BORDER DRUG VIOLENCE POSES THREAT TO U.S.

Byline: Sam Dillon The New York Times

The swaggering adolescent in cowboy boots shoved past a stream of American tourists and stepped into the nine lanes of traffic inching through the afternoon heat toward the United States border. Suddenly, he pushed a 9-millimeter pistol through a car window and fired four times at the driver's head.

As the driver slumped bleeding to the seat, the San Ysidro border crossing between Tijuana and San Diego erupted in shrieks. The gunman slid his pistol under his belt, sauntered back to the sidewalk and climbed into a waiting van that sped away up a side street.

The shooting Oct. 3 of a Tijuana man who the police said was a minor drug trafficker was unusual, coming as it did just 50 yards from American soil, under the noses of U.S. customs officials. It even seemed to startle the jaded youths who stand at pay telephones, reporting to the Tijuana drug cartel on the carloads of cocaine moving north from the Mexican state of Baja California.

But it has been all but forgotten in the days since as several other Tijuana youths have been killed in a drug war that has also seen the slaying of several senior narcotics officials. The growing violence is rocking Mexico and threatens to spill over into the United States.

``This is the equivalent of what we experienced in Chicago in the '30s,'' said Alan D. Bersin, the U.S. attorney in San Diego.

``And given the increasing integration between Baja California and California, it affects us. We're not quite at the point where, when Tijuana sneezes, San Diego catches a cold, but the risks of cross-border violence are certainly perceived.''

The violence also threatens Tijuana's economic boom. In recent years foreign businesses, attracted by a minimum wage of only $2.90 a day, have made Tijuana one of the hemisphere's fastest-growing industrial centers. But the drug killings here and the August kidnapping of a Japanese executive have aroused ``a great deal of nervousness,'' said Mayor Jose Guadalupe Osuna.

``We're having to battle harder to get new industries,'' Osuna said. ``They're asking a lot of questions, and they want us to boost our police presence in the industrial parks.''

According to Mexican and American officials, the bloodshed is being driven by a turf war in which rival gangs are muscling in on the Arellano Felix family, whose drug organization has long controlled the Tijuana border, and a parallel conflict raging among corrupt factions within Mexico's Federal Judicial Police.

Seven Mexican officials who have worked on drug cases in Tijuana have been slain in as many months, along with more than a dozen state and municipal police officers and scores of minor traffickers.

The killings last month in Mexico City of two top Mexican commanders who worked closely with American agents in Tijuana to track the Arellanos has forced American officers to tighten security.

``When you work side by side with a comandante who gets killed, you have to be alarmed,'' an American official said.

The Arellano brothers - Francisco Rafael, Ramon, Benjamin and Javier, natives of the state of Sinaloa - settled in Tijuana in the late 1970s, according to documents filed with Benjamin's 1987 indictment on cocaine charges in San Diego. The family took control of the Baja border in 1985, when the trafficker for whom Benjamin was working, Leonardo Contreras, fled Mexico after killing two Mexican police officers.

The Arellano brothers bought government protection and attained immense wealth, and although their narcotics activities were widely recognized, they mingled openly with the cream of Tijuana society and resorted to violence only infrequently, said Victor Clark, a human rights activist who has studied the narcotics trade here.

But a struggle that broke out in 1992 between the Arellanos and a rival trafficker, Joaquin Guzman Loera, grew into a vicious vendetta.

It attracted widespread attention in 1993 after a Roman Catholic cardinal was killed at the Guadalajara airport when Ramon Arellano's gunmen fired on the churchman's car, mistakenly identifying it as Guzman's, prosecutors said.

In the crackdown that followed, the authorities arrested Rafael Francisco in December 1993 and confiscated Arellano family properties sprawling all across northwest Mexico, including five ranches, 91 vehicles and 118 houses. Over the years, the other brothers have eluded arrest, despite a reward of about $666,000 for their capture.

But this year, an aggressive federal commander, Ernesto Ibarra Santes, appeared to be closing in. Ibarra headed a 30-man mobile intelligence unit that with the help of Drug Enforcement Administration agents was focusing on the Arellano organization. On March 1, Ibarra's unit swept through Tijuana, confiscating 20 houses said to belong to Arellano associates. In another operation Aug. 5, Ibarra arrested two top Arellano associates in the central state of Aguascalientes.

As Ibarra turned up the pressure, a string of current or former Mexican law enforcement officials based in Tijuana were killed.