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Mexico Deports Alleged Drug Cartel Chief to U.S.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Mexican drug agents arrested America’s most-wanted accused narcotics trafficker and deported him Monday to Houston, where the Texas native faces charges of heading a vast criminal enterprise that has brought billions of dollars worth of marijuana and cocaine into the United States.

Juan Garcia Abrego’s arrest Sunday night by Mexican counter-narcotics police at a ranch outside the northern industrial city of Monterrey ended one of the most intensive manhunts ever by U.S. and Mexican drug agents. The search for Garcia Abrego, a U.S. citizen who allegedly heads the Gulf of Mexico drug cartel, was stepped up in March when U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno publicly made him the first suspected international drug dealer to be put on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list.

Abrego was scheduled to appear before a U.S. magistrate today, when bond will be set. He was reportedly being held in jail overnight.

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The U.S. government had offered a $2-million reward for information leading to Garcia Abrego’s capture, but it was unclear Monday who--if anyone--will collect the money. One U.S. official said Mexican police were tipped off to Garcia Abrego’s whereabouts by an informant who spotted him in a Monterrey restaurant. Mexican authorities would not confirm that report, and another U.S. official credited a special squad of Mexican counter-narcotics agents--with the assistance of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration--for the arrest.

Mexico’s attorney general’s office announced late Monday that the arrest was made at 8 p.m. Sunday by 15 federal drug agents who cornered Garcia Abrego at a private ranch they staked out in the village of Villa de Juarez. Mexican federal prosecutors indicated they targeted the ranch after the arrests and interrogations last year of two key Garcia Abrego lieutenants.

The immediate beneficiary of Garcia Abrego’s capture was the government of Mexico’s President Ernesto Zedillo, who declared war on Mexico’s drug-smuggling cartels but faced growing criticism for the inability of his police to capture Garcia Abrego.

In a brief statement, the U.S. State Department in Washington called the arrest “a triumph for the Mexican government and for close U.S.-Mexican collaboration in anti-narcotics matters.” Nicholas Burns, the department’s spokesman, added, “It illustrates the commitment of both governments.”

A senior U.S. law enforcement official said the capture represented the most significant blow in years by Mexican police against the nation’s powerful drug mafias. The official added that it shows Zedillo’s determination to make good on his anti-crime pledges and to respond to pressure from the United States to show more progress against drugs and the corruption linked to the narcotics trade.

“I’m impressed so far,” the U.S. official said. “They are under the gun.”

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The Times reported in September that court testimony and documents filed in more than a dozen criminal cases involving Garcia Abrego’s lieutenants in the U.S. indicate that the 51-year-old built his cartel, worth an estimated $10 billion, partly through millions of dollars in payoffs to corrupt officials in Mexico and the U.S.

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American drug-enforcement agents said they suspected Garcia Abrego used that network to elude capture during the past year. His arrest, they added, is the clearest sign yet that Zedillo’s attorney general is serious about breaking the link between the drug lords and his agency’s officials--a connection known here as “narco-politics.”

On a day marked by a shroud of official secrecy, Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano’s office revealed no details of Garcia Abrego’s capture in its three-line communique confirming it. In a later communique, Lozano’s office confirmed its agents bundled Garcia Abrego off to Texas at 3:40 p.m. Monday--after doctors treated him for heart problems--and indicated the secrecy was due to “the magnitude and importance of the arrest.”

U.S. officials, who say the Sept. 24, 1993, indictment pending against Garcia Abrego in Houston is stronger than the criminal cases against him here in Mexico, privately gave most of the credit for his arrest to agents of Lozano’s Institute for the Combat of Drugs, praising them for efficiency and honesty in a top-secret operation that met with little resistance.

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A special unit of Mexican anti-drug agents captured Garcia Abrego at the ranch after DEA agents assisted in tracking the elusive kingpin, according to a senior U.S. law enforcement official. But he said the Mexican agents “get 90% of the credit. They made an effort to go after it.”

Mexican officials said Garcia Abrego at first tried to flee, but he surrendered without violence at the ranch, whose ownership was unclear. He was without the large retinue of gunmen who have protected him in the past, the official said--unlike Sinaloa cartel kingpin Hector “Guero” Palma, who surrounded himself with dozens of corrupt police officers when the Mexican army was called in to capture him near Guadalajara last year.

Mexican authorities took no chances even after Garcia Abrego’s arrest. They refused at first to confirm or deny that he was en route to the U.S.--even after a Mexican judicial police plane took off Monday for Houston with the alleged drug lord on board.

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Late wire reports said that Garcia Abrego was first taken to FBI headquarters in Houston and then transferred to Harris County Jail.

The indictment against him and eight of his accused top lieutenants pending in U.S. District Court in Houston alleges that Garcia Abrego is “the principal leader of a criminal enterprise headquartered in Matamoros, Mexico, which imported, warehoused, transported and distributed ton quantities of cocaine and marijuana from the Republic of Mexico into the United States.”

“Acts of violence, including murder, were employed by this criminal enterprise,” the 28-page indictment states. “The acts of violence, including the murders of numerous individuals, were authorized by Juan Garcia Abrego as head of this organization.”

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The FBI posters now hanging in post offices throughout the United States and bearing Garcia Abrego’s photograph add: “Consider [him] armed and dangerous. . . . Juan Garcia Abrego is known to be in possession of weapons; utilized bodyguards for his protection and has ordered the murders of his rivals in the drug business.”

The posters describe him as 6 feet tall, weighing 200 pounds, with a medium build and brown eyes and hair. His birthplace is listed as La Paloma, Texas, just across the border from Matamoros, which U.S. and Mexican drug agents say has been the Gulf cartel’s headquarters in an operation that smuggled up to a third of the Colombian cocaine sold in the United States.

One of Garcia Abrego’s cousins testified to the ruthlessness of the Gulf cartel in Brownsville, Texas, last year. Francisco Perez Monroy, who is serving 10 years in a U.S. federal prison on narcotics trafficking charges, said he decided to surrender to U.S. authorities after he had “disappointed” his cousin and former boss.

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“And your need [to surrender] is because if you work with the Juan Garcia Abrego organization and you disappoint the organization, or if you fail, you end up dead, is that right?” one attorney asked Perez in court.

“Definitely,” he said.

But Garcia Abrego’s arrest unleashed speculation in the Mexican capital that he himself could provide damaging testimony if he chooses to cooperate with investigators. Among the keys to Garcia Abrego’s financial success--in addition to sophisticated communications systems and fleets of new, 18-wheel trucks--was an extensive network of bribed public officials, according to former associates and law enforcement agents.

Eduardo Valle, a former Mexican narcotics investigator who alleged high-level corruption between the drug lords and officials in former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s government, called Garcia Abrego’s arrest “extremely important--a sign of the will of President Zedillo . . . an initiative exclusively of the president.”

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If Garcia Abrego decides to cooperate with investigators now, added Valle, who lives in self-imposed exile in Washington, it could implicate some of the highest officials in the former Salinas administration. Zedillo’s government already has jailed Salinas’ elder brother on charges of masterminding the 1994 slaying of a top ruling-party official. And it has announced that Raul Salinas de Gortari, linked to more than $100 million in Swiss bank accounts, is under investigation for corruption and possible ties to international drug trafficking.

In the 10 months since Garcia Abrego was put on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list, U.S. and Mexican counter-narcotics officials have said that Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who they identify as leader of the rival Juarez drug cartel, has inherited much of Garcia Abrego’s power and influence. But U.S. officials said that should not detract from the importance of Garcia Abrego’s capture.

“You hear people say he’s not the biggest, and that’s scary,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Melissa Annis, head of the Houston-based strike force that has been dismantling the Gulf cartel’s operations in South Texas since 1989, said in an interview before Garcia Abrego’s arrest. In all, she said, U.S. federal prosecutions have put more than 60 of his employees behind bars and documented cartel operations from the Texas border to New York and Chicago.

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Times staff writers Sebastian Rotella in San Diego and Ronald J. Ostrow in Washington contributed to this report.

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