Fear Breeds Silence In Smuggling Towns

PALOMAS, Mexico - Everyone in this border town knows who the drug smugglers are, but they don't want to talk about it.

``I don't want to end up like that other guy,'' says a Palomas businessman who requested anonymity.

That other guy was Jose ``Pepe'' Armendariz, 37, a local businessman who was dragged from a Palomas bar in March 1989 and shot once in the back of the head. His body was found in the local cemetery a little more than a year ago. Townspeople and U.S. law-enforcement officers say the killing was drug-related, but official details are scarce.

Jose Miller Hermosillo, attorney general for the northern Mexico state of Chihuahua, says the case remains under investigation.

The dead man's father, Jose Armendariz, says his son had been friends with drug smugglers since childhood but was not involved.

``I think he knew something. He knew everybody around here and what they did,'' Armendariz says.

Several people have been killed here in the past two years in disputes involving drug-connected families, residents and U.S. law officers say.

``Pepe paid the price for being too friendly with one side or the other,'' says Carlos Ogden, attorney and ex-mayor of neighboring Columbus, N.M.

Retired U.S. Border Patrol agent Don Daniels says one faction finally forced the other out of Palomas, a town of about 8,000 people, and six or seven people were killed.

Michael Lappe, agent in charge of Customs at El Paso, Texas, says the power struggle followed the death three years ago of longtime Mexican drug kingpin Pablo Acosta. Mexican federal police killed Acosta in a shootout at a ranch near Ojinaga, 200 miles south of El Paso.

Lappe says the Sandovals of Palomas were among families emerging in the vacuum created by Acosta's death.

Brothers Carlos and Fabian Sandoval are under U.S. indictment on heroin-smuggling charges dating from 1983. U.S. Attorney William Lutz of Albuquerque, N.M., said they were fugitives for seven years after each put up $2,500 of their respective $25,000 bonds.

Carlos Sandoval remains at large, but Fabian Sandoval was arrested in early September following a shootout near here, said Federal Judicial Police Cmdr. Elias Ramirez.

Ramirez said Sandoval attempted to bribe officers with $500,000 in U.S. currency.

Sandoval and five men arrested with him are members of a family linked to drug trafficking and murder, Ramirez said recently.

The federales seized much of the Sandoval family property, said Tracy Self, police chief in neighboring Columbus, N.M.

Many emerging Mexican drug organizations have connections to Colombian cocaine cartels, several U.S. law-enforcement officials say. Colombian cocaine has been routinely flown into Chihuahua state for years.

But the administration of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari has been cracking down for the past two years. Self says there is a tough, new federal commandant in Palomas.

There used to be an airport west of Palomas where Colombian cocaine was flown in, but the bi-national crackdown, including a nearby anti-smuggling radar blimp on the U.S. side, forced the landings farther into Mexico's interior, officials say. Now, smugglers reportedly truck the contraband to the border and stash it in the desolate rangeland along the 180 miles of rusty barbed-wire fence New Mexico shares with Mexico.

``What the Colombians are doing is aligning themselves with established Mexican drug traffickers, because they have all the established routes in place, all their arrangements taken care of,'' says Sam Herrera, resident Drug Enforcement Administration agent in charge at El Paso.

Self says informants in Mexico say Colombians have been buying property around Casas Grandes 120 miles south of here and in the Las Chepas area a few miles south of the border.

``They're forcing people out and buying officials . . . The way it was described to me, they were telling these people, `We can buy it from you or we can buy it from your widow.' ''

Palomas and Columbus have been smuggler's havens for generations.

``We have families in Palomas and Columbus that are second- and third-generation smugglers,'' Self says.

He says they're nearly impossible to infiltrate because they're so close-knit.

``You can hire 50 kids in Palomas for 50 bucks apiece to haul 50 pounds of marijuana across the line . . . It's virtually impossible to stop them all,'' he says.

During a shootout with state judicial police a few weeks ago at Las Chepas, one youth captured by officers told them ``they were lucky his gun jammed or they would never have taken him alive,'' Self says.

Self says he fears an all-out drug war may be brewing between rival families. He says his own life has been threatened many times by local smugglers. He carries a submachine gun.

He provided a list of 13 known Palomas drug smugglers and 40 weapons they have bought from one legitimate U.S. gun shop since 1986. The weapons include several semi-automatic weapons. The men all listed New Mexico post office boxes.

``They get the post office box and driver's license, and with that they can go into any gun store in New Mexico,'' he says.

Self says children of Palomas drug families attend school in Columbus. The children are U.S.-born and therefore citizens.

``About 75 percent of our 310 students come across from Palomas,'' school secretary Irene Davis acknowledges.

In school, Customs and Border Patrol officers give anti-drug lectures, but Davis says students see the issue from conflicting perspectives. How do children of drug families ``just say no?''

``The smaller ones don't really understand what's going on, but the older ones do. It kind of gives them double standards,'' says Davis, a lifelong Columbus resident.

The Palomas businessman says he also worries about the lure easy money may have on children. He says his teen-age son suggested last summer he might join the smugglers.

The father says he threatened to throw his son out of the house.

The father already had been asked to carry a package across the border for hundreds of dollars, he said.

``I'm honest. I said no. I said, `When I sit down and eat a pot of beans, I'm going to eat them without having to look over my shoulder to see who's going to shoot me in the back.

``And when I go to sleep, I don't sleep with a gun under my bed, and I don't walk around with four or five bodyguards like you guys.

``I could have become a millionaire,'' he adds, ``but I'm not going to live like that.''