The New York Times

Thursday, December 2, 1999

Drug Inquiry Finds Remains of 6 People in Mexico

By SAM DILLON

IUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- American forensic experts have unearthed the remains of six people at a farm outside this border city, where they are searching with Mexican investigators for clues to the fate of scores of people who have disappeared, most of them after running afoul of drug traffickers.

Journalists who watched the exhumations across the front wall of the farm Wednesday saw agents gather material several times from a shallow pit, place it in bags and carry it a few yards to a mobile forensics laboratory that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has moved to the site. The farm is on the southern outskirts of Ju rez, 15 miles south of El Paso.

A spokesman for the attorney general of Mexico, Isidoro Guerson, said four sets of human skeletal remains were discovered on the third day of the joint operation. Partial remains of two other people were found on Tuesday.

The search apparently began after an F.B.I. informer, whose identity is secret, told authorities that bodies were buried at the site.

Earlier in the day, the head of the Mexican organized-crime unit, Jos Larrieta Carrasco, told reporters that some of the bodies had been found with clothing and that others were in underwear.

Attorney General Jorge Madrazo said in a television interview in Mexico City that along with the remains found on Tuesday, the investigators also encountered "some clothing and a pair of boots, which are tied, with paper, with glue."

Madrazo said authorities had collected files on 100 people who have disappeared in and around Ju rez in recent years. An association of relatives of the missing people has collected files on nearly 200 vanished people.

Most are Mexicans, though Madrazo said 22 were American citizens.

Although most of the missing vanished after the Mexican police had detained them, no one has been charged in any of the cases. The authorities presume the officers who carried out the detentions had been paid off by traffickers.

Ju rez has long been a major center of drug trafficking, plagued by frequent killings and unexplained disappearances. The authorities have detained several members of a family that was living at the farm where the bodies were unearthed. On Tuesday, the head of the family and another man who appears on property records as the farm owner were flown by authorities to Mexico City.

The joint operation, which has brought more American officials to perform law-enforcement duties inside Mexican territory than any other in memory, has aroused a prickly undercurrent of nationalism. Local television reporters asked Madrazo whether he had ceded Mexican sovereignty to the United States. His office issued a pointed statement that said the work of F.B.I. agents in Mexico was based on the terms of the Judicial Mutual Assistance Treaty and other bilateral anti-drug accords.

Interior Minister Diodoro Carrasco Altamirano vigorously contradicted President Clinton, who suggested on Tuesday that drug-related violence in northern Mexico was a result of recent progress in the drug war in Colombia, where antinarcotics cooperation with Washington has been far less troubled than in Mexico.

"We've had a lot of success in dismantling the Colombian cartels," Clinton said. "And one of the adverse consequences is that many of their operations moved to northern Mexico."

Carrasco bristled when asked what he thought "about those who are saying that Mexico is becoming more like Colombia."

"I think that is a completely mistaken perception," he said. "I don't think we're like Colombia at all. We're making an important effort in combating drugs, given the circumstances and realities of our country."