Juarez Probe Solidifies Fear of Cartel

To residents of this weary city with a drug-related murder rate higher than 1980s Miami, a massive search for bodies on dusty ranches on the outskirts of town is a little like their daily lives: bustling with activity and tinged with knowledge of horrors just below the surface.

Mexican and U.S. authorities continued to dig Wednesday in suspected narco-traffic killing fields that may hide up to 100 skeletons--but so far have yielded only six sets of remains. Bus driver Jorge Aguilar watched ski-masked Mexican soldiers at one suspected grave site with morbid fascination.

Peering over the barbed wire, Aguilar, 45, said: “We knew that a lot of people were disappearing in the last three years, both men and women. But it’s only now that they think it was this kind of thing.”

He gestured at the arid ranch called the Bell, said to contain a secret cemetery. Named for a large mission-like bell hanging from its white gate, the ranch was one of the first two properties investigators began searching Monday night.

Mexican Atty. Gen. Jorge Madrazo Cuellar said Wednesday that two more potential grave sites on other ranches had since been found farther from Juarez. Madrazo said exhumation teams will only begin work at those sites after the first two ranches have been fully explored.

By Wednesday, investigators had recovered partial remains of six bodies. “We have found some bones, some clothing and some fabric,” said Jose Larrieta, head of the organized crime unit of the federal attorney general’s office. Some bodies, he said, were clothed, others stripped to their underwear.

Mexican newspapers said the Bell had been bought by front men for Juarez drug cartel chief Amado Carrillo Fuentes shortly before his death in 1997 in a botched plastic surgery operation. One of those front men, Jorge Salvador Ortiz, is said to be on the run. His brother, Jesus Manuel Ortiz, and the ranch caretaker, Guillermo Falcon, reportedly were taken into custody for questioning this week.

Aguilar, watching the action at the Bell for more than three hours, described himself as a grim sort of “tourist.” But to many others--residents who are one step closer to the drug violence--this week’s excavation was far more than lurid spectator sport. It seemed to confirm some of their worst fears about the sway of drug cartels over Juarez.

“This is not how we hoped it would turn out,” said Jaime Hervella, a resident of El Paso just across the border, whose godson disappeared from a Juarez street. “We were expecting to find our loved ones in military jails, not illegal cemeteries. To have this happen just a few miles from where we are, in our backyard, it’s horrible.”

A dusty, animated city of 1 million, Juarez lives by the maquiladora industry--and the bloody commerce of Carrillo Fuentes’ successors. In addition to the unspeakably high murder rate, Juarez in recent years has also seen a spate of more than 100 unsolved disappearances.

Most of the missing, Hervella and experts said, were somehow connected to the drug trade.

Hervella, who co-founded the Assn. of Relatives and Friends of Disappeared Persons, said his godson, Saul Sanchez Jr., may have been punished by drug traffickers for making their job more difficult. Sanchez, he said, built a microwave communications system used by Mexican federal police to eavesdrop on drug traffickers.

Sanchez and his wife were abducted, Hervella theorizes, when the traffickers got wind of “the damage he was causing the cartel.”

On Tuesday, Madrazo told Mexico’s TV Azteca that the number of secretly interred bodies may not necessarily be the same as the number of Juarez’s “disappeared.” But in New York, the human rights group Amnesty International called for a full investigation of the case, saying it could provide evidence needed to prosecute those responsible for “numerous disappearances and extrajudicial murders.”

Amnesty said in a statement that “some of those ‘disappeared’ were last seen in the custody of people believed to be members of the Mexican security forces.”

On Mexican TV, newscaster Abraham Zabludovsky noted in an aside during the main national afternoon broadcast that the case broke just ahead of Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo’s meeting with President Clinton in Washington next week.

“The damage to Mexico is already done. Its image is very tarnished,” Zabludovsky said. “It is serious damage.”

For residents and the families of the “disappeared,” meanwhile, the onslaught of helicopters, ski-masked soldiers and U.S. investigators suggested a suddenly plausible answer to years of questions.

“It’s a horrible story to think that a hundred bodies might be buried in our backyard,” said Alfredo Carbajal-Madrid, assistant managing editor of Juarez’s El Diario newspaper. But, he added, “I don’t think it’s a real surprise. I don’t think we should be that surprised.”

His newspaper, which has focused on the investigation for the past three days, has been inundated with requests for information from media all over the world. Among Juarez’s citizens, he added, the probe is “the main thing in conversations.”

Cesar Figueroa, 12, who lives in a hut just down the street from the Bell, said the neighbors have whispered for years that the place belonged to associates of Carrillo Fuentes. His neighbor, 70-year-old Francisca Lozano, said she’d heard rumors too but avoided contact with the mysterious people behind the white metal gate.

“If you asked me about [a cartel cemetery], I’d say it was a lie--it’s always been so peaceful there,” Lozano said. “But only God can know what’s going on at night.”

Kolker reported from Juarez and Smith from Mexico City. Times researchers Lianne Hart in Houston and Jose Diaz in Mexico City contributed to this report.