Zedillo, Top Lawman Start Housecleaning in Mexico

As the Senate confirmed his nomination Tuesday over opposition protests, Mexico’s new attorney general and his boss were cleaning house: replacing top law enforcement personnel with an unlikely mix of human rights and military officials to lead an intensified crackdown on drug trafficking and police corruption.

A day after President Ernesto Zedillo named him to the attorney general’s post, former human rights commissioner Jorge Madrazo Cuellar signed off on Zedillo’s appointment of at least one military man to a key civilian law enforcement job.

Gen. Jose Gutierrez Rebollo, who led the army operation that captured one of the country’s most notorious accused drug lords in Guadalajara last year, was named Mexico’s new drug czar. Reliable sources said another general may soon be appointed chief of its powerful--yet notoriously corrupt--civilian federal police, although Mexican officials said they could not confirm that.

Earlier this year, Zedillo replaced Mexico City’s civilian police chief with a general and stepped up the army’s role in Mexico’s war on drug-trafficking gangs, which reap billions of dollars in profit supplying up to three-fourths of the cocaine sold in the United States.

Senior Mexican officials said the military’s higher profile is designed to toughen the war on the cross-border drug trade, which Zedillo calls Mexico’s chief national security threat, and to root out the police corruption that protects it. And they pointed out that President Clinton named a retired general, Barry R. McCaffrey, as his drug czar.

Madrazo said that Gutierrez’s appointment as commissioner of the National Institute for Combating Drugs was justified “because this is one of the most sensitive areas of work for the attorney general’s office. I think it’s possible to work even more intensely and get better results in this struggle.”

But the moves carry short-term risks.

By suddenly replacing former Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano Gracia and his civilian drug czar, Francisco Molina, Zedillo threatens to disrupt the continuity and close ties that U.S. law enforcement officials carefully forged with Lozano and his aides during the last two years in their joint anti-drug efforts.

Bowing to the sensitivity of the U.S.-Mexico relationship, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration issued a statement saying only that the firings “are an internal matter for the nation of Mexico, and it would not be appropriate for the DEA to comment on this matter.”

Privately, however, some U.S. officials expressed concern that the changing of the guard could interrupt the cooperative efforts.

As Tuesday’s Senate debate clearly showed, Zedillo--dogged by his image as a weak, although sincere, leader--faces other pitfalls after his Cabinet move.

The president’s firing of Lozano and his top aides was a decisive gesture to mark the beginning of his third year in office. And it won instant praise from members of Zedillo’s long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

But it also alienated the president from Mexico’s largest opposition force, Lozano’s conservative National Action Party, or PAN, which now governs millions of Mexicans on the state and local levels.

Devastated by the firing of Lozano--the first opposition member ever to serve in a ruling-party Cabinet--PAN senators sharply criticized Zedillo’s decision during the Senate debate.

The debate also indicated that in addition to rebuilding bridges to the PAN, Zedillo’s most immediate tasks include helping Madrazo maintain his independent image.

The Senate confirmed Madrazo along strict party lines: The PRI voted in favor, the PAN voted against, and the left-leaning Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, abstained.

“On the one side, we see long faces, and on the other side, smiling faces,” Sen. Felix Salgado of the PRD said in describing the polarization on the Senate floor.

After taking his oath Tuesday, Madrazo tried to reinforce the independent image he earned during his three years as head of the National Human Rights Commission.

“I was never looking to be named attorney general,” he told reporters. “The reason the Senate confirmed me is because of my professional track record.”

Madrazo praised Lozano’s recent attempts to reorganize and purge corruption in the attorney general’s office--Lozano fired more than 700 federal agents in September--and Madrazo added that those reforms will continue, only “more thoroughly.”

Of the high-profile murder cases that have rocked Mexico--unresolved political assassinations that senior officials say contributed to Lozano’s dismissal--Madrazo said, “We’re not going to limit our efforts because of politics.”

For example, he said, “I don’t think it’s impossible to solve” the March 1994 assassination of PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio.

“It is precisely through those kinds of victories that one can win back confidence in the Mexican justice system,” he said.

In one of his first moves, Madrazo appointed a human rights lawyer as the special prosecutor in the investigation into the September 1994 assassination of PRI Secretary-General Francisco Ruiz Massieu. Another lawyer who had worked with Madrazo on the rights commission has already been working as the special prosecutor in the Colosio case.