The next generation: drug traffickers reel and regroup following the demise of kingpins. (Spotlight).

The death of one gangster and the capture of his brother marks the end of an era when all-powerful kingpins controlled Mexico's drug trade. Their days of worry-free bribery, murder and massive-scale narcotics smuggling are over.

Known for their fierce, get-even-at-all-costs tempers and lavish lifestyles, Benjamin and Ramon Arellano Felix ran the country's largest and most-powerful drug-smuggling syndicate and typified the type of fearless and untouchable drug lords that have dominated the multibillion-dollar Mexican narcotics industry for decades.

Their fall has left a power void at the top of the drug trade, but U.S. and Mexican law enforcement agents aren't expecting one man to step in and take control. Instead, a collection of smaller, less powerful kingpins, who are quicker to build alliances with their rivals and who are more prepared to micromanage their gangs, seem more likely to grab a larger chunk of future drug-smuggling action. Authorities also say the new drug lords will probably keep lower profiles, working to keep their names out of the newspapers and off most-wanted lists.

Investigators believe the result will be a drug trade that is less violent, but even harder to stop, with more narcotics flowing into the United States as authorities on both sides of the border divide their resources between several groups instead of focusing their efforts on one all-powerful gang.

"Today, no drug lord or drug organization is untouchable," said Estuardo Bermudez, Mexico's chief special prosecutor for drug crimes. "The gangs are acting more like businesses. Now they have a mentality that asks how can they move the narcotics from South America to the United States most efficiently, not one that is especially violent or arrogant."

BLOOD BROTHERS

Benjamin and Ramon Arellano Felix were the brains and brawn behind the efficient and ruthless Tijuana-based gang that bears their family's name. Accomplished smugglers from Sinaloa, the brothers set up shop in Tijuana in 1989 after their protege, Miguel Angel Felix Gallarado, went to jail for the shooting of U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) Special Agent Enrique Camarena.

The Arellano Felix organization recruited thousands of couriers from poor border neighborhoods in Mexico and the United States, then distributed cars, trucks, briefcases and duffel bags stuffed with cocaine, marijuana, heroin and ecstasy tablets. The organization then turned its small army of "human mules" loose on the highways and pedestrian bridges connecting Tijuana and San Diego--the world's busiest border crossing. From there, Arellano Felix-brand narcotics went to distribution centers in Los Angeles, Houston and New York, and eventually turned up on street corners and in college dorm rooms as far away as the Midwestern and Northeastern United States.

During the next four years, the gang set up a virtual monopoly in Tijuana, paying out more than US$1 million a week in bribes and committing murders to solidify its dominance of the region. Today, the DEA estimates that the Tijuana Cartel is responsible for supplying a third of all the cocaine on America's streets, either by moving the drugs across the border directly or by using its airtight control of the area to tax other groups for the right to use Tijuana's smuggling corridors.

Benjamin became the group's chief strategist and Ramon became the top triggerman, using a string of bloody killings to ensure the cartel always got its way.

"They were the most violent group Mexico has ever seen," said Donald J. Thornhill of the DEA's San Diego Field Office. "They brought Mexican drug violence to new heights."

Officials estimate that the Arellano Felix Cartel has committed about 300 murders in the United States and Mexico, and the group has Ramon to thank for scores of them. A mainstay on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) 10 most-wanted list for years, Ramon personally directed death squads to wipe out any smuggler, police officer, prosecutor or judge who dared to challenge the gang. Going beyond getting even, Ramon and his hired guns often killed many of their victims' family members, neighbors and colleagues--just to prove how ruthless they could be.

"Ramon enjoyed killing. He was a cancer on society," Thornhill said. "Benjamin was wiser when it came to organizing suppliers and smuggling cells. He took calculated risks."

The beginning of the end for the pair came on a warm morning in February, in the resort city of Mazatlan. As thousands of locals set up folding chairs along the city's main streets, eagerly awaiting the start of a parade that was part of local Mardi Gras carnival celebrations, Ramon and a Volkswagen Bug full of his henchmen drove down a beach-front avenue searching for Ismael Zambada, the head of a rival drug gang who owed them money. But this would be Ramon's last mission.

Although local officials claim that Ramon died in a shoot-out with Mazatlan traffic cops, a top-ranking U.S. law enforcement official, who spoke to a group of reporters in Mexico City on the condition of anonymity, said Zambada had set a trap by spreading the word that he planned to be in Mazatlan. He was sure that Ramon would come hunting for him. When the Arellano Felix death squad steered its car the wrong way down a one-way street, police officers who were on Zambada's payroll tried to pull them over, triggering a wild car chase and gun battle. The corrupt authorities finally caught up with Ramon, and allegedly executed him, according to the U.S. official. Whatever the exact circumstances, the most feared man in Mexican drug smuggling died on a bloodstained sidewalk not far from one of Mazatlan's many strip malls.

Benjamin's arrest almost exactly a month later was less dramatic. Shortly after 1 a.m. on March 9, Mexican soldiers and drug agents stormed a safe house in the city of Puebla. While no shots were fired as agents thundered into the house, his wife Ruth drew a pistol before quickly putting it down and allowing her husband to be taken away quietly. When they captured him, Benjamin was calm, unarmed and waiting for a car to speed him off to another cartel-controlled house.

During an interview in his heavily guarded office near downtown Mexico City, Bermudez called the brothers' takedown "a great victory for Mexico."

ALL IN THE FAMILY

However, U.S. and Mexican officials agree that the Arellano Felix gang is far from finished. After months of gloating over the cartel's downfall, Mexican Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha changed his tune, saying that the group remains strong despite the arrest of more than 2,000 of its smugglers, distributors and pushers in a little over a year.

Authorities also agree that Francisco Javier Arellano Felix--one of six Arellano Felix siblings who haven't been killed or captured--will probably take control of the cartel.

"Nothing has changed. The Arellanos control Tijuana, and Tijuana is 80% of the Mexican drug market. The rest are just table scraps," said Zeta magazine editor Jesus Blancornelas, who has survived two Arellano Felix ordered assassination attempts. "No other cartel has the power to challenge the Arellanos in Tijuana. Francisco and the rest of the family will guarantee this never changes."

A college graduate known as El Tigrillo (Little Tiger), 32-year-old Francisco Javier played a role in the gang's ruthless enforcement wing, working closely with Ramon. Blancornelas said Francisco doesn't have Ramon's ferocious temper and that he may not be ready to take as many dangerous risks as Benjamin was after 13 years on top of the Mexican drug trade.

Francisco and company will have to help the gang recover from the string of serious setbacks. Besides the arrest of Benjamin and the death of Ramon, Mexican authorities also recently collared Manuel Herrera Barraza, one of the cartel's chief smugglers. Barraza's capture helped lead authorities to a pair of border tunnels that had allowed the gang to silently move countless shipments of cocaine and marijuana from ranches deep in the desert of Baja California to private homes in Arizona.

JUAREZ CARTEL

While a contingent of family and non-family members work to lead the Arellano Felix gang back from the brink, authorities say three other men, all of whom are at least loosely affiliated with the rival Juarez Cartel, could step in and grab a bigger piece of the drug smuggling pie.

Based just across the border from El Paso, Texas, the Juarez organization was once the most powerful drug gang in the world. The group paid Colombian suppliers up to US$30 million per cocaine shipment, then transported enormous amounts of narcotics from Mexico to distributors across the United States. It used seemingly endless amounts of cash to buy off police forces throughout Mexico, especially in Sinaloa and Durango, both top producers of marijuana and heroin.

Drug agents had thought the group might collapse after the death of its leader, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, under suspicious circumstances following plastic surgery in 1997. Feared by even the most powerful of his fellow traffickers, Carrillo Fuentes had his henchmen sprinkle victims' bodies with "a dose of milk," or quicklime, a compound of calcium hydroxide and water that melts flesh and turns corpses into smoldering piles of bleached-white bones.

Instead of falling apart after Amado's death, control of the cartel went to his brother, Vicente, who expanded the organization's operations, opening a control center in the eastern border city of Reynosa to supplement the Ciudad Juarez headquarters.

Bermudez said Vicente is in a good position to become a top kingpin because he has formed an alliance with the leader of the Gulf Cartel, Osiel Cardenas. The pact has allowed Carrillo Fuentes' family to gain control of Cancun and other key smuggling posts on the Yucatan Peninsula, Bermudez said.

Another rising kingpin is the man Ramon Arellano Felix was gunning for on the day he died. Known as el Mayo, Zambada was once a second-tier Juarez Cartel enforcer who now heads a group of freelance smugglers based in Mazatlan.

U.S. officials say Zambada has extensive agricultural knowledge and has worked to increase his gang's production of heroin. He is an accomplished alliance-builder who has remained close to the Carrillo Fuentes family while maintaining independent ties to Colombian cocaine smugglers.

U.S. authorities also say Zambada helped the Arellano Felix cartel set up its Tijuana headquarters in 1989, but became a key Arellano Felix target in 1993, after his group refused to pay US$10 million in back tariffs for the right to use Tijuana smuggling routes.

Authorities are also keeping their eyes on Juan Esparragoza, an important adviser to Carrillo Fuentes who acts as a "narco-diplomar" in smoothing over problems between the gangs. Known as elAzul (Blue) because of his dark, almost blue-toned complexion, Esparragoza is a former attorney who became a key Guadalajara Cartel deputy until Gallardo's capture in 1989. He is the most senior drug trafficker still at large.

"After the capture of (Amado) Carrillo Fuentes there was a lot of animosity between Mayo (Zambada) and Esparragoza," said a senior U.S. anti-drug official, who spoke only on the condition that his name not be published. "But it now looks like a lot of that is behind them. It looks like both men are ready to move up in the world after what happened (to the Arellano Felix organization)."

NO BLOOD BATH YET

U.S. and Mexican authorities said this year's reorganization has not been marked by the kind of violence that followed the arrests of top-ranking kingpins in years past.

"There's no indication there is going to be a blood bath," said the DEA's Thomhill. "It seems like many of these groups are ready to work with one another and let everyone get a piece of the pie."

A war for control in Tijuana that pundits had predicted and police were bracing for has not materialized in the months since Ramon's death and Benjamin's capture. Bermudez said authorities have seen smaller Arellano Felix enforcers shoot it Out with rivals in Michoacan and Jalisco, as well as in the remote mountains of Sinaloa. But he said those killings do not point to an all-out war for territory and instead were likely meant to send the message to Arellano Felix rivals that the group has not lost control of its lesser strongholds. Bermudez says a more decentralized drug business could make his job even more difficult.

"The groups are extending their influence across Mexico and recruiting managers in every corner," he said.

NEW LOOK

Authorities also expect those kingpins poised to take control of the country's drug business to do their best to keep low profiles.

"I think the days when the top smugglers arrived in a new Mercedes and spent thousands of dollars at a restaurant on the beach or at the most expensive dance club are over," Sinaloa Attorney General Oscar Fidel Gonzalez told BUSINESS MEXICO. "They live quiet lives now. They know if they attract too much attention they may get killed."

The DEA's Thornhill agrees, but believes that the new kingpins have yet to prove they can "take the heat" of being top-ranking dealers.

But drug lords who shy away from the limelight are not entirely new. When Amado Carrillo Fuentes headed the Juarez Cartel, he was careful to keep his name out of the press and was largely ignored by journalists who focused on better-known kingpins. In Judrez, the cartel handed Out bribes to gain influence at several newspapers, then used its ties to reporters and publishers to help keep Carrillo Fuentes' growing prowess in the world of narcotics quiet through much of the early 1990s.

Even Benjamin Arellano Felix, who in his younger days enjoyed mocking authorities with a lifestyle that was so flamboyant that his grinning face often turned up in the society pages of newspapers across Mexico, learned the value of laying low later in life. When police and soldiers caught up with him, he was living a decidedly middle-class lifestyle, holed up in a small safe house that neighbors and investigators say he rarely ventured out of. His children were enrolled in reasonably-priced private schools and his henchmen drove plain Volkswagen sedans instead of muscle cars or SUVs with tinted windows and gun racks.

Despite their attempts to live simpler lives, Bermudez said the top remaining drug lords can still arrange to fly from one coast to another or out of the country on a moment's notice and often alter their appearances with plastic surgery, with some going under the knife as often as every few years.

"These are men who are still very difficult to catch," he said. "We have to follow the rules, respect human rights and do our jobs professionally and legally. They don't have to follow any rules. They only have to stay alive and do all they can to stay out of jail."

Will Weissert is a correspondent for Associated Press and a Mexico City-based freelance writer.