MEXICO IS GAINING UPPER HAND IN DRUG WAR

Arrests Are Disrupting Cartels' Chains Of Command

MEXICO CITY - Four years ago, U.S. intelligence officers gave their Mexican
counterparts the address and home telephone for Jes=FAs 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 Quintero and his associates in the
Juarez-based cartel, U.S. 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. 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 on Monday.

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

Vega said that 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 Quintero, 42, which was carried out by military commandos who
are part of a Mexico's 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 U.S. law
enforcement and intelligence officers, have jailed leaders and lieutenants
from all four of Mexico's major drug cartels in the past year, disrupting
the gangs' chains of command.

The chiefs of the Tijuana and Sonora cartels are allegedly under arrest, as
is the second-in-command of the Gulf Cartel. Quintero is believed to have
become the chief operating officer of the Juarez cartel after the arrest
last year of Alcides Ramon Maga=F1a, a former federal police officer.

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

The Juarez cartel, whose leadership Quintero reportedly inherited, was once
run by Amado Carrillo Fuentes, perhaps the nation's most powerful cocaine
kingpin in the early and mid-1990s. Carrillo =46uentes, 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. Jes=FAs
Gutierrez Rebollo, several sitting governors, and scores of senior state
and federal police commanders. When 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 U.S. 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 Quintero and Mario
Villanueva, governor of Quintana Roo from 1993 to 1999.

In the late 1990s, officials have charged, the Juarez cartel, run by
Quintero and Maga=F1a, and protected by Villanueva, was single-handedly
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.

Villanueva and Maga=F1a were arrested separately last July. The ex-governor
is the highest-ranking Latin American politician facing cocaine charges in
a U.S. court since the arrest of Gen. Manuel Noriega, the former dictator
of Panama, in 1989.

=46ederal indictments against them in New York City say they smuggled 200
tons of cocaine to the United States, worth more than $2 billion wholesale.
The authorities charge that 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 Quintero's extradition.