Alleged Mexico Cartel Member’s Arrest a Fruit of Cooperation, U.S. Says : Narcotics: Capture of man said to have led hit squads is result of meeting last week of countries’ presidents, White House aides declare.

It was a simple computer exercise for U.S. drug enforcement agents targeting the powerful Mexican narcotics cartels that have saturated the United States’ southern border with cocaine.

From informants and intelligence reports, U.S. officials say, the agents meticulously built a database of addresses where they suspected a top lieutenant of the notorious Gulf drug cartel might show up. They gave the list to Mexican authorities, who plugged it into their own investigation into a cartel that U.S. law enforcement agents say has been shielded by Mexican officials.

There was no sign of that protection last weekend in Mexico’s northern industrial city of Monterrey. There, teams from Mexico’s federal drug enforcement agency set up surveillance at key locations. And just before dawn Sunday, Mexican federal agents arrested Jose Adolfo de la Garza--allegedly the fifth-ranking member of the Gulf organization--as he left a party, apparently at one of the addresses the Americans supplied.

De la Garza was the highest-ranking of the 10 Gulf cartel members arrested this year by Mexican authorities. And Wednesday, White House officials told The Times that they viewed De la Garza’s arrest as the first direct result of stepped-up cooperation between the United States and Mexico on narcotics investigations since President Clinton personally urged President Ernesto Zedillo last week to crack down harder on the cartels.

In a one-on-one meeting between the two leaders during Zedillo’s state visit to the White House on Oct. 10, a senior Clinton aide disclosed, “the President strongly emphasized to President Zedillo” that he should intensify efforts to break the cartels. The aide said it was the second item on Clinton’s agenda, after Mexico’s troubled economy.

Sunday’s arrest of the man who U.S. investigators say directed hit squads that killed enemies and competitors of the Gulf cartel’s alleged chief, Juan Garcia Abrego, on both sides of the border “is the most concrete result to come out of that meeting,” the senior aide said.

A spokesman for Zedillo--who declared narcotics trafficking Mexico’s No. 1 national security threat and ordered a crackdown on the cartels soon after he took office 10 months ago--denied the link between the arrest and the White House summit.

The spokesman did confirm that the two presidents discussed at length the problem of narcotics trafficking. But he stressed that Zedillo and Clinton were in “total agreement” that the cartels must be crushed and said Sunday’s arrest was just one of many such steps by Zedillo’s administration this year.

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“This is something we have been doing all along,” Zedillo’s spokesman said. De la Garza, he said, was “the 10th member of that cartel to be apprehended this year. . . . And while we have had increasing cooperation with law enforcement officials in the U.S., my understanding is this arrest was an in-house operation.”

But the spokesman added: “We are just pleased the arrest was made. The important thing is that we get these people.”

Aides to both presidents declined to say whether their summit specifically focused on the cartel’s alleged chieftain, Garcia Abrego, who remains at large more than seven months after U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno placed him on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list and offered a $2-million reward for his capture.

However, the White House aides said Clinton encouraged Zedillo to follow the example set by Colombia, where joint efforts by U.S. and Colombian authorities led to the recent arrests of all top leaders in the notorious Cali cartel.

A spokesman for Mexico’s Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano, a member of Mexico’s political opposition who has vowed many times to root out the cartels and the corruption they have spawned within his own department, declined to confirm or deny the link between Sunday’s arrest and Zedillo’s meeting with Clinton.

But he added that Lozano, who accompanied the Mexican president on his state visit, met with Reno for the fourth time during last week’s trip and that they “achieved higher levels of cooperation than we’ve seen before.”

Such cooperation is controversial in Mexico, a proud nation that was deeply offended several years ago when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration engineered the kidnaping in northern Mexico of a key figure in the murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena.

Since Zedillo took office Dec. 1, though, the two nations have been collaborating more and more in drug investigations.

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“There has been permanent cooperation between the two countries since President Zedillo took office,” the attorney general’s spokesman said. “And one of the goals of that cooperation is to do away with drug trafficking, not just with Garcia Abrego, but with Amado Carrillo and the others.”

U.S. and Mexican drug enforcement agents agree that the Ciudad Juarez drug cartel allegedly run by Amado Carrillo Fuentes most likely has emerged as Mexico’s most powerful drug-smuggling organization in the months since they have targeted Garcia Abrego. But they stressed that Garcia Abrego’s cartel remains a major threat.

U.S. officials stressed that if Garcia Abrego is arrested and extradited to the United States--where he and his aides face sweeping charges of criminal conspiracy--that will be an important signal that Mexican authorities are sincere in their pledge to attack the cartels.