Excavation of Suspected Drug Cartel Graves Begins

As FBI agents and Mexican police began digging for possibly scores of bodies on desert ranches Tuesday, aghast Mexicans wondered how a drug cartel became so powerful that it could maintain clandestine burial grounds practically within sight of the U.S. border.

Nearly 70 FBI forensic experts joined Mexican police and soldiers, some hiding their faces behind ski masks, for the first painstaking excavations of the two purported mass grave sites, believed to contain victims of the Juarez drug-smuggling cartel. An FBI spokesman in Washington said the graves are thought to contain more than 100 “or even as many as 200” corpses.

FBI officials said they suspect that the victims were buried there two to three years ago.

Barbed wire marked the perimeter of one of the ranches. Reporters and neighbors peeked through a white gate with wagon-wheel portals as black-clad authorities milled in the distance and a few soldiers in green fatigues guarded the property.

In Washington, President Clinton called the find “a horrible example, apparently, of excesses of the drug-dealing cartels in Mexico. And I think it reinforces the imperative of our not only trying to protect our border but to work with the Mexican authorities to try to combat these [cartels].”

But some Mexican newspapers and broadcast stations wondered whether Mexico’s independence has been threatened by the involvement of U.S. agents in the exhumations. Mexican Atty. Gen. Jorge Madrazo Cuellar responded: “This in no way damages our sovereignty. To the contrary, it strengthens it.”

Madrazo said that among the feared victims might be 22 U.S. citizens along with more than 100 Mexicans who had been reported missing in the Juarez area since the mid-1990s. “The working hypothesis is that these were executions by the Juarez cartel,” he said.

Esperanza Maldonado lives in a one-room cinder-block house across from one of the ranches.

“Hearing the news gives you terror and it makes you sad,” she said. Her husband, Rosendo Rojas, 52, added: “Everyone knew that house belonged to a narco-trafficker. It’s very nice, that ranch.

“It’s not like this,” he said, pointing to a concrete floor and battered aqua walls. “Everyone said, ‘Who can the owner be?’ ”

Analysts in Mexico City marveled at the brazen nature of the apparent burial grounds, one just 10 miles and the other 30 miles from the border city of Juarez.

Jorge Chabat, a professor at the Center for Economic Teaching and Research in Mexico City, said the existence of the graves “shows the great impunity and great powers that the Juarez cartel has. It is like a movie or a novel.”

Chabat compared the graves to those connected with the Chilean and Argentine military dictatorships in the 1970s but noted that the latter were created by governments, not by outlawed organized crime gangs.

“This is a very clear challenge to the rule of law,” Chabat said of the Mexican grave sites. “That a drug cartel has the luxury of having a clandestine burial ground shows the high degree of impunity operating here.”

Peter H. Smith, director of Latin American studies at UC San Diego, said the graveyards appeared to involve victims of the ferocious battle for control of the Juarez cartel after its leader, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, died during plastic surgery to change his identity in July 1997.

The apparent scale of the graves “has to raise the question of whether the local authorities had any inkling this was going on,” Smith said. “The clandestinity raises the issue of potential complicity on the part of local or state authorities.”

Furthermore, Smith said, that Americans are among the suspected victims “demonstrates that the major cartels, particularly the cocaine cartels, are truly transnational operations. They have been known to be recruiting foot soldiers and distributors and retail salespeople in the U.S. for some time. It is therefore not surprising that U.S. citizens would be involved in the operations of a cartel on the border that really serves the U.S. market.”

Sixty-eight U.S. agents, most from the FBI, arrived at the grave sites Tuesday morning to help secure the scene and assist in the excavations. The partial remains of the first victim were found within a few hours, said Thomas J. Pickard, the new deputy director of the FBI. TV Azteca reported later that the remains of a second person had been found.

The independent Mexican television station also reported that both an owner and caretaker of the property where the remains were found had been detained and taken to Mexico City.

FBI agents will be using “ground-piercing radar” and other high-tech methods they put to use in Kosovo earlier this year in assisting with the excavation of mass grave sites there.

Pickard praised Mexico for its “outstanding cooperation” in the investigation.

The FBI began tracking leads several months ago that helped point investigators to the Juarez sites in what Pickard described as one of the most “desolate” areas he had ever seen.

Pickard discounted reports that U.S. agents themselves were among the victims. However, other U.S. officials in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity, said former informants of the FBI and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration were believed to be among the victims.

A senior American law enforcement official said the Mexican government had agreed to allow the United States to bring the victims’ bodies across the border to El Paso for forensic examination by FBI agents there.

“It’s pretty amazing that Mexico would allow us to even bring the bodies to El Paso,” said the official, who had spoken to Mexican law enforcement authorities about the case. “It shows that they’ve become increasingly concerned about the threat that drug trafficking poses to public safety in Mexico.”

Jesus Blancornelas, the crusading Tijuana magazine editor who narrowly survived a drug cartel assassination attempt in 1997, noted that many Mexican police officers at the scene of the excavations wore balaclavas. He said this suggests that they are special anti-drug police brought in from elsewhere in Mexico, emphasizing the importance of the operation to the Mexican government.

Madrazo said 600 Mexican police officers and soldiers are taking part in the operation in Juarez, a sprawling industrial center.

Anxious family members of people who have disappeared in recent years in Juarez gathered with reporters at the gates of the two ranches where the massive police operations were taking place. Roman Alonso Aguilar, said his brother Jose, a father of six, disappeared in May 1998. Roman told reporters, “We hope it’s not true, but we came to see.”

Another brother, Manuel Saenz, said a witness saw two people wearing police uniforms come into the body shop where Jose worked and ask him to come help them repair their car. “We never heard from him again,” said Saenz, 29, an industrial engineer.

Three days after Jose Aguilar disappeared, the family went to the police. “They didn’t help us at all,” said Roman, a 36-year-old shopkeeper.

Roman Alonso Aguilar conceded the possibility that the disappearance involved drugs, but he said the family had no evidence of that.

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Kolker reported from Juarez and Smith from Mexico City. Times staff writer Eric Lichtblau in Washington contributed to this report.