Pact overshadows news that pair was to be extradited to U.S.

By RICARDO SANDOVAL / The Dallas Morning News

MEXICO CITY – When news came last month that Mexico would soon extradite two top suspected drug traffickers to face charges in American courts, it was heralded by some as the cap to a good summer in the United States' war on drugs.

The extraditions of Jesús "Chuy" Labra Avilés and Jesús Hector "El Güero" Palma were to follow the arrest in June of two suspected ranking operators in the Tijuana-based Arellano Félix organization.

Mr. Labra once was the chief financial planner for the cartel, authorities said, and the arrests and imminent extraditions had U.S. officials declaring that the gang was "in ruins."

But those gains were overshadowed by an ominous jailhouse agreement. Earlier this year, in a clandestine meeting at a federal prison outside Mexico City, Benjamín Arellano Félix and Osiel Cárdenas, accused leader of the Matamoros-based Gulf cartel, agreed on a joint venture between their two organizations, authorities said.

Now the two are said to be fighting the rival Juárez cartel in a struggle to control lucrative trafficking routes and tunnels along the 2,000-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico.

"They've come together to fortify their organizations," said José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, Mexico's deputy attorney general in charge of the organized crime task force. "These organizations are very damaged, and they realized that alone they could not sustain territory and needed help. ...For us this is very dangerous."

The recent confiscation of some 8 tons of marijuana in a suburban home in Ciudad Juárez signaled to some analysts that a broader border shooting war may soon break out.

Informants reportedly told Mexican federal authorities that the marijuana belonged to the Arellano Félix organization and that police were notified of the stash by the Juárez cartel.

Soon after, Arnulfo Loya Olivas, 24, was found dead in Chihuahua City, south of Juárez. According to local police reports, Mr. Loya was tied to the Tijuana traffickers.

Juárez has had about 20 drug-related killings this year, putting the city on a pace to eclipse last year's total of 30 drug-related homicides, according to local police. In Tijuana, authorities reported 180 violent deaths this year, and U.S. officials attribute many of those to drug-gang violence.

Benjamin Arellano Félix was arrested in March 2002 in Puebla, east of Mexico City. His arrest followed the death of his brother, Ramón, in a Mazatlán shootout with police. The Mazatlán officers, according to agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, were on the payroll of Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada – a kingpin now said to be working alongside Vicente Carrillo Fuentes and the Juárez cartel.

At its zenith, the Arellano Félix family dominated drug trafficking in western Mexico and was seeking ties through drugs and weapons swaps with Colombian rebels and Russian mafia figures, authorities have said.

Osiel Cárdenas was arrested in March 2003 after a protracted firefight with Mexican police and an army special forces unit. In the late 1990s, he rose to power in a cartel that controlled trafficking into east Texas and the smuggling of Colombian cocaine around the Gulf of Mexico and the Yucatán peninsula, authorities said.

The first flash point in this new war among traffickers will probably be the mountainous region just east of Culiacán in the western state of Sinaloa, Mexican authorities said. Dozens of drug-related homicides have been registered this year in a region that is the childhood home of the Arellano Félix siblings and their chief rival, Mr. Zambada. Mr. Carrillo Fuentes is also from Sinaloa.

The cartel realignments and new bloodletting have diminished any elation U.S. and Mexican officials were feeling about the Mexican Foreign Ministry's approval of the extraditions of Mr. Labra and Mr. Palma.

Mr. Labra was arrested in March 2000 by Mexican army special forces as he watched a youth soccer match in Tijuana. Within months, the bodies of three Mexican federal investigators who had been working closely with the DEA were found. The men had been tortured and then crushed by trucks and dumped into a desert ravine east of Tijuana.

In the 1980s and early '90s, Mr. Palma was one of Mexico's "Cocaine Cowboys" – a generation of kingpins raised in Sinaloa who were particularly vicious. He is serving a sentence on trafficking charges but was first arrested in 1995 in connection with nine slayings – of the family of Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo, a relative of the Arellano Félix brothers who allegedly had killed Mr. Palma's children and his former wife.

"These are two significant extradition cases," said a U.S. official who asked not to be identified. "In every case, we recognize Mexico's right to prosecute individuals we also want in our court system. Under our treaties, the extraditions can be delayed until the resolution of Mexican charges. That may come soon for these two men. This is a big deal for us."

Extraditions of suspected drug traffickers have increased to an average of 43 per year. Between 1996 and 2000, the yearly average was 24, according to Mexican government figures.

Many of those extraditions, however, have been of U.S. citizens on the run in Mexico. The only notable extradition of a Mexican drug suspect was the May 2001 transfer of Arturo "Kitty" Páez, an alleged hitman for the Arellano Félix organization.

Meanwhile, Mr. Labra and Mr. Palma remain in custody in Mexico. They have appealed their extraditions to Mexico's Supreme Court.

E-mail rsandoval@dallasnews.com