U.S. Military Unit in Mexico Aids Drug War

Despite recent frictions, the United States and Mexico have quietly established a U.S. military counternarcotics team at the American Embassy in Mexico City to relay intelligence and help plan operations for a new Mexican strike force, The Times has learned.

The new link for the first time establishes the U.S. military as a crucial player in the Mexican anti-drug fight. The move threatens to inflame Mexican concerns about the role of the United States south of the border.

The unit marks the closest anti-drug coordination ever between the two countries. It stands in sharp contrast to the recent souring of the public relationship after the abduction from Mexico of a Guadalajara doctor charged in the murder of a U.S. drug agent.

Officials said that the military team could play a key role in intercepting cocaine shipments before they cross into the United States.

“This is going to help us immensely,” said a source close to the Mexican attorney general.

The eight-man tactical analysis team, installed in March under the auspices of the U.S. Forces Command, is credited by U.S. officials with contributing to previously undisclosed cocaine seizures near the U.S.-Mexico border in recent months.

The new team has been used to funnel to Mexican authorities information gathered by U.S. Air Force surveillance planes, Administration officials said. The intelligence is designed to guide a Mexican strike force to cocaine-laden aircraft flying northward from Colombia and has contributed to at least nine major drug busts in the last four months, the officials said.

Sources in the United States and Mexico said that the U.S. military now plans to assign more personnel to the team, personnel who would help plan counternarcotics missions for other Mexican anti-drug units, including the recently established strike force, the Northern Border Response Team.

The close new relationship raises questions about indirect U.S. participation in missions that result in the shooting down of traffickers’ airplanes, a practice outlawed in the United States. According to Mexican government sources, authorities in the last six months have shot down four drug smuggling planes as they tried to flee Mexican landing strips.

At least two traffickers were killed in one of the operations, the sources said. There is no indication that U.S.-provided intelligence played any role in those attacks.

The Pentagon refused comment on the U.S. military team, but a U.S. Embassy spokesman confirmed the existence of a “small tactical analysis team . . . to further counternarcotics cooperation with Mexico.” He declined to provide details.

According to a senior U.S. official, the two governments are concerned that disclosure of the military team’s role could have serious domestic repercussions in Mexico, where sovereignty is a sensitive issue. They also fear that it might complicate the visit to Washington this weekend of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

Asked about the new U.S.-Mexico coordination, another U.S. official, Charles P. Gutensohn, chief of cocaine investigations for the Drug Enforcement Administration, said: “We’ve got some real good things going. When it stops going well, then we’ll talk about it.”

Other knowledgeable sources said the tactical analysis team in Mexico City has installed sophisticated new communications equipment in the embassy to collect intelligence from a wide variety of U.S. military sources, including the Colorado-based North American Air Defense Command and the Panama-based Southern Command.

“The purpose is to sort, convert, classify and sanitize information for the Mexicans to act on,” a senior U.S. counternarcotics official said.

The sources said the tactical analysis team, working closely with the DEA, will be able to pass on a far wider range of information--sometimes from highly classified military sources--than the DEA has been able to do alone.

U.S. tactical analysis teams are already in place at American embassies in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia, where they offer host countries advice in planning DEA-backed anti-drug missions.

“A lot of what we do is more of a military operation,” a senior DEA official said.

Administration sources stressed, however, that the analysis teams do not participate directly in anti-drug operations in Mexico or any other foreign country. “This isn’t some kind of covert action,” one senior official insisted.

A list of “cooperative investigations” shows that the nine operations in which American intelligence played a leading role led to the seizure of seven aircraft and nearly 10 tons of cocaine, most of it at landing strips near the U.S.-Mexico border. The list was provided to The Times by a U.S. source and confirmed by Mexican officials.

The Mexican airstrips near the border serve as principal transit points for U.S.-bound cocaine, with drug shipments flown there from Colombia and transferred to smugglers who carry it across the border. Although U.S. authorities watch the air traffic by radar, they can do nothing directly to intercept south-of-the-border flights.

The new intelligence channels are designed to overcome that obstacle by funneling U.S. radar data and other information to the new Mexican strike force, established early this year in Monterrey.

The information is relayed from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City to the office of Mexico’s attorney general and on to Monterrey. There the Northern Border Response Team and DEA advisers are equipped with planes and helicopters to pursue suspicious aircraft.

The first such operation used a Customs Service P-3 AEW radar plane to guide Mexican authorities in early February to a northern Mexico airport, where they found a plane laden with more than 1,700 pounds of cocaine.

Among the most recent such joint busts, according to U.S. and Mexican officials, was a May 11 seizure of 3,300 pounds of cocaine at an airstrip in Ciudad Jimenez, Chihuahua. The officials refused to discuss the source or method of U.S. intelligence-gathering in the case.

With the Mexican government expressing a willingness to establish seven more “rapid response” teams by the end of the year, the DEA has proposed that the United States support the project with as much as $65 million in assistance.

Similar sentiment was voiced last week by the House Armed Services investigations subcommittee, which noted in a report that Mexico “now has a handful of mobile strike forces located in northern Mexico designed expressly to do what we are suggesting--move in swiftly for the kill at the landing sites.”

“We need more strike teams,” the report said, “with trained manpower and secure communications links to the radar resources that track the drug aircraft.”

Both U.S. and Mexican officials said that their recent public squabbles, stirred daily by the trial in Los Angeles of Mexican defendants in the 1985 torture-murder of U.S. drug agent Enrique S. Camarena, have done little at a practical level to interfere with the new cooperation.