Mexicans Say Drug Lord May Be Dead

Authorities were trying to determine Friday whether a man killed in a shootout with police this month was Ramon Arellano Felix, the reputed leader of Mexico’s most-feared drug cartel.

The newspaper Noroeste in Mexico’s Sinaloa state reported that Arellano Felix was shot dead Feb. 10 in the seaside resort of Mazatlan. Arellano Felix is on the FBI’s 10 most-wanted list alongside Osama bin Laden, and the State Department has offered a reward of up to $2 million for his capture.

The newspaper alleged that Arellano Felix had gone to Mazatlan during its annual carnival to kill one of his drug-trafficking rivals, Ismael Zambada. While Arellano Felix and his henchman cruised the beach strip looking for Zambada, the paper said, state police stopped the men’s Volkswagen. A gun battle broke out that left one officer and two suspects dead, the paper reported.

Mexican and U.S. officials said only that the case is being investigated. But Sinaloa state officials also acknowledged that the bodies of the two slain suspects, including the one that could be Arellano Felix, had been returned a day later to people claiming to be family members, potentially undermining the probe.

If Arellano Felix was indeed killed, it would be by far the biggest blow to drug traffickers since President Vicente Fox took office in December 2000 vowing an all-out war on drugs. But the death of Arellano Felix, whose family allegedly controls the Tijuana cartel, would also likely set off reprisals and further bloodshed by the brutal drug gang.

The report came a day after the head of special investigations in the federal anti-drug unit was gunned down in his car on a Mexico City avenue. Mexican officials said the man, Mario Roldan Quirino, was probably slain to halt a major investigation.

The reported Mazatlan shootout was the latest in a spurt of drug-related violence in Sinaloa state, the home of the Arellano Felix family. In November, two federal judges were gunned down in Mazatlan in what was described as the first such killings.

Sinaloa Gov. Juan Millan said after those slayings that Fox’s declaration of war against the Arellano Felix cartel had pressured the family in Tijuana, the stronghold of its drug trade, and fed violence in nearby Sinaloa. Millan said then that the number of drug-related murders in Sinaloa had increased in 2001 to about 560 after falling in 2000.

Arellano Felix, 37, placed on the FBI’s list in September 1997, was accused of importing huge quantities of cocaine, marijuana and amphetamines into the United States. A lengthy indictment against him and his older brother Benjamin was unsealed in May 2000, accusing them of numerous trafficking offenses.

Ramon, 6-foot-2 and 220 pounds, has long been known as the most violent of the reputed four active brothers in the cartel and as the gang’s chief enforcer. He has been accused of orchestrating dozens of slayings of informants and rivals.

Jesus Blancornelas, who survived an assassination attempt attributed to the Arellano Felix brothers in November 1997, said that if Ramon indeed had died in the shootout, “I don’t believe that the cartel of the Arellano Felix will be weakened. They have shown us for years that when they have lost their best people, they have replaced them immediately.

“If it was true, this is a result of the vanity of Ramon Arellano, wanting to go to Mazatlan to personally kill ‘El Mayo’ Zambada. If it was this, it cost him his life,” said Blancornelas, the feisty editor of Zeta magazine in Tijuana.

Asked whether Ramon Arellano Felix had died in the shootout, Mexican Atty. Gen. Rafael Macedo de la Concha told reporters: “It is a possibility. . . . We are trying to establish if the person was Ramon Arellano Felix.”

Noroeste newspaper said one of the suspects slain in the shootout was identified as Efrain Quintero. He had been accused of leading the massacre of 12 people in a Sinaloa village in February 2001.

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Smith reported from Washington and Ellingwood from Los Angeles.