Pubdate: Sun, 24 Aug 1997 Source: Houston Chronicle, page 1D (http://www.chron.com/cgibin/auth/story/content/ chronicle/metropolitan/97/08/24/drugs.20.html) Contact: Partnership is the best weapon, drug czar says By THADDEUS HERRICK, Houston Chronicle San Antonio Bureau LAREDO The 1993 Freightliner tractortrailer heading north from here last month looked no different than most of the commercial trucks that ply Interstate 35 from the Mexican border to the northern reaches of Minnesota. Not, that is, until authorities at a Border Patrol checkpoint north of town took a look at the 38 cardboard boxes inside. They found 3,300 pounds of cocaine worth $106 million and proclaimed it the second largest bust of its kind in the history of this NAFTA boomtown. Locals cheered. But to many the news only emphasized the ease with which narcotics are flowing into the United States as the country opens its borders to free trade. Last year, 2.8 million trucks crossed the Mexican border into the United States. Only 900,000 were inspected. In all, the U.S. Customs Service had the manpower to check only about 5 percent of all vehicles coming across the nation's 2,000mile international boundary. "You can put anything in the back of your car, and there's a 95 percent chance it won't be inspected," said Travis Kuykendall, a former head of Drug Enforcement Administration operations in El Paso and now an administrator of the West Texas High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, which distributes federal money to anti narcotics agencies. It is that armsintheair assessment from the front lines that the nation's drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, is almost certain to hear when he visits El Paso Monday and Laredo Tuesday as part of a weeklong visit to the U.SMexico border. With its 890 miles of international boundary, Texas may present McCaffrey with his greatest challenge in the war on drugs. El Paso and neighboring Juarez, Mexico, which make up the most heavily populated metropolitan area on any international border in the world, has for almost a decade been the preferred corridor of the socalled Mexican federation, which works with Colombian traffickers to help satisfy America's $49billionayear appetite for illegal drugs. U.S. officials got a glimpse of that route this month, when they broke up three drug cells allegedly run by Amado Carrillo Fuentes' Juarez cartel. The bust led from warehouses in El Paso where cocaine was stored to the affluent New York suburbs. Downriver on the Rio Grande, Mexican traffickers are muscling aside Maverick County ranchers, in some cases issuing threats, ransacking property and tearing down fences. Now some federal agents believe that South Texas will soon eclipse El Paso in smuggling activity. The reason is twofold. Laredo handles the bulk of trade with Mexico, making it arguably a better transshipment point than El Paso. And Carrillo, who favored the El Paso corridor, with its access to Interstates 10 and 25, died last month. Whatever unfolds, McCaffrey has vowed to respond to the marijuana, cocaine and heroin pouring into Texas with technology, manpower and a closer working relationship with Mexican authorities. Shared intelligence, he said in an interview last week, is the best way to thwart smugglers. "Most of us believe this can't be done unilaterally," McCaffrey said. "We can't do it unless we have a partnership." The trouble may be finding Mexican authorities who aren't corrupt. Indeed, Mexico made a near mockery of its antinarcotics efforts this year when its drug czar, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was linked to Carrillo, Mexico's most powerful drug trafficker, who headed the Juarez cartel before his death during plastic surgery. Though a successor to Carrillo is not yet apparent, U.S. officials say Juarez traffickers continue to operate with impunity. Such was the case under Carrillo, when DEA informants and many more suspected of being informants were routinely found dead. Among those murdered were a former Mexican police commander and his two sons, whose bodies were dumped at a crossing in 1994. "As long as Mexico allows the world's most significant traffickers to conduct their business, nothing can really change," said Phil Jordan, a former DEA agent and onetime head of the El Paso Intelligence center, a worldwide drug monitoring post. Even a senior official under McCaffrey at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy acknowledged that "any DEA agent will tell you, `Look, there's just not a lot of people we can trust over there.' " But corruption also plagues the U.S. side. The problem was underscored two years ago in El Paso when two Customs inspectors tried to shake down an informer posing as a drug smuggler, one of them demanding more than $1 million to look the other way when vehicles hauling cocaine crossed from Juarez. At the other end of the Texas border, in Zapata County, most of the county's leaders were convicted or pleaded guilty in federal court of charges to aiding the international drug trade. "We'd be crazy not to acknowledge there are billions of dollars involved this, and that the capability to corrupt on both sides of the border is enormous," said McCaffrey. "The question is not whether corruption exists, but what we can do about it." McCaffrey said that a detailed antidrug strategy drawn up with Mexico includes the creation of three reliable binational counternarcotics task forces on the border. But even as the drug czar touted this plan, he was busy downplaying a Texas lawmaker's comments that Mexican traffickers are paying former U.S. soldiers for their knowhow. Silvestre Reyes, an El Paso congressman who served as Border Patrol chief there earlier, said former American counterintelligence soldiers and Green Berets are being paid handsomely to subvert U.S. antidrug operations. McCaffrey said such a scenario concerns him. But he said reports on the matter from the DEA, FBI, Border Patrol, CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency have yielded nothing. "The bottom line is that, categorically, I've never heard of anything like that." said McCaffrey. "I think if we had gringos walking around doing this I would have heard about it." Still, McCaffrey proposed more federal agents along the entire border in addition to fencing, lowlight television equipment and other surveillance tools. Traffickers, he said, are operating with technology that often gives them the edge in the war on drugs. "We have got to have the ability to create law and order and respect for human rights on the border," McCaffrey said. That has long been lacking in many forsaken communities between Brownsville and San Diego, Calif. But these days the problem seems particularly acute. Since Carrillo died in a Mexico City hospital July 24, at least 18 people have been murdered in Juarez. Near Eagle Pass, where a Border Patrol agent was shot and killed by traffickers early last year, skittish ranchers on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande refuse to leave their homes without weapons. "You take a gun with you to go water a horse," said Sandra Wipff, the wife of rancher Karl Wipff. "It's that bad." And in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, three men were killed Thursday in a gunbattle that U.S. officials described as a fight for the turf of Juan Garcia Abrego, a convicted drug trafficker and former head of the gulf cartel. Controlling the lawlessness spawned by the drug trade is a daunting problem. McCaffrey himself has been working on the Eagle Pass problem for more than a year, bolstering the federal presence, but ranchers say they are no better off. Nor has the controversial use of the military for reconnaissance along the border currently suspended after a mixup led Marines to shoot and kill a U.S. citizen in Redford provided a solution. U.S. officials concede they could address the drug problem more efficiently under a centralized system, one that doesn't rely on various agencies. But few predict consolidation or the creation of a new antidrug agency. About all that U.S. officials along the border predict is more international traffic, which they see as more drugs being waved through unknowingly by understaffed U.S. inspectors up and down the border. "This is a nightmare," said Kuykendall. "It's overwhelming It's almost unresolvable."