Mexican Drug Ring Witness Vanishes

By ANITA SNOW

TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) Cops on both sides of the border wanted to talk to
Alejandro Hodoyan, hoping he held the key to cracking Mexico's most violent
drug gang.

But Hodoyan and much of what he knew vanished in early March when two men
with automatic rifles jumped out of a van in a Tijuana parking lot, tossed
Hodoyan inside, and screeched away.

Authorities ``thought he knew a lot,'' said Hodoyan's mother, Cristina
Palacios de Hodoyan, who was with her son the day he disappeared. ``But he
complained that they wanted a lot more information than he had.''

The 35yearold Hodoyan was known as a ``narco junior,'' a member of
Tijuana's wealthy class seduced by the glamour and the grittiness of the
Arellano Felix ring, Mexico's secondmost powerful narcotics cartel.

Mexican police considered Alejandro Hodoyan a midlevel trafficker. Over the
years, they say, he had learned much about childhood friends in the drug
gang: the murders they had committed, the authorities they had bribed, the
cocaine they had driven over the U.S.Mexico line.

And law officers sensed that he wanted out.

Hodoyan's wife had threatened to leave him if he didn't stop seeing his old
friends, his mother said. His daughters were growing up, and the young man
who had once aspired to become a lawyer wanted a normal life.

``I was offered protection in exchange for information,'' Hodoyan wrote of
U.S. officials in a notarized statement one day before he disappeared.

``I was told that they had information that the Arellanos had ordered me
killed and had taken a contract out on my life ... But if I cooperated, I
would be protected.''

Mrs. Hodoyan said her son was still debating the Americans' offer on March 5,
the day the van cornered her and her son in the family car.

He had made the sworn statement precisely because he feared something would
happen to him, she said.

U.S. authorities refused to comment on Hodoyan's disappearance, confirming
only that they knew about the case and that it involved ``extremely
dangerous'' people.

Mexican authorities say Hodoyan is probably dead, but otherwise also refused
to talk about him.

Hodoyan's old bosses the Arellano Felix brothers control almost all drug
trafficking along the CaliforniaMexico border, transporting tons of cocaine
and marijuana into the United States.

But U.S. authorities allegedly were most interested in what Hodoyan knew
about a more recent employer disgraced former Mexican drug czar Gen. Jesus
Gutierrez Rebollo.

In his statement, Hodoyan wrote that he met the general during months of
military interrogation in Guadalajara. When Gutierrez Rebollo became head of
the country's antidrug effort on Dec. 6, Hodoyan agreed to work as the
general's bodyguard in return for his political protection.

Mexican prosecutors allege the drug czar also was protecting a druglord rival
of the Arellano brothers. On Feb. 18, Mexico fired Gutierrez Rebollo,
arrested him and charged him.

About then, American law officers allegedly approached Hodoyan.

Hodoyan wrote that on Feb. 11, a U.S. government plane flew him from suburban
Mexico City to San Diego. The government put him up at a hotel, where he
talked with federal agents and prosecutors.

He quietly left a few days later without telling his hosts and returned to
Tijuana.

Mrs. Hodoyan said her son worried about incriminating friends and a jailed
brother. He also fretted about possible jail time and estrangement from his
family.

Mrs. Hodoyan refuses to believe her sons were as involved as authorities say.
But she admits they knew the Arellano brothers.

``Everyone knew them,'' she said. ``At parties they bought champagne for
everyone.''

The Hodoyans and childhood friends from Tijuana's exclusive hillside
neighborhoods had befriended the Arellano brothers in the 1980s at the city's
throbbing discos and highclass parties. The Arellanos served up the
excitement; the rich kids provided respectability and contacts.

The Arellano's upperclass associates spoke perfect English learned at
private Catholic schools, had impeccable manners and drove shiny new
fourwheeldrive trucks.

Their exciting, dangerous world started falling apart when Hodoyan's
25yearold brother, Alfredo, and a childhood friend were arrested on a
Mexican warrant just north of the border on Sept. 30.

Alfredo is now in a San Diego jail, awaiting extradition on Mexican charges
that he helped the drug ring kill the federal police commander of Baja
California last fall.

Most of the other narco juniors are out of commission as well, authorities
say: dead, behind bars, on the run or like Hodoyan simply gone.