MEXICO'S FORMER DRUG CZAR TIED TO KIDNAPPINGS : 51 REPORTED MISSING IN MEXICO.

Byline: Julia Preston The New York Times

The owner of a department store in the provincial capital of Culiacan was driving to work one morning in September when three unmarked sedans without license plates surrounded his gray Oldsmobile.

As bystanders watched in terror, four men brandishing assault rifles hauled the man, Romulo Rico Urrea, from his car, forced him into one of theirs and sped away.

Rico has not been seen since Sept. 25. But a notebook dropped in his car by one of the kidnappers, as well as evidence gathered by military investigators, links the abduction to Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, the former head of Mexico's anti-drug agency who was arrested last month on charges of collaborating with one of the country's most powerful cocaine barons.

Rico is one of at least 51 Mexicans who have disappeared in the last three years in kidnappings with signs of involvement by government security forces, according to lists compiled by relatives, human-rights organizations and the press. Now evidence is emerging to tie many of these abductions to the war against powerful drug traffickers, which has increasingly been under the command of Mexico's military.

``We are everyday citizens under attack, caught in the cross-fire between narcos, authorities and narco-authorities,'' said Lucia Solis de Jurado, whose husband, a trader in semiprecious stones, was seized in October last year from the front step of his home in the border city of Ciudad Juarez. ``It has gotten to the point where it can happen to anyone.''

Relatives and human-rights leaders contend that most of the victims have no proven ties to drug traffickers or other criminal activities, although some have had brushes with the authorities.

``They tend to be businessmen, students and other citizens who were going about their lives,'' said Oscar Loza of the Commission for the Defense of Human Rights in the state of Sinaloa, where at least nine people have disappeared.

Mexico's military has traditionally played a supporting role in the fight against drug trafficking, mainly eradicating narcotics crops. Soon after he took office in 1994, President Ernesto Zedillo, facing widespread corruption in the state and federal police, began to place military officers and troops in key positions in the battle against the drug cartels.

Gutierrez was named Mexico's chief anti-drug official in December 1996, and army officers were given command of state and municipal police forces in Sinaloa. Large quantities of drugs have long flowed through Sinaloa. Just last week, the army took over narcotics operations in the border state of Baja California.

Since the arrest of Gutierrez, families of missing Mexicans have come forward after enduring their anguish in silence for months and even years. The number of known victims is growing.

There is evidence that, in addition to Rico, five men who disappeared since last September in northern Mexico were abducted in operations commanded by Gutierrez and carried out by his deputies during his two-month tenure as head of the national drug agency or before that, when he was the senior commander of the Fifth Military Region in central Mexico.

The abductions in which Gutierrez appears to have had a role are only a fraction of those reported. The general's lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.

The disclosures about the kidnappings raise new questions about Gutierrez's ascent to the highest position in Mexico's war on drugs and about Zedillo's moves to expand the role of the armed forces in the anti-narcotics campaign.

Several months before Defense Minister Enrique Cervantes Aguirre recommended Gutierrez to the president for the top anti-drug job, the Mexican military had substantial evidence implicating the general's two closest aides in the kidnapping of Rico. Both aides were arrested with their commander on drug charges on Feb. 18.

The kidnapping allegations apparently never reached the highest levels. Cervantes acknowledged that neither he nor Zedillo had any doubts about Gutierrez until about two weeks before his arrest.