Juarez Grave Probe Is Sign of Drug Cartels’ Tenacity

When cocaine boss Amado Carrillo Fuentes died in July 1997 during plastic surgery to disguise his identity, some predicted the collapse of his Juarez cartel, one of the hemisphere’s premier drug-smuggling gangs.

But the four suspected burial sites of Juarez cartel victims discovered this week near the border city of the same name provide gruesome evidence that Mexico’s major drug gangs remain powerful and vicious threats, both to Mexico and the United States.

The key Mexican drug cartels, U.S. and Mexican officials agree, have evolved constantly in recent years even amid a crackdown against them. A new generation of younger traffickers, sometimes called “narco-juniors,” has added a cold, high-tech sophistication to the arsenal of old-fashioned corruption and brutality that made the cartels so feared.

The narco-juniors are no less brutal, but “their human and material structures are lighter, they disguise their merchandise, they move with more discretion, they are better educated, and they have more of an entrepreneurial vision of their business,” Proceso magazine said in an August analysis of the new breed.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said in a briefing paper this year that the new-wave cartels often provide instructions for their distributors “over encrypted communications such as phones, faxes, pagers or computers.”

Thomas A. Constantine, who resigned earlier this year as head of the DEA, grimly assessed the power of the cartels on ABC’s “Nightline” this week, declaring that the “drug cartels in Mexico are really more powerful than the government. The reason I say this is they make hundreds of millions of dollars, they kill hundreds of people, they are charged time and again in U.S. courts, and they are never arrested.

“The only conclusion I can draw is that they are operating in a sanctuary, and in that sanctuary they are more powerful than the central government,” Constantine said.

Richard A. Fiano, the DEA’s chief of operations, agreed with that conclusion in testimony to a congressional subcommittee in September. Mexico’s four major cartels, he said, “are in many ways the 1990s versions of the mob leaders and groups that U.S. law enforcement has fought since the beginning of the century. These international organized-crime leaders, however, are far more dangerous, far more influential and have a greater impact on our day-to-day lives than did their domestic predecessors. Their power and influence are unprecedented.”

The four major cartels, smuggling drugs ranging from marijuana to Colombian cocaine and Mexican-grown heroin, dominate Mexican cross-border trafficking to U.S. cities. The DEA estimates that the cartels provide 60% of the cocaine and 14% of the heroin consumed in the United States.

The Juarez cartel is considered one of the two most powerful cartels. The other is the Tijuana cartel, run by Benjamin and Ramon Arellano Felix. A third major cartel, run by Miguel Caro Quintero, is based in Sonora in northern Mexico. The fourth significant player, according to DEA analysts, is the Amezcua brothers’ methamphetamine-smuggling operation based in Guadalajara. Three Amezcua brothers are in custody and awaiting extradition proceedings that would bring them to the United States for trial.

Some analysts still include the Gulf cartel among the major players, but most say it has been broken up with the arrest of its boss, Juan Garcia Abrego. Bitter fighting between the Juarez cartel and other bands for the spoils of the Gulf cartel has led to constant killing in the state of Tamaulipas and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast.

That kind of violence also occurred within the Juarez cartel after the bizarre death of Carrillo Fuentes. Despite the bloody succession battles that followed the death of “the Lord of the Skies,” the Juarez cartel not only survived but spread its wings, establishing a formidable operation in the Caribbean resort city of Cancun.

That operation apparently even corrupted the governor of Quintana Roo state, Mario Villanueva, who went into hiding in February on the day his term ended. Mexican prosecutors said Cancun and the nearby coast had become a primary Juarez cartel gateway for drop-offs of Colombian cocaine by high-speed boats.

Prosecutors have indicted Villanueva in what they call the “maxi-proceeding” against the Juarez cartel, which names more than 100 defendants, some now in custody and others on the run.

But arrest warrants and prosecutions don’t necessarily mean convictions and jail time for Mexican traffickers.

The DEA’s Fiano told the congressional subcommittee that the Mexican cartels’ “ability to avoid arrest and continue to ship drugs into the United States is attributable to their ability to intimidate witnesses, assassinate and corrupt public officials.”

Mexican Atty. Gen. Jorge Madrazo Cuellar argued this week that the discovery of the purported burial sites near Juarez shows that U.S. and Mexican authorities are working together effectively and achieving some breakthroughs against the Juarez cartel.

Madrazo has pointed to a number of high-level arrests of Juarez cartel figures this year and a well-publicized crackdown on the organization’s burgeoning Cancun smuggling operation as signs of progress. On Wednesday, his U.S. counterpart, Janet Reno, also lauded Mexico’s attempts to fight internal corruption and take on the powerful cartels.

Madrazo says as many as 22 U.S. citizens are among the 100 people officially reported missing in Juarez in the mid-1990s, underlining the cross-border nature of the threat.

The working hypothesis, Madrazo says, is that the graves contain victims of the Juarez cartel.

FBI agents and Mexican police, using ground-piercing radar and sniffer dogs, have pulled the remains of six people from the first site excavated. They predicted a slow and grueling operation as they search for bodies on the four desert ranches outside Juarez.

The extent of the Juarez cartel’s reach into Mexican life became clear last year when officials disclosed that its leaders had nearly managed to buy a Mexican bank, Banco Anahuac, as a conduit for laundering the cartel’s profits. The deal was thwarted when regulators became suspicious.

The international scope of the cartel was underlined Thursday when Juan Miguel Ponce Edmonson, director of Interpol in Mexico, disclosed that Argentine police had arrested suspected money launderers for the Juarez cartel and had seized a number of properties. Ponce said evidence showed that the cartel also had operated in Brazil, Chile and Uruguay at least until Carrillo Fuentes’ death.

Vicente Carrillo Fuentes has been described as one of the cartel’s leaders since his brother’s death, and the organization has split into regional cells to make it harder for authorities to penetrate it.

Mexican anti-drug czar Mariano Herran Salvatti contends that the Juarez cartel has been hit hard, with authorities seizing about $250 million worth of property and cash, including four hotels and 24 houses.

“The most important achievement is that this group has been atomized, in a process similar to what happened to the cartels in Colombia,” Herran Salvatti said. “In our case, we have been able to go further because the Juarez cartel was spread all over the country. The small heads have not been able to coordinate among themselves.”

While the Juarez cartel has suffered some substantial blows from Mexican law enforcement initiatives, the Tijuana cartel of the Arellano Felix brothers appears to have survived relatively unscathed.

Constantine, testifying before Congress in March, described the Tijuana cartel as “arguably the most violent of the drug-trafficking organizations,” but he noted that “the truly significant principals have not been arrested and appear to be immune to any law enforcement efforts.”