DRUG LORD'S DEATH TAKES NEW TWIST

MEXICO CITY A tale of crime and intrigue took a bizarre twist Thursday
when Mexican authorities said the late drug baron Amado Carrillo Fuentes
was murdered and didn't die by accident after surgery in July.

But instead of clearing up doubts about the death of one of the world's
most powerful traffickers, the announcement only triggered more
questions.

Mexican authorities' official story is that on Oct. 29 they began
investigating three doctors suspected of having given Mr. Carrillo a
fatal drug dose. On Monday, five days later, at least two of the three
doctors' badly decomposed bodies were found stuffed in metal barrels
along a highway leading to the resort city of Acapulco.

"How convenient," said a highlevel U.S. law enforcement official who
requested anonymity. "If they thought it was murder, why did they wait
so long to open the criminal investigation against the doctors?"

Indeed, many unanswered questions remain, the American official said.
Among them:

Did Mexican authorities play a role in Mr. Carrillo's death? Did
authorities begin investigating because they knew the doctors had been
killed and they wanted to make it look like they were on the right
trail? More important, who ordered Mr. Carrillo's killing?

"I don't know that we'll ever know what happened," the U.S. official
said.

Whatever the truth, there's no telling if ordinary Mexicans will believe
it. Most people these days are profoundly suspicious of statements
coming from either the government or the ruling party. And few are
convinced that Mr. Carrillo, dubbed the "Lord of the Heavens," is really
dead.

"He's alive. They're only trying to make it seem like he's dead," said
Soledad Hinojosa Cortez, a retired school transport employee in Mexico
City. "I think there must have been some deal with highlevel
authorities. There's too much money involved for the Lord of the Heavens
to be dead."

A Drug Enforcement Administration official disputed that, saying rumors
that Mr. Carrillo is alive have "as much credibility as the millions of
sightings of the late Elvis Presley."

What's certain, U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials say, is that
Mr. Carrillo checked into a Mexico City clinic July 3 for a facelift
and liposuction. The circumstances aren't entirely clear. As some U.S.
antidrug agents see it, Mr. Carrillo was trying to change his
appearance to escape authorities. Others say it was vanity he wanted
to be better looking.

Whatever the case, he was found dead the next day. DEA agents blame
complications he was given too many sedatives considering the amount
of anesthetics already in his system.

Mariano Herran Salvatti, the head of Mexico's antidrug agency, expanded
on that version at a meeting with reporters Thursday in Mexico City.

He said Mr. Carrillo died in a recovery room after surgery. The cause:
He had been given anesthetics and Dormicum sleeping pills, a mixture
that "contradicted all medical science," Mr. Herran said.

"We have concluded that these doctors, acting with malice and the
intention of taking his life, administered a combination of medicines
that caused the trafficker's death," the Mexican drug czar said.

The mixture was especially potent, he added, because Mr. Carrillo had a
damaged liver due to alcohol abuse, and his system was more vulnerable.

Mr. Herran, dripping with sweat and refusing to answer pointed
questions, gave no clue as to why the doctors allegedly murdered Mr.
Carrillo.

He identified two of the doctors accused in the case as Jaime Godoy and
Carlos Avila. Highway maintenance workers found their bodies
blindfolded, handcuffed and partially encased in concrete inside
52gallon drums. Their fingertips and even their toes had been
mutilated, an apparent attempt to make them impossible to identify by
fingerprint.

The third body is also thought to be that of a doctor, Ricardo Reyes
Rincon, a Colombian who had reportedly been trained at a Guadalajara
medical school. Confirmation of the body's identity, however, is pending
DNA and dental record tests, Mr. Herran said.

Mr. Carrillo, 41, earned his nickname Lord of the Heavens by pioneering
the use of aircraft in drug smuggling. U.S. law enforcement officials
say his sprawling organization over the years moved hundreds of tons of
cocaine across the U.S.Mexico border.

But few Mexicans paid attention when authorities said he was dead.

"People just don't believe anything from those who hold power," said
Daniel Lund, director of MORI de Mexico, an international polling firm.
"It goes back to the authorities' long history of lying. People get real
cynical. And eventually they believe just the opposite of what they're
told."

Mexico has been dominated by the same political party for nearly seven
decades. And the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, has
done everything from stealing elections to murdering foes to stay in
power over the years, members of the political opposition say.

Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the country's disgraced former president who
left office in 1994, told his countrymen that Mexico was about to join
that exclusive club of developed nations. But the economy nearly
collapsed after he fled the country, and millions of Mexicans were
plunged deeper into poverty.

And there have been countless other deceptions over the years,
government critics say:

The authorities have routinely announced they're firing a batch of
dishonest police officers only to replace them with even more corrupt
officers.

The staterun oil company has proclaimed that gas prices will not go up,
only to raise them less than 24 hours later.

Or, as it happened in one case, authorities say a psychic nicknamed "La
Paca" led them to the body of a missing congressman only to admit later
the corpse was planted.

"After a while, it just seems like a movie, like life interacting with
art. You let your imagination run," Mr. Lund said.

Guadalupe Loaeza, a noted Mexican writer, said Mexicans' ability to
believe has become "very elastic."

"We're living an age in which we don't believe anything we hear, but at
the same time we believe everything," she said. "We don't believe our
authorities because they don't give us they promise us."

The idea that Mr. Carrillo was still alive gained new momentum earlier
this week when a Chilean newspaper called La Segunda reported that the
trafficker was in DEA custody and helping "dismantle drug trafficking
networks" throughout Latin America.

"Mexican officials were frantic," one U.S. law enforcement official
said. They wanted a statement from the Americans backing up their report
that the trafficker was dead. And this was just four months after
Mexico's ambassador in the United States called DEA Administrator Thomas
Constantine a "cretin" for confirming nearly a week ahead of the
Mexicans that Mr. Carrillo was dead.

"Now it's, 'Please can you help us?' " the American official said.