Valley Of Death

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If you don't live in the border region between the U.S. and Mexico, it is hard to understand how totally the drug business has come to dominate life there. But last week, as FBI and Mexican backhoes began digging into what may be mass graves containing dozens of victims of the region's drug cartels, it was suddenly a lot easier. FBI sources say the grave uncovered last week is probably the first of many; they will continue exploring for more this week. "In law-enforcement circles, there have been rumors of these for a long time," says a senior Drug Enforcement Administration agent. "Hell, there are bodies [from drug-related killings] buried all over the place down here."

The carnage is a sign of an epic shift in the drug business. From the early 1970s until a couple of years ago, if you went out on the streets of New York City to score cocaine, you'd look for a Colombian trafficker or a Dominican who dealt with a Colombian. Nowadays, you're just as likely to find yourself face-to-face with a Mexican. Your dealer's ethnic roots probably won't matter to you so long as the product is as advertised. But to DEA agents, the decline and fall of Colombia's once impregnable Cali cartel is a sensational development--surpassed only by the meteoric rise of the Juarez cartel now headed by Vicente Carrillo Fuentes. As the U.S. has cracked down on drug cartels in Colombia in the past decade, the business has shifted north and into the hands of Mexican traffickers, who play by the same bloody rules that characterized the lethal reign of the Colombians. Mexico's narco-industry is now a $30 billion-a-year business. "The flow of drugs through Mexico to the U.S. is not slowing down," says a U.S. official. "If anything, it's increasing."

The Juarez cartel has risen faster than most tech stocks, thanks to the vision of its late founder, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, and the ruthlessness of his dumber but meaner younger brother Vicente. For a long time, Mexican criminals were simply subcontractors whom the Colombians paid a set fee, usually $1,500 to $2,000 per kilogram, to truck cocaine over the U.S. border and to warehouses in California or Texas. There, Cali cartel employees would reclaim the goods, move them to major retailing hubs like Manhattan and Los Angeles and wholesale them to distributors. The Colombians pocketed a chunk of the wholesale and retail markups. The Mexicans risked their necks for chump change.

But kingpins like Amado changed all that. He fancied himself the Bill Gates of Mexican drug traffickers--a visionary who earned the nickname "Lord of the Skies" for the multiton shipments of Colombian cocaine he received in Boeing 727s. When he died in 1997 after botched plastic surgery, DEA agents were skeptical that his brother Vicente would last as the successor head of the Juarez syndicate. But in Vicente's favor, says a U.S. agent, "he's vicious."

After a two-year-long war against factional leaders, notably Rafael Munoz Talavera, found shot to death in his jeep in Juarez in September 1998, Vicente secured his bid to succeed his brother. He has since been indicted in El Paso, Texas, and in Mexico on drug-trafficking charges. Many of the bodies being unearthed south of Juarez are believed to be victims in that war, as are any Americans who Mexican officials say might be among the dead.