Mexico Says It’s On the Case : Mystery ambush of seven agents raises major questions about anti-drug campaign

Mexican lawmen are sensitive to criticism from this country that corruption keeps Mexico from being as effective as it could be in helping fight the war on drugs. They often remind U.S. critics of the many Mexican police who have died in gun battles with drug smugglers that go unreported in this country--and often they’re right.

But not always. On Nov. 7 a terrible incident cost the lives of seven of Mexico’s best drug agents, and it is being widely reported in this country, first by Times correspondents Marjorie Miller and Douglas Jehl. With the help of U.S. Customs Service aircraft, Mexican drug agents tracked a light plane loaded with cocaine from Colombia to an airstrip near Tlalixcoyan, Veracruz. When the Mexican agents landed to arrest the plane’s occupants, they found Mexican soldiers already on the scene. What happened next is still unclear, but not the tragic ending: three drug suspects escaped and seven Mexican agents died.

The first report from Mexico’s military said the deaths resulted from confused gunfire in the rural darkness when the soldiers opened fire on both aircraft. But sources in the U.S. government paint a more frightening scenario. They say there is credible evidence, forwarded to the Mexican government, that the soldiers knew the Mexican agents were lawmen, and executed them in cold blood. Those same soldiers may have allowed the drug suspects to escape because they were providing protection for the smuggling operation.

In response, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari has ordered his country’s Human Rights Commission--a neutral agency linked to neither the army or the attorney general’s office, for which the agents worked--to investigate. The commission must pursue its probe as rapidly and aggressively as possible.

If there is even a suspicion that Mexico is shrinking from its investigation of this awful bloodshed, it could end two years of increasing--and increasingly effective--cooperation in the drug war between Washington and Mexico City. That would be as terrible a loss as Mexico suffered when it lost seven of its finest.