Dead Drug Lord's Life Is Now An Open Book

THE UNTOUCHABILITY that Amado Carrillo Fuentes enjoyed as a top drug kingpin has disappeared.

MEXICO CITY - When Amado Carrillo Fuentes was alive, the drug lord was one of Mexico's most mysterious men. He lived discreetly - no wild shootouts, no late-night disco hopping. Few pictures of him appeared in newspapers or on television. He was from a new breed, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration liked to say, a low-profile kingpin who behaved like a businessman.

But since he died in July after high-risk surgery to change his appearance, an unprecedented flood of information has emerged about Carrillo from Mexican, Chilean and U.S. law-enforcement officials and from other published accounts.

The newly available details illuminate his travels, families, properties and businesses. They show that he was in the process of shifting his drug operations to Chile, that he allegedly used a money exchange there to launder money through Citibank accounts in New York, that he had a second family in Cuba and that he was a benefactor of the Catholic Church in Mexico.

That so much information is emerging now that Carrillo is dead demonstrates, according to analysts here, the untouchability he enjoyed during his years as one of the world's top drug lords. It follows a tradition in Mexico that the most damning information about powerful people gets aired only after they lose their influence and the information loses its urgency - after the money

and drugs have left the country, after the principals are dead, have left office or are hiding elsewhere.

"This is standard operating procedure," said Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, an independent senator. "The attorney general's office had all this information before Amado Carrillo's death, but they couldn't digest it politically or integrate it in a court of law" because of the powerful people who might have been implicated.

"This has always been the central issue in how the attorney general's office builds its cases," Aguilar said. "They are more compelled by what they have to hide than what they are willing to prosecute."

Corruption expected

Among most Mexicans, for instance, it is accepted that sitting presidents are corrupt but that evidence of their alleged crimes will emerge only after they leave office.

In that sense, some analysts said, the Carrillo case resembles the situation faced by former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, whose administration from 1988 to 1994 was marked by rumors of high-level corruption. Only after he left office did evidence of the alleged crimes began to surface.

Salinas, who has denied any wrongdoing and who has not been charged with any crime, went into exile in 1995 in Ireland, which has no extradition treaty with Mexico.

Given Carrillo's protection payments of about $500 million a year, his ruthlessness in dealing with enemies - by some accounts, he ordered 400 people killed - and his informant network, it is not surprising that so little information about him became public when he was alive. Nobody wanted to talk.

Carrillo enjoyed tremendous freedom to run his drug business from Mexico and to come and go as he pleased in the months before his death. But he and his cartel also came under increasing pressure from Mexican anti-drug forces.

Carrillo himself barely escaped arrest when Mexican agents raided his sister's wedding at the family ranch. A corrupt law-enforcement official apparently tipped him to the raid. "His infrastructure was starting to collapse. No one could withstand the focus," a senior U.S. drug official said. "He got too big, too notorious."

Under pressure

Feeling the heat, Carrillo, 42, began scrambling to safeguard himself, his family and his drug business. His flight from the law ended July 4, when he died from a lethal combination of drugs administered after radical plastic surgery and liposuction at a small Mexico City hospital.

According to the accounts now available, Carrillo rarely saw his family or spent the night in the same place twice in the months before his death. He frequently traveled abroad. Shortly after he died, newspapers here published a picture of Carrillo in Jerusalem in 1995 with a priest from Mexico.

Some of the foreign trips apparently were to find a new headquarters for his cartel.

A prominent Mexican weekly magazine, Proceso, citing secret military documents, reported Carrillo's right-hand man, Eduardo Gonzalez Quirarte, met earlier this year with high-ranking Mexican military officials to propose a live-and-let-live arrangement: If the government would stop pursuing Carrillo and his family and let them keep half their assets, he would agree to continue pumping drug profits into the Mexican economy, but only from trafficking in the United States and Europe, and to help Mexican police curtail freelance drug smuggling in Mexico.

Mexico's Defense Secretariat acknowledged that four generals met Gonzalez Quirarte in January. However, the generals did not know who he was at the time and rejected his offer.

Among other details that have emerged since Carrillo's death:

Carrillo began planning to move his drug business from northern Mexico to Chile, where he, his family and top lieutenants spent three months last spring.

Carrillo entered Chile by car from Argentina on March 3 using a fake passport. With him were his wife, Sonia Barragan Perez; their three small children; his 20-year-old son by another woman; and three others.

While in Santiago, Carrillo and his assistants allegedly enlisted a local money exchange that had two bank accounts at Citibank in New York to launder drug proceeds and provide them with cash. The U.S. government has frozen the accounts, which total about $26 million.

One associate applied to Chile's Foreign Investment Commission for permission to operate a construction and real-estate business.

During his three-month stay, Carrillo and his entourage purchased 11 cars, bought or rented almost a dozen mansions, ranches and condominiums, and established a company,Hercules Ltd., to manage his drug operations.

Using his fake passport, Carrillo left Chile on June 6 and traveled to Cuba, where he stayed for about three weeks in a residential enclave reserved for government guests. Carrillo went to Cuba often in the past three years, perhaps to visit his second family - a woman named Marta and their 2-year-old daughter.