DRUG SUSPECTS ARE ARRESTED, ATTESTING TO A CHANGING MEXICO

MEXICO CITY, May 27 - Four years ago, American intelligence officers gave
their Mexican counterparts the address and home telephone for Jesus Albino
Quintero Meraz, a man they believed was shipping tons of Colombian cocaine
from the state of Quintana Roo, on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, to the
United States.

But nothing happened. In those days, Quintana Roo was a veritable
narco-state. Authorities from the governor down through the ranks of the
police were bought and paid for by Mr. Quintero and his associates in the
Juarez-based cartel, American and Mexican officials say, giving them
control over much of the multibillion-dollar drug trade on the Gulf of Mexico.

Now, it seems, things have changed in Mexico. Mr. Quintero, characterized
as an unremarkable thug who nonetheless rose to the top of one of the
nation's biggest drug gangs, was arrested on Sunday along with six
associates, including a federal police officer, in the gulf city of
Veracruz, the defense secretary and the attorney general announced today.

"He wasn't famous. He wasn't glamorous," said the defense secretary, Gen.
Clemente Vega Garcia. "But he was a very important figure in the cocaine
trade."

General Vega said that Mr. Quintero shipped, on average, 100 pounds of
cocaine daily to the United States, often working in coordination with
Osiel Cardenas, the head of another major Mexican drug organization, the
Gulf Cartel.

The arrest of Mr. Quintero, 42, which was carried out by military commandos
who are part of a federal drug enforcement unit, is the latest in a series
that has transformed the drug wars in Mexico. The demand for drugs in the
United States remains high and the overall supply essentially unchanged.
But Mexican authorities, working closely with American law enforcement and
intelligence officers, have jailed leaders and lieutenants from all four of
Mexico's major drug cartels in the last year, disrupting the gangs' chains
of command.

The chiefs of the Tijuana and Sonora cartels are under arrest, as is the
second-in-command of the Gulf Cartel. Mr. Quintero is believed to have
become the chief operating officer of the Juarez cartel after the arrest
last year of Alcides Ramon Magana, a former federal police officer.

Taken together, the arrests are a remarkable reversal from the 1990's, when
the gangs clearly had the upper hand over the authorities.

The Juarez cartel, whose leadership Mr. Quintero inherited, was once run by
Amado Carrillo Fuentes, perhaps the nation's most powerful cocaine kingpin
in the early and mid-1990's. Mr. Carrillo Fuentes, known as "the Lord of
the Skies" for flying tons of cocaine to Mexico from Colombia in converted
commercial jetliners, died in 1997 during botched surgery aimed at altering
his appearance.

The gang guarded its shipments by bribing Mexico's drug czar, Gen. Jesus
Gutierrez Rebollo, several sitting governors, and scores of senior state
and federal police commanders. When Mr. Carrillo Fuentes died, his
lieutenants kept his operations going, focusing on controlling Colombian
drug shipments that reached the Yucatan peninsula by air, land and sea en
route to the United States.

That control was maintained with money and guns. Court records and the
accounts of Mexican and American investigators describe an organization
capable of shipping hundreds of tons of cocaine, buying protection from
politicians and police, and physically intimidating those who opposed them.
The editor of a weekly newspaper in the northern state of Sonora, Pulso,
was threatened with death after reporting links between Mr. Quintero and
Mario Villanueva, governor of Quintana Roo from 1993 to 1999.

In the late 1990's, officials have charged, the Juarez cartel, run by Mr.
Quintero and Mr. Magana, and protected by Governor Villanueva, was
singlehan dedly importing roughly 15 percent of all the cocaine consumed in
the United States. Tons of the drug flowed through airstrips, beaches and
businesses in and around the resort city of Cancun, they say.

Mr. Villanueva and Mr. Magana were arrested separately last July. The
ex-governor is the highest-ranking Latin American politician facing cocaine
charges in a United States court since the arrest of Gen. Manuel Noriega,
the dictator of Panama, in 1989.

Federal indictments against them in Manhattan say they smuggled 200 tons of
cocaine to the United States, worth more than $2 billion wholesale. The
authorities charge that Mr. Villanueva took a $500,000 bribe for every 500
kilograms of cocaine shipped through his state.

Neither man has been extradited to the United States. A recent ruling by
Mexico's Supreme Court bars extraditions of suspects facing life sentences.
The United States has not yet asked for Mr. Quintero's extradition.