Mexico Rejects Report on Its Marijuana Crop : Diplomacy: A much higher State Dept. estimate of pot production is only ‘rough speculation,’ one official says.

The Mexican ambassador to the United States this week voiced strong objections to an upcoming Bush Administration report on marijuana production in Mexico, telling U.S. officials that the data is “very controversial and questionable,” Mexican sources said.

The State Department report, based on CIA satellite surveillance, shows that the Administration now believes Mexico produces 10 times more marijuana than the United States previously estimated, The Times has reported.

Mexican Ambassador Gustavo Petricioli, in a meeting with U.S. officials Monday, challenged the suitability of such satellites for identifying drug cultivation and asked whether the United States has used such devices to survey its own marijuana crop, sources said.

A senior Mexican official added his voice to the condemnation in an interview, denouncing the new U.S. estimates as “enormously irresponsible” and “a clumsy leak.”

“It appears to be an unreliable estimate,” the senior official said in a telephone interview from Mexico City. “It can only be considered rough speculation. . . .”

The public release of the new figures at a congressional hearing today is expected to add momentum to a move on Capitol Hill to punish Mexico for a lack of cooperation in anti-drug efforts.

In a preliminary flurry Wednesday, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), citing The Times’ account, asked William J. Bennett, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, whether the Mexican government has been submitting “misleading statistics” to the United States.

A top deputy to Bennett, John P. Walters, confirmed that the State Department report will show “there is a lot more marijuana being cultivated (in Mexico) than people thought.”

But Walters said he doubts that Mexico deliberately misled the United States, suggesting that the Mexican government did not have the capability for measuring the marijuana crop.

Although declining to state the measures used by the United States, Walters expressed confidence that the upward revision of 1,000% in the State Department report will provide “a reliable figure for the first time.”

Helms is expected to lead a congressional effort to deny Mexico foreign aid on grounds of poor performance on drug issues. But with the Administration planning to muster a strong defense of the Mexican government, a well-placed congressional source predicted Wednesday that Mexico will win certification as having “cooperated fully.”

Those assurances of Administration support in the certification fight appear to have muted some of Mexico’s concerns. But the Mexican officials made clear in interviews this week that they will not accept the new estimate and are angered by its disclosure.

“It seems enormously irresponsible to make such a statement when President Bush and William Bennett recently acknowledged that the United States is the world’s largest marijuana producer.”

The new State Department figures will show Mexican marijuana production to be many times that of the United States. But U.S. officials have acknowledged that domestic growers produce the world’s most potent marijuana and say they may continue to supply as much as 35% of the American market.