiders] or acts without their consent,” and the one who paid off the “jackpot gang”--Ibarra’s nickname for federal police allegedly corrupted by the Arellanos.

The narcotics cartels and their bloody subplots had a much lower profile in Mexico when the Arellano brothers arrived in the early 1980s from Sinaloa, a state that has spawned a who’s who roster of drug barons.

They were already wealthy. Some U.S. experts say they are the scions of an old marijuana and contraband smuggling family run by Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, Mexico’s biggest trafficker until he was jailed in 1989. Maldonado denied that the Arellanos were related to Felix Gallardo, and said his client was born into a legitimately successful Culiacan business family.

For years, the Arellanos maintained a low profile in Tijuana. They bought homes in Chapultapec, an exclusive hillside neighborhood, and began to cultivate the nomenclature.

“They behaved like successful citizens. They would turn up with their bodyguards in discos and nice neighborhoods,” said Ruffo, the former governor. “People said they were involved with narcotics traffickers, but no one really knew.”

The brothers did not emulate the populist largess of traffickers in Colombia who financed clinics and schools and passed out cash to beggars, U.S. and Mexican drug agents say. The Arellanos gave to the rich. Even many of their foot soldiers were “juniors,” the sons of wealthy Mexicans, U.S. and Mexican drug agents say.

“Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa came up on the streets and gave to the poor,” a U.S. official said. “[The Arellanos] were born rich. They had no appreciation for the poor.”

The Arellanos’ image darkened considerably after the cardinal’s assassination and its disturbing aftermath. After the killing, Ramon Arellano and his squad boarded a commercial flight that had been mysteriously held, investigators said. During the two-hour flight, the Guadalajara airport never alerted Baja officials to the suspected killers’ arrival, Ruffo said.

Ibarra said the allegations of Arellano involvement in the cardinal’s slaying permanently changed public perceptions of the brothers.

“I don’t think the principal suspects in the assassination of a church leader can possibly be viewed in a romantic light in a country that is 90% Catholic,” Ibarra said.

Francisco was arrested seven months later, in December 1993. First he offered $150,000 for his release, Ibarra said, then $1 million.

He is being held at Almoloya de Juarez, a maximum-security federal prison near Mexico City that his attorney, Maldonado, described as a “medieval jail with electric lights.”

Maldonado said his client was convicted only for a minor offense, for possession of pistols and “hunting rifles,” and is appealing. He described Arellano as an exemplary Mazatlan disco proprietor who once persuaded boxer Julio Cesar Chavez to fight an exhibition match for poor children. “It was a frame-up,” Maldonado said. “He’s a scapegoat.”

Although the Arellanos have endured--through bloody turf wars against honest officials as well as corrupt police affiliated with other traffickers and foot soldiers of rival drug barons--violence and corruption have left the Baja anti-narcotics forces in disarray.

Most of the seven slayings this year of top authorities who had worked on drug cases in Baja appear to be narcotics-related, U.S. and Mexican officials say, though they suspect some victims may have been corrupt allies of warring kingpins.

A recent cartoon in El Sol de Tijuana captured the reigning mood of dread and suspicion left among the living. It showed a Grim Reaper with a machine gun stalking a distraught police investigator. “Police investigation of the Tijuana cartel,” it read.

“The bottom line is intimidation,” said narcotics expert Tom Cash, a former Drug Enforcement Agency chief in Miami who helped prepare the Carlos Lehder and Manuel Noriega prosecutions. “They don’t want any new Ibarras standing up and being counted any time soon.”

Police corruption deepens the narcotics intrigue.

Authorities face constant pressure to choose between plata o plomo--bribe or bullet--that can turn police politics into a kind of chess game between rival mobsters. Officers who refuse to play at all face personal risk, and some narcotics vendettas are played out between police of integrity and their corrupt challengers, U.S. and Mexican officials say.

Among the disguises found in raids of Arellano homes, Ibarra said, were mustaches, wigs--”even ladies’ dresses. I think they put those on to disguise themselves, too”--but most disturbing, federal judicial police uniforms that hinted at a corrupt alliance he vowed to end.

This is not the Tijuana envisioned by the architects of a San Diego plan to create a complimentary binational border region that, according to one civic activist, could make a joint Olympics bid someday. They worry about a different type of exchange--the recruitment by Mexican drug lords of San Diego gang members for violence that may spill across the border. Two of the alleged Arellano gunmen whose arrests were announced Wednesday were found at an apartment complex in Coronado Shores in San Diego, Mexican authorities say. One of them, according to San Diego authorities, was U.S. born.

“We are heavily invested in a border region characterized by rule of law,” said Alan Bersin, the U.S. attorney in San Diego. “That is a prerequisite for the treasure we have here for economic and cultural exchange. This exchange must take place in an orderly, stable and predictable environment.”

It is a national priority as well.

An estimated 70% of the cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana that reaches U.S. consumers moves across the Mexican border, according President Clinton’s Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Its strategic importance was underlined by Clinton when he pledged $100 million to fight drug trafficking in Latin America, with $37 million destined for Mexico. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said Mexico is to get 20 helicopters to patrol the common border and may eventually get 53 more.

A senior U.S. law enforcement official said the United States would be willing to assist Mexico in arresting the Arellanos “in any way.” There is even a contingency plan to activate a U.S. SWAT team should the Arellanos be spotted in one of their reputed San Diego haunts: Coronado, La Jolla and Chula Vista, U.S. officials said.

“The requirement to locate and apprehend the Arellanos and their henchmen is very crucial at this juncture,” the U.S. official said. “This is a defining moment for Mexican law enforcement. The need for a response to the Arellanos and their allies dictates this be taken for the grave matter that it is.”