U.S. Planes Help Mexico Head Off Drugs at Border

From its secret post off the coast of Colombia, the American P-3 radar plane found what it was looking for--a twin-engine Turbo Commander churning its way northward, low and slow in the black of night.

The civilian aircraft was following a drug couriers’ favorite flight plan: a wide turn over the Pacific past Central America, then straight for Mexico and landing strips just short of the U.S. border.

For American sentinels, that course is a source of unending frustration. Every day, at least three suspect planes disappear onto remote landing strips in the Mexican sagebrush. And from those well-placed staging points, an ant army of smugglers has proved more than a match for U.S. border guards.

But on this February night, the American radar plane had license to do something never before attempted.

When the Turbo Commander crossed into Mexican airspace, the P-3 followed. Using new intelligence channels, it warned Mexican authorities what was coming. By the time the smugglers touched down in the town of Monclova, a fledgling Mexican response team, guided by the American radar plane, was descending for what would be a historic bust.

The take: more than 1,700 pounds of cocaine, three Colombian pilots--and five corrupt cops, two of them Mexican federal judicial police.

The still-classified operation marked the consummation of a marriage long sought by American officials: a matchup of American radar sightings and Mexican ground forces, operating in a country where U.S. intelligence had previously been of little tactical use.

But along a border scarred by decades of feuding, the success in Monclova has given only passing comfort to American officials painfully aware of just how porous the United States’ 1,900-mile Southwestern frontier remains.

Almost overnight, the border has become the No. 1 entry point for cocaine into the United States, the weakest link in the drug interdiction campaign. No one can agree how the trend might be reversed.

Mexican sensitivities about its bullying neighbor to the north remain such that the principal American attempt to shore up the border barrier--the creation of the military’s Joint Task Force 6 to help guard against smugglers--provoked a near-crippling outcry.

“The fact is,” a senior Administration official said of the border war on drugs, “we’re getting our tails kicked down there.”

Of the hundreds of tons of cocaine that pour into the United States every year, an alarming 70% is now thought to pass through Mexico--up from 30% just a few years ago.

Determined to toughen up, the Bush Administration has already taken unprecedented steps to expand its surveillance, including the increased use of high-technology radars that look deep into Mexican territory.

At least 200 American soldiers now do border-guard duty every week, well-armed and well-camouflaged in the Southwest desert. Oklahoma-based AWACS (airborne warning and control system) radar planes patrol over the region on 35 missions a month. And increasingly, fighter planes as well as Customs Service Cessnas are slated to scramble on missions to intercept airborne smugglers.

But as interviews with officials on both sides of the border make clear, it remains uncertain what will be gained by upping the ante. A senior U.S. official who is coordinating a review of the problem has concluded only one thing: The United States is being badly outsmarted along the border--and no one knows how.

What is more, the geography that makes Mexico a vital partner in the United States’ anti-drug effort has also made it the victim this century of two invasions from the north. That in turn has made Mexico’s leaders protective of their sovereignty.

Indeed, Mexico’s top anti-drug official, Javier Coello Trejo, insisted in an interview that current American estimates of cocaine passing through his country were at least four times too large.

“The traffickers are not passing the quantity of drugs through here that (U.S. officials) say they are,” he insisted. “. . . Not even 15% of the cocaine (consumed in the United States) passes through Mexico.”

So important is sovereignty that Mexican governments have routinely denied that the United States plays any part in Mexican anti-drug operations. But in a clear indication that a new U.S.-Mexican partnership has been forged despite the recent tensions, Coello declared, “Our relations are excellent.”

“There is an exchange of information,” he said. “This has never happened before.”

Whatever its magnitude, the current drug troubles in the porous borderland stem from past successes. A U.S. buildup in south Florida in the mid-1980s managed to strike heavy blows against Colombian traffickers in what had been their favorite corridor.

Rather than fight, the traffickers switched air smuggling operations westward through Mexico, where cocaine traffic had been spare. When beefed-up radar defenses began to catch up with planes flying across the border, the traffickers turned to new ground routes.

And when a valuable alliance with Mexican smugglers collapsed owing to the arrest of drug kingpin Felix Gallardo, the Colombians began to take over more of the operation themselves, with pilots delivering loads ever closer to the U.S. border.

Exactly how cocaine is now smuggled into the United States from Mexico is a matter of dispute--and a source of great anxiety for American officials.

U.S. officials believe that much of it is now flown directly from Colombia into northern Mexico. With border radar that looks as deep as 150 miles into Mexico, the Americans track as many as 20 planes a day that set down near the border. Typically, at least three of those are believed to be traffickers.

But at that point, knowledge becomes even more imperfect. Based on arrests, authorities believe that Mexican subcontractors still ferry loads into the United States. Based on seizures, it is known that the means of conveyance can range from a tractor-trailer to teams of mules--both human and four-legged.

But while there are many theories, no one knows for sure. And against a suspected rising tide of cocaine, the recent record of interdiction along the border gives little reason to believe that officials are on the right track.

In all of 1989, customs inspectors working round the clock at border crossings from San Ysidro, Calif., to Brownsville, Tex., recovered just over nine tons of cocaine. In El Paso, deputy director Michael Nowak said his inspectors had made only one significant cocaine seizure in the last three years.

Yet in Los Angeles, agents in one lucky hit stumbled on more than twice that amount, more than 20 tons, in a San Fernando Valley warehouse. All of it and more, investigators believe, had been smuggled through the El Paso border crossing point.

Moreover, on the rare occasions when cocaine is intercepted near the border, there is rarely as much as agents had expected. Statistics show that border guards are making just as many busts. It is simply that the average load is getting smaller.

“It looks like the smugglers have wised up,” said Charles S. Henry, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency official who is a tactical director of Operation Alliance, which coordinates anti-drug agencies along the border.

Theories about smugglers’ strategies vary from agency to agency.

“The big problem is right up the gut, at the crossings themselves,” said David L. Westrate, assistant DEA administrator for operations.

Sam Banks, a top customs official, points elsewhere: “We see evidence that it is coming across between the border points.”

According to government sources, a Bush Administration working group is so dissatisfied with those explanations that it has asked intelligence agencies to come up with a better picture.

Among their tasks: to determine whether the interdiction effort is not so much being outsmarted as it is being sold out by corruption. Already, anti-drug officials say, there have been a number of ominous clues.

In San Ysidro last month, border inspectors one day were unexpectedly ordered to switch to unaccustomed posts. Suddenly, a Mexican sitting in a car that was three cars away from the crossing point opened his door and ran. In his car was 700 pounds of marijuana.

“It looks as if the guy had been counting on favored treatment,” one customs official said. The incident, and the inspector who would normally have searched the vehicle, remain under investigation.

“It’s just not fair for us to talk so much about corruption on the Mexican side when we may have a very big problem ourselves,” an Administration official said.

For its part, the military, the major new player on the American side of the border, has also been asked primarily to gather intelligence.

Teams of National Guardsmen from California to Texas began to operate last year from remote border posts to survey smuggling traffic that might otherwise go undetected. The Air Force AWACS planes now devote 40% of their flight time to anti-drug surveillance.

And since November, when the Defense Department established its Joint Task Force 6, such watch-and-wait operations along the border have become even more frequent. Now units of about 70 infantrymen armed with M-16 rifles periodically fan out in covert four-man teams along designated 30-mile segments.

In an interview in the task force headquarters in an empty stockade on the outskirts of Ft. Bliss, Tex., Col. Thomas C. Carter, the deputy commander of the force, stressed that each team includes a Border Patrol agent and that soldiers do not take part in law enforcement.

“We’re their eyes and ears,” Carter said, noting that a support team of federal agents is responsible for arrests and seizures.

But the creation of the unit has raised questions in some minds about the proper limits to a stepped-up U.S. response. With the task force said to be lobbying for more extensive operations and more independence--all missions must now be approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff--there is concern that too aggressive a posture might prove counterproductive.

“We need to make sure the reins stay in place,” one civilian official said.

Some of the concern dates from December, when Marines patrolling in southern Arizona fired over the heads of a pair of smugglers and sent up illumination flares that set ablaze several hundred acres of grassland in the Coronado National Forest.

No one was injured in the exchange, and after the smugglers fled, several hundred pounds of marijuana were recovered. But while the Marines reported that the smugglers had fired first, sources say that an ongoing Border Patrol inquiry has cast doubt on that account and may conclude that the Marines opened fired unnecessarily.

A military official acknowledged in an interview that the incident “was a little outside of what we anticipated happening.” But he said the Marines had found no reason to alter the rules of engagement governing such clandestine patrols.

“If you burn the woods down,” the official said, “gee, I’m sorry.”

Given the importance of winning further Mexican cooperation, a far more important constraint on military operations is high-level wariness about the Mexican response. From the start, what was conceived in Washington as a military remedy was interpreted in Mexico City as a military affront.

Indeed, so harsh was the Mexican note of protest dispatched after the border task force was unveiled that sources say the State Department responded by encouraging the Pentagon to temporarily postpone any operations by the unit.

And while tempers have since cooled, officials say that the potential benefits of new cooperation with Mexico will ensure that the task force proceeds with considerable caution.

“Understandably, the Mexicans are nervous about this,” one military official said. “We’re going to go down on the border with guns. It’s going to make the Mexicans nervous.”

That the collaboration in Monclova occurred at all is testament to a new back-channel relationship between the two nations that has helped to coordinate U.S.-Mexican anti-drug relations even as public tensions flared.

The outcry over the task force was just the first in a series of squabbles. Last month, when the Bush Administration reported that the Mexican marijuana crop was 10 times larger than previously known, the Mexicans shot back that the finding was inaccurate and irresponsible.

Meanwhile in Washington, there was fury over a Mexican decision to arrest Miguel Aldana Ibarra, under indictment in Los Angeles for the murder of DEA agent Enrique S. Camarena. U.S. officials believe that Aldana was locked up to keep him from talking to American investigators.

However, behind the public tussles, according to informed sources, the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari quietly took two major steps early this year that made the collaboration effort possible.

It first granted permission for U.S. radar planes to fly over Mexican territory on anti-drug missions. At about the same time, it moved to establish in the northeastern city of Monterrey a “rapid response team” of federal police, giving Mexico a new capacity to interdict smugglers on short notice.

In an indication that the accord remains highly sensitive, neither American nor Mexican officials would discuss the mission publicly. Westrate, the high-ranking DEA official, warned that details of the operation are “classified.” Coello, Mexico’s deputy attorney general, even denied that U.S. radar planes are now permitted to fly over Mexico.

But after The Times learned of the Monclova operation, a Customs Service spokeswoman, Kathy Hamer, confirmed that it had taken place. Still, she emphasized, “We don’t routinely conduct surveillance through Mexican airspace.”

The overflight permission, based on a pact negotiated last May, makes it far easier for Texas-based Customs Service radar planes to reach airspace near the Pacific coast of Colombia. The corridor is believed to have been favored by smugglers because it was beyond the reach of Caribbean-based radar.

The arrangement requires the P-3 airborne early warning planes to shut down their radar while over Mexican airspace. But the 200-mile range of the radar nevertheless reaches well into Mexico, providing a more comprehensive look at suspected smugglers’ corridors from either side of the mainland.

And with the basis for the new rapid-response team in place, the new arrangements started paying off just after midnight Feb. 4, when the radar of one of the Customs Service planes detected the suspicious Turbo Commander over the Pacific.

With communications handled by a command, control and intelligence center at March Air Force Base in Riverside, Calif., the radar plane received Mexican government permission to pursue the suspected smuggler into Mexican airspace--this time, with its radar still operating fully, according to the Customs Service account.

Relaying word through the U.S. Embassy in Mexico and DEA agents in Monterrey, the Americans alerted the fledgling Mexican response team that the suspected smugglers were likely to reach the border soon after dawn.

As the Turbo Commander moved off the Mexican coast to the Gulf of Mexico, the Americans could tell only that it was landing near Monclova, about 150 miles northwest of Monterrey. But the team of Mexican federal judicial police, accompanied by DEA agents, got lucky.

There on the tarmac when they arrived at Monclova’s main airport was the Turbo Commander. Inside were extra fuel tanks that had allowed the three Colombian pilots to fly nonstop from Colombia to the border.

The cocaine lay in neat piles outside--and there was another bonus. Five of the seven Mexican guards turned out to be corrupt cops. Their ringleader was the head of the Monclova branch of the Mexican federal police.

“This was the kind of thing we’ve been trying for 20 years to do,” a customs official said.

Indeed, so successful was the U.S.-to-Mexico handoff that sources say it has been used as a model for at least two more busts linking American radar intelligence and the now well-established Monterrey team.

Citing these successes, the DEA has proposed that the United States provide Mexico with about $65 million worth of helicopters and interceptor aircraft so that it can quickly establish more response teams all along the border.

But for now at least, that plan has been derailed. Administration officials are unsure whether such a step would be wise. Mexico’s Coello made clear in the interview that his country would rather take care of itself.

And as the glow of the success subsides, officials in both countries now express concern about whether joint anti-drug operations can survive the scrutiny of a deeply suspicious Mexican public.

“There is a lot of nervousness in Mexico about some of what we are doing,” one U.S. official warned. “What worries us is that as soon as these things are disclosed, that could be the end.”

Stakeout, Chase and Capture 1. Smuggler’s plane takes off from Quibdo, Colombia, 11 p.m. Feb.3 2. U.S. radar plane spots smugglers off Colombia, 12:38 a.m. Feb.4 3. Turbo Commander enters Mexican airspace, 3 a.m.; U.S. plane follows. 4. U.S. plane takes station off Mexico to monitor smuggler’s landing, 6 a.m. 5. Smugglers land at Monclova, 6:18 a.m.; Mexican police from Monterrey make arrests.

Jehl reported from El Paso and Washington, and Miller reported from Mexico City.