MEXICO CITY (Reuter) - Late Mexican drug kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes spent part of the last three years of his life in Cuba as he sought to build a cocaine smuggling empire in South America and the Caribbean, El Universal daily reported Wednesday.
According to an unidentified Mexican government official cited by the newspaper, Carrillo used the alias Juan Antonio Arriaga to travel between Cuba and Chile, where he aimed to expand his drugs domain.
In Havana, he stayed in a posh diplomatic suburb called El Vedado, El Universal said.
It said police investigations of a Mexican travel agency Viages Regis, as well as airline and phone records, confirmed the Cuba connection of the so-called ``Lord of the Skies.''
Before his death in July during plastic surgery in Mexico City, Carrillo Fuentes, 42, was Mexico's top druglord, who flew billions of dollars worth of cocaine in large aircraft from Colombia to Mexico for sale in the United States.
According to El Universal, toward the end of his life he sought to set up a cocaine factory in northern Chile to process coca paste from neighboring Peru and Bolivia. This was aimed at distancing himself from Colombian drug cartels in order to establish distribution routes to Europe.
Mexican authorities were investigating the possibility that Carrillo bribed officials in order to travel freely, but so far it had come up with no firm evidence, El Universal reported.
``It's not a witch hunt against the Cuban government ... up to this moment we haven't registered a single gram of cocaine leaving the Caribbean island,'' the source was quoted as saying.
An official at Viajes Regis said he had no knowledge of a police probe of the travel agency.
A spokesmen at the Attorney General's Office had no immediate comment on the report, though his boss, Attorney General Jorge Madrazo, recently confirmed that the Mexican government had asked its Cuban counterpart for information on Carrillo's stay in Cuba shortly before his death.
12:17 09-24-97