Mexican Drug Lord Found Slain

          By SAM DILLON

                MEXICO CITY -- Rafael Munoz Talavera, who fought for control
                of a major drug cartel after he was freed from charges of being
          the master smuggler behind the largest cocaine seizure in history, was
          found slain on Thursday, the authorities said.

          The authorities in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas,
          discovered the body of Munoz, 45, in a parked Jeep Cherokee at dawn
          on Thursday. He was tied and had several gunshot wounds.

          Munoz's father identified the body on Thursday evening, but the
          authorities said they would investigate further to be sure of its identity.

          U.S. officials have accused Munoz of leading a violent campaign to take
          control of the Juarez drug cartel after the death of its leader, Amado
          Carrillo Fuentes, during plastic surgery in July 1997. But in an open letter
          to President Ernesto Zedillo that Munoz paid to have published in several
          Mexican newspapers in December, he denied those accusations, calling
          himself "a simple, hard-working man."

          Munoz's death could provoke new revenge killings in Juarez, which has
          seen scores of drug killings in the last year, one law-enforcement official
          said Friday.

          But other people familiar with the drug underworld there said Munoz's
          death -- which they said confirmed their sense that he had lost his battle
          for the cartel months ago -- might usher in a calmer period in which his
          rivals control the billion-dollar narcotics commerce that passes through
          Juarez into El Paso.

          "He who lives by the sword truly dies by it," Glenn McTaggert, an
          assistant U.S. attorney who worked for seven years collecting evidence
          against Munoz, said Friday in a telephone interview. "They've certainly
          terminated a kingpin. This changes the whole complexion of the drug
          landscape."

          Until the fall of 1989, Munoz was known in Juarez as a sober restaurateur
          from a leading local family. Agents of the Drug Enforcement Agency in El
          Paso were suspicious of a $3 million estate he had built in El Paso, but he
          was not known as a major trafficker.

          But in September of that year, the authorities seized 21 tons of cocaine in
          a warehouse in the Los Angeles suburb of Sylmar, and several traffickers
          arrested in connection with that seizure identified Munoz as their leader.

          The amount of cocaine seized at Sylmar was more than has ever been
          found in one place before or since. And ledgers showed that much more
          cocaine -- hundreds of tons, worth billions of dollars -- had passed
          through the warehouse in the preceding months.

          After weeks of U.S. pressure for Munoz's arrest, the Mexican authorities
          arrested him and put him on trial in Mexico, using evidence collected by
          U.S. officials in the United States.

          A Mexican judge acquitted Munoz after a trial in Juarez in 1991. The next
          year he was rearrested in connection with the same charges in Hermosillo,
          and a judge there convicted him in 1995. But an appellate panel freed him
          in 1996, noting that he had been tried twice for the same crime.

          After his release, testimony that emerged in several U.S. trials and in
          Mexican court records showed that Munoz's acquittal in his first trial, in
          Juarez, had been arranged by the corrupt Mexican police commander
          who had arrested him and by the deputy attorney general who had
          supervised his prosecution. Both Mexican officials were on Munoz's
          payroll, witnesses have testified.

          Francisco Barrio Terrazas, the governor of Chihuahua, said in an
          interview this year that after his release, Munoz forged an alliance with
          exceptionally violent traffickers from Tijuana, hoping to seize control of
          the Juarez drug trade from Carrillo's followers.

          Months of killings followed. One grisly slaughter that Barrio attributed to
          Munoz and his Tijuana henchmen came in August 1997, when a Juarez
          restaurant was sprayed with gunfire, killing six.