Pubdate: Wed, 14 Aug 2002
Source: St. Paul Pioneer Press (MN)
Copyright: 2002 St. Paul Pioneer Press
Contact:  http://www.pioneerplanet.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/379
Author: Tim Johnson, Washington Bureau

U.S. DRUG CZAR LAUDS MEXICO'S EFFORTS

WASHINGTON - Mexico is chalking up "enormous successes" in battling 
narcotics trafficking, causing "a disruption that we have not seen before" 
in cocaine smuggling around the hemisphere, the White House drug czar said 
Tuesday.

Mexico's sweeping actions against drug smuggling are forcing U.S. dealers 
to dilute the quality of cocaine on U.S. streets, said John Walters, 
director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The 
purity of street-level cocaine in the United States fell 9 percent last 
year, he said.

Walters' praise of Mexico - a nation that Washington largely treated as a 
corrupt and unworthy ally in the drug war in the 1990s - was both lavish 
and unprecedented. It coincided with the apparent arrest in Mexico of 
several Colombians with alleged ties to Colombia's largest rebel group and 
the Tijuana Cartel, a new sign of what the Bush administration asserts is a 
link between terrorist groups and drug trafficking.

The Mexican attorney general's office did not say how many Colombians were 
arrested, but the detentions fueled speculation in the Mexican press that 
guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia were 
establishing ties to Mexico's drug traffickers.

Walters, who took over as President Bush's drug czar eight months ago, said 
Mexico's "historic" achievement in dismantling several drug gangs this year 
has earned it a new role as an anti-drug leader.

"Mexico, I believe, is farther ahead than any other nation, including the 
United States, in this hemisphere at this point," Walters told a news 
conference limited to foreign journalists in Washington. A transcript of 
the news conference was later issued.

Walters, who recently returned from a trip through South America, said 
Mexico's effectiveness at smashing drug rings was disrupting traffickers in 
Colombia, source of most of the world's cocaine.

"The reports we have are that many Colombia-based organizations are no 
longer providing cocaine on credit to Mexican organizations because of 
cash-flow problems," Walters said. "There's a lot of destabilization in 
these markets."

He said Mexican traffickers may move into marijuana to "make up cash flow."

"We want to make the market (unstable). That's the way you destroy 
markets," he said. "Our goal in the United States and working with our 
allies is to create and sustain fundamental instabilities in the drug markets."

Mexican President Vicente Fox, who came into office in December 2000, is 
credited with carrying out his pledge to attack drug gangs and police 
corruption that allowed traffickers to flourish.

In a February shootout in Mazatlan, police killed Ramon Arellano Felix, the 
enforcer of the Tijuana Cartel who was on the FBI's 10 most wanted list. 
Weeks later, police arrested the cartel's chief operations officer, 
Benjamin Arellano Felix, in the city of Puebla, and captured the cartel's 
chief smuggler.

Some 65 percent of the cocaine entering the United States is believed to 
penetrate by land though the 2,000-mile border with Mexico.

Walters, who attended the inaugurations of new presidents in Colombia and 
Bolivia last week, strongly defended a state of emergency imposed Monday in 
Colombia that allows for restrictions on civil liberties.

He said the South American nation's incoming president, Alvaro Uribe, 
confronts spreading lawlessness by the FARC rebels and needs a free hand to 
bring order and political reform to his country.

Uribe, whose inauguration was greeted by a surge of rebel violence, had 
adopted "a dramatic agenda that will be ambitious and difficult," Walters said.

"The new government has set not only ... an ambitious security agenda for 
itself, but an ambitious domestic reform agenda, spreading the burden of 
taxation throughout society, in addition to raising revenues, reforming 
public institutions of education, of health and social welfare," he said.

On another counternarcotics issue, Walters said Colombia and Peru are 
likely to renew in mid-autumn a suspended U.S.-coordinated program to 
intercept drug-laden airplanes.

The Bush administration suspended the program in April 2001 after Peruvian 
jet fighters fired on a U.S. missionary airplane over the Amazon River, 
mistaking it for a cocaine-smuggling aircraft. A U.S. missionary and her 
infant daughter were killed.

U.S. officials are engaging in joint exercises and refining their 
interdiction procedures in both Andean countries to avoid a repeat of the 
tragedy, he said.

"We understand this is not a risk-free activity," he said, "but we want to 
minimize to the absolute extent possible the risk of innocent lives being 
put in jeopardy."
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart