Officials estimate he's behind the deaths of at least 100 Americans

By RICARDO SANDOVAL and ALFREDO CORCHADO / The Dallas Morning News

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – This country's long, bloodstained history of narco-trafficking has featured a series of drug lords, each seemingly more murderous than his predecessor.

Juárez cartel boss Vicente Carrillo Fuentes may be the drug trade's biggest kingpin yet, authorities say, eclipsing Ernesto "Don Neto" Fonseca Carrillo in the 1970s, Rafael Caro Quintero in the '80s and the Arellano Félix brothers in the '90s.

Interviews with informants and law enforcement officials pursuing the fugitive Mr. Carrillo Fuentes create a portrait of a drug lord who has set new, high bars for profitability and violence.

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The cartel brings in at least $10 billion each year from the distribution and sale of cocaine and marijuana in such major markets as Dallas, Houston, Chicago and New York, say current and former U.S. law enforcement officials. By comparison, Petroleos de Mexico, the national oil company and the republic's single largest enterprise, generates $16 billion annually.

Formally charged in U.S. courts with nine murders, Mr. Carrillo Fuentes has ordered directly or through lieutenants the deaths of hundreds of people – at least 100 of them American – over the last decade, investigators and informants estimate. The victims have included women and children as well as drug-trafficking rivals, authorities say.

Federal investigators looking into the slayings of hundreds of women in Juárez since 1993 say they suspect Mr. Carrillo Fuentes' organization is a key player in those cases.

Mr. Carrillo Fuentes, 42, took over the Juárez drug empire when his older brother, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, died in 1997 after botched plastic surgery. Amado was the infamous "Lord of the Skies" who ferried Colombian cocaine and heroin across Mexico in jets, protected by police and former Mexican army officials.

By 1997, the cartel was Mexico's largest and deadliest drug-trafficking organization. After Amado's death, its profile declined, and its leaders fell off the FBI's Top Ten Most Wanted list.

But the group remained active around Juárez as well as across the border in El Paso. And after a violent leadership fight among cartel lieutenants, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes restored it to notoriety.

Drug-interdiction veterans describe Mr. Carrillo Fuentes, a native of Sinaloa state in western Mexico, as more ruthless than his brother had been.

"He's just vicious," said Phil Jordan, former director of the El Paso Intelligence Center, or EPIC, which teams officials from several U.S. agencies in the fight against drug traffickers. "If Amado suspected a leak, he would first check it out and then kill the person. If Vicente suspects a leak, he simply has the person or persons tortured and executed. He takes no chances. He's paranoid about protecting his home turf."

Mr. Jordan said Mr. Carrillo Fuentes does not have the business acumen his brother did. "I'm surprised Vicente hasn't been taken down, because he's not a businessman," Mr. Jordan said.

Others disagree, noting that each year the cartel funnels about half a billion dollars in bribes to local, state and federal police and elected officials. That largesse, authorities say, has helped Mr. Carrillo Fuentes and his associates operate with impunity in Juárez and throughout Mexico.

New evidence of the Juárez cartel's insidious reach is surfacing in Morelos state, south of Mexico City, where more than 500 police officers suspected of drug corruption were suspended this week. The action follows the arrest of a high-ranking police official, José Agustín Montiel López, who was accused of running a protection network for the Juárez cartel and ushering drug shipments from Colombia through southern Mexico.

The emerging scandal in Morelos state is part of what a U.S. official said is an epidemic of state and local police corruption in Mexico that threatens the judicial reforms of President Vicente Fox.

But purchased impunity is nothing new in Juárez and Chihuahua state. The state attorney general recently resigned, he said, so that he could dedicate his time to clearing his name of drug-corruption allegations.

La Línea

Mr. Carrillo Fuentes uses as the nucleus of his killing apparatus a group known as La Línea, or The Line, whose main task is safeguarding passage of drugs across the border, authorities say.

Members, who are said to include Juárez and Chihuahua police officers, apparently participated in the torture and killing of 14 suspected drug smugglers whose bodies were found buried in the yard of a Juárez home during a weeklong search that began Jan. 23.

Mexican federal agents are holding 13 Chihuahua state police officers at an undisclosed location, questioning them about La Línea and Mr. Carrillo Fuentes while charges are prepared against them in the killings of the rival traffickers.

"We are slowly extracting information from them," said a Mexican federal investigator looking into the slayings of the Juárez women. "We are confident we can get more information from them," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

As attention on the Juárez slayings has intensified, Mr. Carrillo Fuentes has virtually disappeared. U.S. law enforcement officials say they do not know his whereabouts but add that they're working with Mexican agents to reel him in.

Mexican officials said they've come close to capturing the shadowy kingpin on three occasions in recent months – in Guadalajara, Sinaloa state and Juárez. He escaped just ahead of government raids, they said.

"I feel confident we're closing in on him," said José Luís Santiago Vasconcelos, chief of the organized crime task force in the Mexican attorney general's office. "But it's a fluid situation because he's proven to be very elusive."

Mr. Carrillo Fuentes may be looking for a base of operations other than Juárez, Mr. Vasconcelos added, perhaps in his home state of Sinaloa, where he could tap into a familiar cadre of gunslingers for protection.

In the meantime, he has nonchalantly navigated under the radar in both Mexico and the United States, according to U.S. intelligence reports.

He used a forged ID to travel between Juárez and El Paso, where his girlfriend lived with their child, according to the reports. His documents identified him as a Mexican police officer.

U.S. officials said it was not clear how long Mr. Carrillo Fuentes had been traveling between Juárez and El Paso, but an informant who has spoken with authorities said the drug lord routinely visited a woman named Gloria in El Paso's upscale Coronado neighborhood.

Mr. Carrillo Fuentes and the woman had a child, who was 8 in 2000, when U.S. authorities raided the home and discovered the false police ID, according to U.S. officials and the informant.

Sandalio González, agent-in-charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration in El Paso, said the reports "are probably true."

"Take a good look at the porous border. If you wanted to come across, could you?" Mr. González said. "We're constantly keeping track of these guys on both sides. This is their market. That doesn't surprise me."

Other drug lords

Authorities have also turned their attention to other drug lords even as they pursue Mr. Carrillo Fuentes, who remains the main attraction.

Next on agents' priority list are Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, a notorious drug lord who in 2001 bought his way out of a maximum security prison in western Mexico, and Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, who U.S. law enforcement officials say probably orchestrated the Feb. 10, 2001, ambush in Mazatlán in which rival kingpin Ramón Arellano Félix was killed.

Mr. Guzmán and Mr. Zambada have joined with the Juárez cartel in a bid to control the bulk of Mexico's drugs and money laundering businesses, a U.S. official said.

The three traffickers once were aligned in what U.S. intelligence reports in the 1990s called "The Federation," an amalgamation of several Mexican drug gangs that exploded onto the crime scene in the 1980s, pushing huge quantities of Colombian cocaine and heroin.

The Federation began to fall apart after a break between the founders of the Arellano Félix organization and gangs led by Mr. Guzmán and Mr. Zambada. The flash point in that turf war was a May 1993 shootout between the gangs at the Guadalajara airport – in which Mexican Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo was killed in a fusillade of bullets.