Cartel's tentacles stretch to teeming sidewalks

By Roger Franklin

NEW YORK - It is a good 2000km from the killing fields of dusty, dirt- poor Ciudad Juarez on Mexico's border with the United States to a certain loading bay in New York's fashionable Flatiron district - two locations that might seem at a glance to have not the slightest thing in common.

But one lunchtime last week, as sidewalks bustled with chic women doing their Christmas shopping, a ritual was unfolding as it does every day between noon and 2 pm. At the entrance to the loading bay's dark hole, two young black men scanned the street for cops and steered customers to the drug sellers waiting inside.

In the dim gloom beneath a dirt-encrusted awning of corrugated iron and industrial glass, a pair of homeboys dispensed lunchtime pick-me-ups to two lines of mostly white, well-dressed customers.

Grass was $US60 ($118) for perhaps 3g of hard, dense heads sealed in a tightly furled bag. Silver-foil "twists" of fine white cocaine were $US40 a gram. Two women in black designer outfits shared a couple of snorts before ducking beneath the half-closed roller door to rejoin the throng.

It was not the prospect of a quick high that drew this reporter to the drug market. The attraction was a lesson in street-corner economics from its proprietor, a Jamaican who goes by the name of Edmund.

If someone could explain the carnage recently unearthed in far-off Juarez, where a Mexican drug cartel is thought to have filled four mass graves with as many as 200 bodies, Edmund would be the man.

US drugs tsar, retired general Barry McCaffrey, had been no help whatsoever. A call to his Washington office had been fielded by a flak who rattled off all the old and tired battle cries from America's so-called war on drugs. The massacres were further proof that there had not yet been sufficient "progress" in the drug war.

"It is a long, expensive crusade," the aide admitted. "But if we hold the course, if we don't lose our resolve, we can win. We will win." The generals' dispatches from the trenches of the First World War were written with the same dutiful and blinkered optimism.

Nor was the FBI of any assistance. On Thursday, as teams of FBI forensic investigators joined their Mexican counterparts to unearth leg bones, teeth and rotted shoes, the agency announced there would be no further communication with the press until the search and excavations of four possible mass graves were over. The Mexican Government, one source noted before the gag order, was "touchy" about a bunch of gringos taking over their turf. The Mexicans, whose informants had revealed the graves' existence, figured the death toll at around 200 while the Americans were insisting there could be no more than 20 bodies at most.

As for the graves themselves, the only remarkable thing about them was the sheer number of victims.

"Drug dealers kill people," the G-man said, as if noting that the sun also comes up every morning. "This time they killed a lot of them." So many that the FBI has assembled the largest team of forensic pathologists since it was called upon to help unseal the mass graves of Kosovo.

Just why the Juarez Cartel found it necessary to dispatch quite so many victims remains moot. The early indications are that the gang, which trans-ships an estimated $US2 billion worth of Colombian cocaine across the Rio Grande every year, came down with a case of raging paranoia after its fugitive leader, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, died in 1997 while undergoing plastic surgery in an effort to change his appearance.

Rival factions battled for control with Uzis and car bombs, all the while terrified that US drug agencies would seize the moment to plant informers in their midst.

At that point people began to vanish. Many were last seen in the custody of Mexican federales, presumed to have been working as freelance hit men for the cartel's bosses. Others "disappeared" from their homes or were hauled off buses by men brandishing guns and badges. In each case, none has been seen alive again.

"We believe these people were killed for their knowledge, or for being witnesses to drug trafficking endeavours," Assistant FBI Deputy Director Thomas Pickard said. And the victims did not need to know all that much to qualify for a bullet.

El Paso resident Leandra Pfeiffer last saw her son, Ricardo, four years ago. He was just a college kid, she told reporters, not a drug dealer or dope runner. If he knew anything about the smuggling cartel's activities, it could have been no more than he learned from his wilder friends.

What came to be known as the Juarez Cartel began life more than three decades ago moving marijuana, untaxed cigarettes and truckloads of illegal migrants north across the border.

But in the 1980s, as US drug enforcement taskforces clamped down on the traditional seaborne route through Miami and the Florida Keys, the Medellin and Cali cartels began looking for new ways to get their product to market. Outfits like the Juarez gang were obvious and eager recruits, delighted to run cocaine in return for an estimated 20 per cent of each shipment. With their own supplies guaranteed, the Mexicans continued to deliver for the Colombians while setting up independent US networks stretching north along the Rockies and up through the heartland all the way to Chicago, even into Canada.

"Marijuana, there is no percentage in that these days," remarked Edmund. "It's too easy to find when it's growing and too bulky to transport. I'm paying up to $US1300 a pound for grass and it's grown under lights. Good smoke, sure, but expensive and a lot of trouble. But coke, well coke is easy and everybody wants it. Coke sells itself."

Fifteen years ago, a gram of largely uncut, top-quality cocaine sold for around $US120. Today, as supply continues to remain several steps ahead of demand, the price is one-third that figure.

"The war on drugs? I love the war on drugs!" Edmund continued. "If they legalised drugs, I'm out of business. The bag it comes in would be worth more than the blow inside."

But is he not, just occasionally, bothered by the notion that his wares come stained with blood? "No way," he said. "It's just business. I sleep fine at night, just fine."

But not, of course, the kind of sleep inflicted on those uncounted unfortunates buried beneath the dust of Juarez.