Pubdate: Sun, 09 Jul 2000
Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA)
Copyright: 2000 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
Contact:  PO Box 120191, San Diego, CA, 92112-0191
Fax: (619) 293-1440
Website: http://www.uniontrib.com/
Forum: http://www.uniontrib.com/cgi-bin/WebX
Author: Robert Caldwell, Insight Editor
Note: Part 6 of a 6 part special report on the Arellano Felix Cartel

A LACK OF POLITICAL WILL

The United States, Too, Could Do Much More To Break The Arellano Felix Cartel

The federal government has no plan for bringing down the AFO (drug cartel) 
and capturing the Arellanos," says Charles G. La Bella, with an emphasis 
born of frustration.

Were it otherwise, at least through last year, La Bella would have known.

 From December 1993 through June 1998, he was First Assistant United States 
Attorney in San Diego, chief of the office's criminal division and the 
principal deputy to U.S. Attorney Alan Bersin, the Justice Department's 
designated chief law enforcement officer on the Southwest Border.

When Bersin left in June 1998 to become superintendent of the San Diego 
Unified School District, La Bella succeeded him. La Bella held that post 
until May 1999, when he resigned and accepted a private-sector job.

A tough-minded prosecutor with a distinguished record, La Bella won 
widespread respect for his aggressive approach on drug trafficking and 
pursuing the Arellano Felix principals. One participant who attended 
closed-door meetings with La Bella said he didn't shrink from telling 
corrupt Mexican officials to their faces that he couldn't trust them enough 
to share sensitive intelligence information on the Arellanos.

La Bella also had specific ideas on how Benjamin and Ramon Arellano and 
other cartel principals might be brought to justice.

"You would need a team of Mexican 'untouchables' kept on this side of the 
border, secretly stationed at a military base. U.S. intelligence would 
locate one or more of the Arellano brothers. The Mexican team would then 
board the helicopters at the base, fly to the location, surround it and 
arrest them.

"People say this could never be done, but it could be done. Leaving the 
Mexican team in Mexico would probably guarantee failure because they would 
be compromised."

This bold idea apparently went nowhere among Washington's cautious bureaucrats.

"What is lacking," La Bella argues, "is the political will, in Washington 
and certainly in Mexico City, to get this job done. We could get these guys 
if we really wanted to, and were really trying to."

La Bella's stinging critique goes beyond indicting Washington and Mexico 
City for an absence of political will. What is also missing, he contends, 
is a proper strategy for attacking the Arellanos and Mexico's other drug 
cartels.

"This is not a criticism of (U.S.) law enforcement," La Bella stresses. 
"They are doing a terrific job with the tools they have. They just need 
more tools."

Alan Bersin emphatically agrees. Two years removed from his former job as 
U.S. Attorney, Bersin has concluded that Washington needs a far broader 
strategy for taking down the Arellanos and for neutralizing the serious 
threat posed by Mexico's drug cartels.

"Using the domestic law enforcement model to attack this problem isn't 
working. It's much more than a law enforcement problem alone. When you 
consider what drug trafficking and the drug cartels are doing, to Mexico 
and the United States, this is a foreign policy problem and a national 
security problem in addition to a law enforcement problem," Bersin says.

"It can't be effectively attacked until we start treating it for what it is 
- -- a threat to Mexico's national security and, partly because of that and 
partly because of what drugs do to our own society, a threat to our 
national security."

La Bella says that what is lacking in American drug policy "is a 
comprehensive plan to bring the Arellanos to justice. And I think that plan 
must of necessity have several components."

"Law enforcement is clearly one component, and a significant component. But 
equally significant are the intelligence agencies. There has to be an 
intelligence component. There has to be a political component. There has to 
be an economic component. There has to be a diplomatic component.

"There has to be a multi-discipline approach to this problem. And it is not 
just about this organization (the Arellano cartel). There are probably 
three or four other drug organizations in Mexico that need this same 
attention," La Bella says.

The Bersin-La Bella record against the Arellanos demonstrates the 
limitations of having to rely almost exclusively on domestic law 
enforcement mechanisms to counter a complex threat based in a foreign 
country. Bersin's prosecutors won some notable victories against the 
Arellano cartel. But as Bersin and La Bella readily acknowledge, they never 
came close to toppling the cartel or its principal leaders.

Bersin targeted mostly those Arellano syndicate members and associates his 
prosecutors could reach on this side of the border. Bersin's team indicted, 
tried and convicted nearly a dozen cartel members. These included several 
cartel assassins recruited from the Logan 30s street gang in San Diego. 
Bersin's prosecutors also convicted several of the border-crossing 
"narco-juniors," sons of wealthy Tijuana families who worked for the 
Arellano syndicate.

Perhaps Bersin's biggest victory against the cartel was his indictment and 
provisional arrest warrant against Arturo Paez Martinez in 1997. Paez was 
the most important narco-junior and had emerged as a key Arellano 
lieutenant. He was indicted by a federal grand jury on cocaine trafficking 
charges. Law enforcement sources describe the evidence in the Paez case as 
overwhelming.

It was the resulting pressure from U.S. authorities that prompted Mexican 
officials to arrest Paez in Tijuana in November 1997, initially on a charge 
of illegally possessing a firearm. The U.S. Justice Department formally 
requested Paez'extradition to stand trial on the drug charges in the United 
States. The extradition request has dragged through Mexico's murky judicial 
system for three years and is now before the Mexican supreme court.

U.S. law enforcement authorities consider Mexico's final answer on the 
extradition request for Paez a litmus test of Mexico's cooperation in 
combatting the binational drug trade. They know that extradition to the 
United States is every Mexican drug trafficker's greatest legal fear. Tough 
drug laws vigorously enforced by a criminal justice system the traffickers 
cannot buy would be a potent antidote to the Arellanos, if ever it can be 
applied.

Losing by default

Despite these initial successes, and the more recent arrests in Mexico of 
"Chuy" Labra and Ismael Higuera, U.S. and Mexican law enforcement appear 
hardly closer today than they ever were to apprehending the Arellanos 
themselves and dismantling their cartel.

Not coincidentally, the gap between the comprehensive strategy Bersin and 
La Bella advocate and the federal government's actual practice through much 
of the 1990s is a yawning chasm.

On the decisive question of political will at the government's highest 
levels, there is scant evidence that it exists in the Clinton White House. 
President Clinton rarely mentions the drug-trafficking problem or the 
federal government' s supposed war on drugs. Clearly, these are not 
political issues of any urgency for the president and his chief advisers.

Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey's Office of National Drug Control Policy, 
nominally a White House adjunct, is a forceful anti-drug lobby, but also an 
advocate with little actual authority. McCaffrey himself is energetic, 
articulate and personally committed to reducing both the demand for drugs 
and their supply. What he lacks is real political support, and thus 
Washington clout, from a Clinton administration plainly unenthusiastic and 
seemingly even uninterested in the drug war.

Thomas A. Constantine, a Clinton appointee, headed the Drug Enforcement 
Administration, the federal government's principal agency in combatting 
narcotics, for five and a half years. In all that time, Constantine never 
once was called to meet with the president on the drug issue.

With rare exceptions, the federal government's purported war on drugs drew 
comparably blank stares through the 1990s at the State Department, which 
had other priorities regarding Mexico. Always seen as much more pressing, 
these included the North American Free Trade Agreement, the peso bailout, 
illegal immigration and keeping political and economic reform in volatile 
Mexico moving forward.

Law enforcement sources tend to rate Attorney General Janet Reno as merely 
dutiful on narcotics issues but not an assertive leader.

In 1989, then-President George Bush assailed the deadly cocaine trade in 
his inaugural address and vowed that "this scourge will stop." To that end, 
Bush dramatically increased federal spending on drug interdiction and 
ordered the Defense Department to use the American military against drug 
trafficking.

Four years later, the newly elected Clinton appeared almost to reverse 
course on drugs.

Clinton promptly cut his own drug czar's budget and staff by 75 percent. He 
slashed drug-interdiction funding by almost half in just three years. In 
addition, Clinton stood by silently as a shrinking American military found 
steadily fewer surplus assets to aid in interdicting drugs.

A report this January by Congress' nonpartisan General Accounting Office 
detailed the jarring extent of the Pentagon's retreat from the drug war:

"Since 1992, DOD's level of support to counter drug-trafficking in Central 
and South America and the Caribbean has significantly declined," the report 
said.

"For example, the number of flight hours devoted to counter-drug missions 
declined 68 percent from 1992 through 1999. Likewise, the number of ship 
days fell 62 percent over the same period. In fiscal year 1999, U.S. 
Southern Command reported that DOD was unable to meet 57 percent of the 
command' s requests for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance 
flights to support its detection and monitoring responsibilities."

The report detailed drastic drops in flying hours on drug-surveillance and 
interdiction flights for key types of military aircraft over the 1992-99 
period: 64 percent fewer flying hours for Navy P-3Cs, 57 percent fewer 
hours for Navy E-2s, 80 percent fewer for Air Force E-3s, and a 78-percent 
decline in Navy SH2F helicopter flight time on drug missions.

The report went on to note that these sharp declines in support had 
seriously weakened efforts to interdict and reduce the flow of narcotics 
into the United States.

"Coverage in key drug-trafficking routes to the United States is lower, 
leaving gaps in detection areas ...... In the Eastern Pacific, a key threat 
area, DOD was unable to sustain its support in 1997 and 1998 to a 
successful interdiction operation due to a lack of available assets," the 
report noted.

McCaffrey defends the Pentagon. He argues that a U.S. military reduced by 
more than a third since 1990, even as its overseas deployments multiplied, 
lacks the resources to sustain its previous drug-war efforts. He has a 
point. But so do those who wonder why the president hasn't at least tried 
to do something about it.

An administration fully engaged in the drug war would presumably use 
America's matchless intelligence assets to help the drug fighters. The 
United States still spends an estimated $30 billion a year (the precise 
figure is classified) to operate by far the world's most sophisticated 
information-gathering capabilities. Yet, these seem rarely to be employed 
against, for example, the Arellanos.

"It is inconceivable to me that the National Security Agency and the 
Central Intelligence Agency could not identify where Ramon Arellano is 
sitting right now," says a former senior Justice Department official.

"Why aren't we using this technology to detect (drug) loads coming across 
the border? Why aren't we using (electronic) intercepts? If we could bug 
(the late Soviet leader) Brezhnev's limousine during the Cold War, you 
could certainly bug the cartel's telephones to figure out when the drug 
loads are coming."

But interviews with numerous law enforcement officials suggest that the 
United States'national intelligence agencies, in fact, contribute only 
marginally to the drug-war effort.

"It is so filtered, and so late. We'll learn that something was happening 
over here, say, eight or nine days ago. But now it's too late. It's over, 
the bad guys are gone," recalls Vincent DelaMontaigne, the FBI agent who 
headed law enforcement's multi-agency Arellano Task Force from 1997 to 1999.

The Clinton administration's marked lack of enthusiasm for a drug war it 
apparently sees as a political loser isn't lost on those struggling to hold 
the line along the Southwest border.

The U.S. Customs Service's William Cecil, who directs air and marine 
interdiction operations from a headquarters at North Island Naval Air 
Station, is blunt on the subject.

"There has never been any emphasis from the Clinton administration on the 
drug war," Cecil says.

"I don't think the support is there. In the last couple of years, we've 
gotten far more support from the Hill (Congress) than we have from the 
administration. Whatever the reason, there has not been the effort to make 
what needs to happen, happen."

Alan Bersin's conclusions focus on the immensely damaging consequences for 
the Tijuana-San Diego region of allowing the Arellano drug cartel to 
continue operating unchecked.

"For our region, the importance of dealing with the Arellanos remains 
paramount. You cannot begin to conceive of a binational region here that 
will take advantage of all the elements that are coming into play while 
leaving the mafia, in effect, in control of so much of Tijuana's official life.

"That is a major obstacle to what I understand and perceive to be a very 
important part of San Diego's future, which is designing, evolving and 
nurturing a relationship with Tijuana and Baja California that benefits San 
Diego as well as the border."
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