Pubdate: Wed, 18 Jul 2001
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2001 The New York Times Company
Section: International
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Tim Weiner

MEXICO'S NEW ANTI-DRUG TEAM WINS THE TRUST OF U.S. OFFICIALS

MEXICO CITY -- After five years of failure, American and Mexican 
officials fighting the war on drugs say they have created a trusted 
group of undercover Mexican investigators who are arresting long- 
sought suspects and attacking all the big drug cartels, instead of 
selling out to them as in the past.

This breakthrough in no way means that the tide has turned in the 
drug war, they acknowledge. A never-ending river of cocaine and 
heroin still flows north from Mexico to meet never-ending demand in 
the United States. Drug barons are still using their profits to try 
to corrupt Mexican law enforcement at every level.

But in the last few months, something significant has changed: with 
the creation of a 117-member Mexican organized-crime unit, which 
works side by side with the United States Drug Enforcement 
Administration in Mexico, both sides say they are starting to trust 
each other.

"We have got counterparts down here whom we trust and with whom we 
can share sensitive information without that filtering out to the 
traffickers, and we haven't been proved wrong yet," said a senior 
United States law enforcement official in Mexico. "We have found some 
people in whom we have confidence."

The creation of the new drug police unit, each member rigorously 
vetted by both nations, has meant a new way of doing business, said 
Joseph Keefe, the United States drug enforcement agency's chief of 
operations.

"We can sit down and freely share information with the Mexicans, they 
can share information with us, the information doesn't wind up on the 
street," he said. "They are going out and attacking drug 
organizations."

Jose Santiago Vasconcelos, chief of Mexico's special organized-crime 
unit, who oversees the vetted unit, as it is known, said: 
"Information is flowing on both sides, almost instantaneously. We 
obtain information, we communicate it to the Americans immediately; 
they obtain information, and they communicate immediately, and we are 
connecting, coordinating, on cases as much in the United States as 
much as in Mexico."

Both nations have tried without success since 1996 to form a cadre of 
trustworthy undercover Mexican investigators. The 117 Mexicans under 
Mr. Vasconcelos have been through financial audits, psychological 
screening and polygraphs. Their neighbors and families have been 
grilled. Their blood and urine have been analyzed. That screening is 
done by Mexican government officials with American help. Then they 
have gone to the United States for more tests and extensive training.

They have been working since April for Mr. Vasconcelos and his 
organized crime unit. He is the only man in Mexico empowered to run 
wiretaps and undercover operations against drug cartels.

The Americans give Mr. Vasconcelos information. He takes it to a 
trusted Mexican judge - a judge who, he hopes, will not leak details 
of the investigation to drug gangs - to win approval for wiretaps 
against suspects in Mexico. The information gleaned from bugging in 
Mexico can provide probable cause to seek more wiretaps in the United 
States.

That sets information flowing across the border, "and there's a real 
synergy there," said a senior United States official in Mexico. 
Members of the Mexican unit then run the cases from investigation to 
arrest.

They have attacked all the major drug cartels this year - "the entire 
spectrum of narcotics trafficking, making it very difficult to assert 
that this is anything other than real," said this American official.

"In years past, to the extent that the government in Mexico did 
anything against one of the major cartels, it was typically viewed as 
a means of protecting another cartel someplace." he said. The 
implication had been that "the government was lining its pockets with 
money from one cartel, while trying to curry favor with the United 
States or others by going after another one."

But now, he said, "there's a fundamental difference down here." Since 
President Vicente Fox took office in December, "there has been a 
broad-based offensive against all of the cartels."

This year, the unit has helped arrest a former governor, Mario 
Villanueva, and a drug cartel operator, Alcides Ramon Magana, jointly 
accused of conspiring to ship more than $2 billion worth of cocaine 
to the United States.

Mr. Villanueva had been slipping in and out of Mexico since his term 
ended in 1999. But in May he was detected in Cancun. He was tracked 
for eight days, until officials had dotted every i and crossed every 
t for his arrest and potential extradition to the United States, 
Mexican and American officials said.

"We worked side by side, we had live sources on Villanueva's comings 
and goings, and we seized the right moment," Mr. Vasconcelos said.

Mr. Magana, a former federal police officer, had been in plain view, 
off and on, for close to four years. American agents had given their 
Mexican counterparts his home addresses, telephone numbers and 
safe-house locations, officials said. But nothing happened until 
June, when Mexican agents cornered him.

This year ships hauling more than 50 tons of cocaine off the Pacific 
coast have been seized, officials said, and large drug smuggling and 
money laundering rings that reached from the Canadian border to 
Colombia have been at least temporarily destroyed.

The arrest roster also includes three senior military officers, 
several drug cartel lieutenants, and a Tijuana cartel enforcer 
charged with shooting a Roman Catholic cardinal in 1993. After 
Mexico's Supreme Court approved extradition of drug suspects, four 
suspected major traffickers were sent to the United States for trial.

Mr. Vasconcelos said the underlying trust in his new vetted unit 
"comes from a new openness" between the Americans and Mexicans. 
"We've created it among ourselves and it's generating confidence," he 
said. "And at last we understand we have a common enemy" - instead of 
fighting one another.

The history of the drug war in Mexico suggests that tactical 
government victories are fleeting. The cartels have billions of 
dollars to buy off officials. They feed a seemingly insatiable demand 
with "ever-increasing supplies, delivered by ever-more sophisticated 
means," said Michael Massing, a longtime analyst of the drug war and 
author of "The Fix" (University of California Press, 2000).

"Can it make a difference?" he said, referring to the new unit. "I'd 
be surprised if these changes lead to a substantial decrease in drugs 
going to the U.S. or a decrease in the violence and power of the 
cartels."

The Drug Enforcement Administration in Mexico is essentially an 
intelligence service. Its agents cannot carry guns or make arrests. 
It gathers and analyzes information and hopes that its Mexican 
counterparts will act on it.

If it cannot pass on information with confidence, in its view, 
nothing good will happen ó and many bad things could, like the 
collapse of investigations or the death of colleagues.

Its officials say they do not want to paint too rosy a picture.

Only two years ago, Thomas Constantine, then the director of the Drug 
Enforcement Administration, said Mexican drug enforcement was corrupt 
and incompetent. And its previous attempts to form a trusted cadre of 
Mexican officers also began with enthusiasm, but failed miserably.

"There is little effective law enforcement leading to the arrest of 
major traffickers in Mexico," he said. "Investigations have been 
compromised," usually when drug traffickers bought information from 
corrupt Mexican agents. His depressing and largely undisputed 
assessment meant that the drug war, from the Americans' standpoint, 
was a losing battle and perhaps a lost cause.

 From 1996 onward, the drug agency, the F.B.I, the United States
military and the C.I.A. have tried forming vetted units. Between 1997 
and 1999, the American drug agency alone spent $4.5 million on 
training, equipment and lie-detector tests for Mexican agents and 
prosecutors.

Seventy passed the test. Shortly after they were mobilized, the unit 
collapsed - corruption in the ranks, Mr. Constantine said.

That left the number of trusted Mexican drug agents, and therefore 
the effectiveness of counternarcotics operations in Mexico, at "zero 
- - or less than zero," said Mr. Keefe, the agency's operations chief.

Part of the problem was the "massive ignorance and arrogance" of 
United States officials, said Barry R. McCaffrey, the retired Army 
general who served as the American antidrug chief for five years. He 
cited his own public assessment of his Mexican counterpart in the war 
on drugs, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, as "a guy of absolute 
unquestioned integrity."

General Gutierrez was trusted with highly secret information by White 
House, Drug Enforcement Administration and intelligence officials. 
Presumably, every bit of it ended up in the hands of the traffickers.

He was arrested in February 1997 and convicted of working for a major 
Mexican drug trafficker lord.

A predecessor, Mario Ruiz Massieu, Mexico's drug policy chief in 1993 
and 1994, killed himself in 1999 rather than stand trial in Texas on 
drug and money laundering charges.

The moral, said General McCaffrey, was, "Watch your step - honest men 
die in Mexico," while the corrupted thrive.

But the real lesson, said Mr. Fox's national security adviser, Adolfo 
Aguilar Zinser, is that the nations have to work harder to establish 
trusted units.

"President Fox convinced President Bush to try this" when they met at 
Mr. Fox's ranch on Feb. 16, Mr. Aguilar Zinser said.

A senior American official in Mexico said the two men had issued 
"orders from on high to make this thing work."

Mr. Keefe said: "We're certainly sharing a lot more intelligence than 
we were a year or two ago. We're sharing it sooner. This is what's 
new ó the straightforwardness of it. And it's been successful. So 
far."
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