Valley Of Death

By Elaine Shannon/Washington and Tim Padgett/Miami

If you don't live in the border region between the U.S. and Mexico, it is hard to understand how totally the drug business has come to dominate life there. But last week, as FBI and Mexican backhoes began digging into what may be mass graves containing dozens of victims of the region's drug cartels, it was suddenly a lot easier. FBI sources say the grave uncovered last week is probably the first of many; they will continue exploring for more this week. "In law-enforcement circles, there have been rumors of these for a long time," says a senior Drug Enforcement Administration agent. "Hell, there are bodies [from drug-related killings] buried all over the place down here."

The carnage is a sign of an epic shift in the drug business. From the early 1970s until a couple of years ago, if you went out on the streets of New York City to score cocaine, you'd look for a Colombian trafficker or a Dominican who dealt with a Colombian. Nowadays, you're just as likely to find yourself face-to-face with a Mexican. Your dealer's ethnic roots probably won't matter to you so long as the product is as advertised. But to DEA agents, the decline and fall of Colombia's once impregnable Cali cartel is a sensational development--surpassed only by the meteoric rise of the Juarez cartel now headed by Vicente Carrillo Fuentes. As the U.S. has cracked down on drug cartels in Colombia in the past decade, the business has shifted north and into the hands of Mexican traffickers, who play by the same bloody rules that characterized the lethal reign of the Colombians. Mexico's narco-industry is now a $30 billion-a-year business. "The flow of drugs through Mexico to the U.S. is not slowing down," says a U.S. official. "If anything, it's increasing."

The Juarez cartel has risen faster than most tech stocks, thanks to the vision of its late founder, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, and the ruthlessness of his dumber but meaner younger brother Vicente. For a long time, Mexican criminals were simply subcontractors whom the Colombians paid a set fee, usually $1,500 to $2,000 per kilogram, to truck cocaine over the U.S. border and to warehouses in California or Texas. There, Cali cartel employees would reclaim the goods, move them to major retailing hubs like Manhattan and Los Angeles and wholesale them to distributors. The Colombians pocketed a chunk of the wholesale and retail markups. The Mexicans risked their necks for chump change.

But kingpins like Amado changed all that. He fancied himself the Bill Gates of Mexican drug traffickers--a visionary who earned the nickname "Lord of the Skies" for the multiton shipments of Colombian cocaine he received in Boeing 727s. When he died in 1997 after botched plastic surgery, DEA agents were skeptical that his brother Vicente would last as the successor head of the Juarez syndicate. But in Vicente's favor, says a U.S. agent, "he's vicious."

After a two-year-long war against factional leaders, notably Rafael Munoz Talavera, found shot to death in his jeep in Juarez in September 1998, Vicente secured his bid to succeed his brother. He has since been indicted in El Paso, Texas, and in Mexico on drug-trafficking charges. Many of the bodies being unearthed south of Juarez are believed to be victims in that war, as are any Americans who Mexican officials say might be among the dead.

U.S. agents believe the war has subsided, but they admit they don't have good intelligence on the inner workings of the Juarez cartel or on Vicente himself. "We don't really know where he is," admits a top U.S. official. "He could be anywhere. We assume he's somewhere in Mexico, probably Chihuahua."

Still, Vicente is no Amado, a fact that emboldens his rivals--especially the recklessly homicidal Arellano Felix brothers, who run the Tijuana cartel. Shortly after Amado Carrillo's death, Mexican officials tell TIME, the Arellanos phoned in a death threat against U.S. antidrug czar General Barry McCaffrey as he toured the border. Specifically, they threatened a rocket-propelled grenade attack. The arrogant brutality wasn't a surprise: the brothers reportedly once sent the severed head of the wife of a rival to him in a box of dry ice.

But U.S. officials do know this: the Juarez cartel and the other Mexican syndicates control an ever larger slice of the illegal drug market in the U.S. They still transport cocaine for Colombian gangs, but they also move their own cocaine onto the street through retail-distribution networks that they established decades ago to sell Mexican marijuana to middle-class Americans. These networks have become one-stop shopping outlets for Mexican marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin.

The Mexican move into retailing is bad news for U.S. law enforcement because the Mexicans are even harder to track than Colombians. Mexican gangsters have ready-made support structures in most cities in the U.S.--large extended families who put down roots in the U.S. years ago. U.S. drug agents complain that, unlike the Colombians, who tend to stand out by the way they dress and speak, Mexican criminals are practically invisible even in non-Hispanic neighborhoods. They cross the border at will, indistinguishable from the millions of U.S. and Mexican citizens who present themselves at border checkpoints daily.

When they're in Mexico, as demonstrated by the Juarez killing fields discovered last week, they can do just about anything they want--often with the help of Mexican police. What most angers families of those presumed buried near Juarez is the alleged involvement of local, state and possibly federal police in the narco-murders. Recent studies by U.S. and Mexican researchers have shown that many Mexican police recruits are actually convicted criminals; they join police forces to get a piece of the narcotics action, usually as cartel enforcers. A state-police commander in Tijuana told TIME last year that he quit when cops under him killed an honest antidrug detective in 1996. "I realized I was working with police more vicious than the traffickers who pay them off," he said. Vicious, perhaps, but also well paid to ignore and even abet what goes on in the borderlands. U.S. DEA and other law-enforcement agents often refer to the corrupt, usually low-paid Mexican police as "la familia feliz"--the happy family, always smiling and never enforcing the law.

Last Friday, when Mexican Attorney General Jorge Madrazo and FBI Director Louis Freeh visited the first Juarez grave site, called Rancho de la Campana, Madrazo insisted that police were being investigated. "We're not going to cover up for anybody," he said.

Mexico, with multimillion-dollar U.S. help, has tried to create more professional, better-paid and less corrupt antidrug units. But even the new, vetted squads have been tainted--two Tijuana agents were charged last year with kidnapping--or have balked at pursuing targets like the Arellanos, who still freely frequent clubs and boxing matches on both sides of the border. During the '90s, only one Mexican drug-cartel leader--Juan Garcia Abrego--has been arrested.

As a result, exasperated U.S. officials are increasingly declining Mexican cooperation. For example, in a major sting that netted Mexican drug-money launderers last year, called "Operation Casablanca," the gringos didn't even consult their cross-border counterparts.

Americans, however, shouldn't get too righteous about the Mexicans' failings: the drug crisis, after all, is fueled by the insatiable Yanqui appetite for snorting, shooting and smoking what grows in Latin America. And the U.S. even plays a role in the violence: of the estimated 4,000 illegal guns seized in Mexico since 1994, more than 75% were traced back to U.S. smugglers--as were the rocket-propelled grenades the Arellanos threatened to fire at McCaffrey. It's something else to consider in the coming weeks while peering into the death pits outside Juarez.

--With reporting by Ronald Buchanan/Mexico City and Hilary Hylton/El Paso

With reporting by Ronald Buchanan/Mexico City and Hilary Hylton/El Paso