Drug Lord's Death Was Murder, Say Mexican Officials -- Killing Of Carrillo's Doctors Raises Questions

MEXICO CITY - A tale of crime and intrigue took a bizarre twist when Mexican authorities said the late drug baron Amado Carrillo Fuentes was murdered and didn't simply die by accident after surgery in July.

Carrillo was known the world over as "Lord of the Skies" for pioneering the use of airplanes to become one of the world's biggest drug traffickers. The announcement yesterday about how he died only triggered more questions - such as, who subsequently killed his doctors?

Mexican authorities' official story is that on Oct. 29 they began investigating three doctors suspected of having given Carrillo a fatal drug dose. On Monday, five days later, at least two of three doctors' badly decomposed bodies were found stuffed in metal barrels along a highway leading to Acapulco.

"How convenient," said a top U.S. law-enforcement official. "If they thought it was murder, why did they wait so long to open the criminal investigation against the doctors?"

Other unanswered questions:

-- Did Mexican authorities play a role in Carrillo's death?

-- Did authorities begin investigating because they knew the doctors had been killed and they wanted to make it look like they were on the right trail?

-- And, finally, who ordered Carrillo's death?

Whatever the truth, there's no telling if ordinary Mexicans will believe it.

"He's alive. They're only trying to make it seem like he's dead," said Soledad Hinojosa Cortez, a retiree in Mexico City. "I think there must have been some deal with high-level authorities. There's too much money involved for the `Lord of the Skies' to be dead."

But a Drug Enforcement Administration official said rumors that Carrillo is alive have "as much credibility as the millions of sightings of the late Elvis Presley."

What's certain, U.S. and Mexican officials said, is that Carrillo checked into a Mexico City clinic July 3 for a face lift and liposuction. U.S. agents say Carrillo was trying to change his appearance to escape authorities.

He was found dead the next day. Mariano Herran Salvatti, the head of Mexico's anti-drug agency, told reporters yesterday that Carrillo died after surgery from a cocktail of anesthetics and sleeping pills, a mixture that "contradicted all medical science."

Herran, dripping with sweat and refusing to answer pointed questions, gave no clue as to why the doctors allegedly murdered Carrillo.

He identified two of the doctors as Jaime Godoy and Carlos Avila. Highway workers found their bodies - blindfolded, handcuffed and partially encased in concrete - inside 52-gallon drums. Their fingertips and even their toes had been mutilated - an apparent attempt to make them impossible to identify by fingerprint.

The third body is thought to be that of Dr. Ricardo Reyes Rincon. Confirmation was pending.

U.S. officials said Carillo's sprawling organization over the years moved hundreds of tons of cocaine across the U.S.-Mexico border. Few Mexicans paid attention when authorities said he was dead.

"People just don't believe anything from those who hold power," said Daniel Lund, director of Mori de Mexico, an international polling firm. "It goes back to the authorities' long history of lying. . . . Eventually, they believe just the opposite of what they're told."

Earlier this week, a Chilean newspaper reported that Carillo was in DEA custody and helping "dismantle drug-trafficking networks" throughout Latin America.

"Mexican officials were frantic," one U.S. official said. They wanted a statement from the Americans backing up their report that the trafficker was dead. And this was just four months after Mexico's U.S. ambassador called DEA Administrator Thomas Constantine a "cretin" for confirming nearly a week ahead of the Mexicans that Carrillo was dead.

"Now it's, `Please can you help us?' " the American official said.