Agents’ Deaths Underscore Peril of Mexican Drug War

Mexican drug prosecutor Jose Patino Moreno enjoyed the respect of U.S. authorities along the international border even before accepting the daunting assignment that would be his last.

Courtly and careful, Patino, a ranking lawyer in the narcotics unit of the federal attorney general’s office in Mexico City, had impressed U.S. counterparts as a trustworthy ally and a bright spot in his country’s often-fitful campaign against drug smuggling.

When he was named in December as the point man in a new secret hunt by both countries for the leaders of the notorious Arellano Felix drug gang in Tijuana, U.S. law enforcement officials held out hope that the move would jump-start efforts that had gone nowhere for months.

The 48-year-old Patino didn’t disappoint them. During the ensuing months, he displayed what U.S. authorities describe as a refreshing willingness to swap tips and follow up leads in Mexico that had been unearthed by U.S. agents and other sources.

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Patino was gathering evidence on the drug kingpins’ possible whereabouts in Mexico and compiling a list of properties that are believed to have been bought with drug proceeds and eventually could be seized as part of the Mexican government’s effort to financially paralyze the cartel.

Patino prepared “numerous” search-warrant affidavits in preparation for such raids, the U.S. official said, though it was unclear how many raids were carried out.

But then came the gruesome reminder of the potential price for such cooperation. On April 11, Patino’s body was found, along with those of two fellow agents and the used Chevrolet Lumina they had recently bought, in the stony depths of a mountain ravine between Tijuana and Mexicali.

All three bodies bore signs of beatings so savage that officials on both sides of the border are certain that torture preceded death--possibly by half a day. Patino’s face wore the ghastly markings of a clubbing that smashed every bone; his back was tattooed with tire marks from a vehicle estimated to have weighed 3 1/2 tons.

His partners, fellow federal prosecutor Oscar Pompa Plaza and army Capt. Rafael Torres Bernal, who was on loan to the effort, appeared to have been brutalized even worse: Their heads are not even recognizable in photographs.

Drawing Close to the Arellano Brothers

U.S. investigators say the killings came as the team led by Patino, acting on secret information developed by both countries, was drawing tantalizingly close to the three fugitive Arellano brothers and the henchmen who run the drug cartel, one of Mexico’s biggest and most violent.

“The work that Pepe Patino was doing hit a nerve,” said Errol J. Chavez, special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s office in San Diego. “We scared them.”

Mariano Herran Salvatti, Mexico’s top drug prosecutor, has scheduled a memorial tribute to the three slain men today in Mexico City.

Patino, married and a father of four, quietly accepted the dangers of his job, Mexican officials say. “He never said no. He never put up any objection in his work,” said a colleague in the Mexican attorney general’s office who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The trio’s horrified superiors in Mexico City suggest that the killings were a message sent by the traffickers, who are thought to have murdered dozens of prosecutors, judges, police and suspected rivals over the years.

But U.S. authorities instead believe that the three agents, who, for safety reasons, were living in a house rented by the Mexican government in suburban San Diego, were tortured in an effort to dislodge secrets they may have picked up during meetings with investigators from the DEA and the FBI.

“That was not a killing to send a message,” said one U.S. official. “That was an attempt to know what we know.”

The slayings dealt a blow to the search for the drug gang’s leaders--one of whom, Ramon Arellano Felix, has been on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List since 1997--and have shaken U.S. officials who had befriended Patino and come to view him as a reliable and courageous cop.

Amid the charged rhetoric in the capitals of both nations over who is helping in the war on drugs and who is not, these officials say, the killings underscore the huge practical challenges at street level, where the life of an ally as valued as Patino can be so easily and cruelly snuffed out.

“He’s the guy that we worked with and who got things done. That’s very rare,” said a U.S. official. “Now who do we work with?”

William Gore, special agent in charge of the San Diego FBI office, worries about longer-lasting damage. “I hope this doesn’t have a chilling effect, which is what the Arellanos want,” he said.

The Mexican government has responded to the murders by dispatching a wave of agents, backed by soldiers, into Baja California, the Arellanos’ home base and the scene of escalating drug violence during the last year.

The bloodshed had seemed to crest when Tijuana’s police chief, Alfredo de la Torre Marquez, was assassinated on a city highway Feb. 27 shortly after Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo spoke out against narcotics traffickers during a speech in Mexicali.

State authorities in Baja California soon rounded up seven gunmen alleged to have confessed to killing the chief and 14 other people. The suspects allegedly confessed to have worked at the behest of a drug trafficker in the state of Sinaloa who hoped to expand his presence into the border area.

Some U.S. officials are skeptical and believe instead that the killings were part of factional housecleaning within the Arellano Felix organization, known in U.S. law enforcement circles as the AFO. There is also considerable skepticism north of the border over whether the seven suspects committed all 15 murders.

Quick Raid Snares Suspected Mastermind

Into this increasingly unstable landscape arrived Patino and a small group of prosecutors and agents. U.S. and Mexican officials say the group’s mission was a stepped-up, highly confidential effort to find the Arellanos and to investigate a separate Mexicali-based smuggling organization.

Just four months after Patino took the assignment, and weeks after his transfer to the border full time, Mexican soldiers snared Jesus Labra Aviles, the suspected financial mastermind of the Arellano Felix group, during a lightning operation that surprised even U.S. agents.

U.S. authorities took note when Patino, unlike other officers present after the arrest, chose not to mask his face before television cameras. When Labra was shuttled to Mexico City, it was Patino who rode escort and questioned him. When Labra’s lawyer turned up dead on a Mexico City street a few days later, Patino took over the Tijuana end of the investigation.

But Patino was also pursuing other, unspecified leads that were part of what officials described as a “specialized purpose or tactic” aimed at cracking the cartel. “What was finally developed and worked between the two [countries] was getting very close to locating the AFO,” said Chavez.

Patino knew the risks. Fretful over the perils south of the border, his bosses took the step of renting the two-story house in a residential San Diego neighborhood that Patino was sharing with Pompa, Torres and three other attorneys and agents. He got house-hunting help from U.S. agents who shared his worries.

Authorities in both countries believe the three men who were killed, unarmed at the time, were abducted in Mexico en route from their San Diego home to a meeting in Tijuana on the morning of April 10. Photographs taken with a remote camera mounted at the Otay Mesa port of entry show their white Chevy sedan entering Mexico.

It apparently did not arrive at the drug agency office, barely a mile away. The car and the three battered bodies were found the following day a few hundred feet below a mountain highway 70 miles away.

The way that the victims were intercepted has led U.S. authorities to suspect a set-up by someone inside the Mexican government familiar with Patino’s appointments. Mexican officials said they are investigating the possibility of involvement by federal police agents.

U.S. officials tend to cast a skeptical eye on their counterparts in corruption-riddled Mexican law enforcement. But those who knew Patino spoke unabashedly of his determination.

“Pepe was a front-line soldier,” said Alberto A. Arevalo, a U.S. prosecutor who became friends with Patino after they worked together on an anti-smuggling operation in 1997. “He should be held out as somebody who gave his life in protecting people on both sides of the border.”