U.S. Plans More Pressure on Mexico to Block Cocaine

The U.S. government has decided to mount a diplomatic campaign to pressure Mexico to enlist more actively in efforts to halt the mounting flow of cocaine through its territory into the Southwest United States, Administration officials said Friday.

The projected focus on Mexico, to be initiated in coming weeks, is part of a broader U.S. plan to step up its own anti-drug efforts in the border region, where most cocaine is now believed to enter the country.

The timing coincides with the annual State Department consideration of whether Mexico should be formally certified as cooperating in the anti-drug effort and therefore eligible for extensive foreign aid, officials noted.

In disclosing the plan, National Drug Control Policy Director William J. Bennett emphasized in an interview that the United States was “very encouraged by what we see” in the way of more stringent anti-drug efforts by Mexico.

“We should build on these efforts, and we should be doing more. . . ,” he said. “The whole relationship between the United States and Mexico is going to be pretty focused with regard to drugs.”

Despite such gentle language, officials acknowledged that the plan to prod Mexico could complicate relations between the two countries, whose differences over drugs have aggravated stormy relations for nearly two decades.

They said that while Mexico’s new president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, has proven more aggressive than any of his predecessors in mounting anti-drug efforts, the steps he has taken still fall far short of what the United States has made clear it would like to see.

In particular, Mexico has shown little enthusiasm for U.S. proposals calling for joint crews on aircraft used on drug interdiction missions and for American authorities to be permitted to cross the border in “hot pursuit” of drug traffickers.

In addition, the State Department, in a report last summer, noted persistent “charges of corruption” against high-level Mexican officials long thought to be aligned with drug traffickers.

The U.S. decision to seek the additional cooperation, Bennett said, was prompted principally by an emerging Bush Administration effort to dispatch additional anti-drug resources to the Southwest border, the preferred point of entry for drug traffickers after enforcement was stepped up off the Florida coast.

“We are going to have to have an increased presence along the Mexican border because we think more of (the cocaine) is coming in that way. . . ,” Bennett said. “And if you’ve got more military and more border patrol, you need more cooperative government.”

Another U.S. official involved in the anti-drug effort noted that the effectiveness of the planned border crackdown depended in large part on intelligence and surveillance that only the Mexican government could provide.

The planned discussions with Mexican officials also appear designed to forestall the kinds of protests its diplomats sounded last month after the Defense Department unveiled a plan to use American troops and warplanes along the border.

The Mexican Embassy warned that the plan “might have negative consequences for the bilateral relationship,” and both the Pentagon and the State Department issued statements playing down the impact of the new effort.

In the interview, Bennett said he had discussed “the necessity (for Mexico) to develop an even better campaign” with John D. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, in a telephone conversation Friday morning.

BACKGROUND Differences over drugs have plagued U.S.-Mexican relations since the Richard M. Nixon Administration, when the United States put pressure on Mexico to eradicate heroin and marijuana. The Mexican response has consistently fallen short of American expectations, leading the United States on occasion to slow cross-border traffic in hopes of spurring further action.