Fallout From Mexican Drug Scandal Hits U.S.

The day after he met his tough new Mexican counterpart here last December, President Clinton’s top counter-narcotics official, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, offered effusive praise.

“This is a deadly serious guy,” McCaffrey, himself a retired four-star general, said of the Mexican army general who had just taken over all federal drug enforcement here.

Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, McCaffrey told several U.S. reporters over breakfast at his Mexico City hotel that day, was a hard-nosed field commander of the “highest integrity” who clearly was committed to cooperating with the United States in battling Mexico’s powerful drug cartels.

In the weeks that followed, Gutierrez reportedly was privy to a wealth of data on counter-narcotics operations. Hosted by McCaffrey and the United States’ top drug enforcement agencies in Washington as recently as three weeks ago, Gutierrez was briefed on the inner workings of the United States’ anti-drug efforts and the intricacies of the joint U.S.-Mexican drug war--part of a new era of cooperation and intelligence-sharing.

On Thursday, though, Gutierrez--chief of Mexico’s anti-drug effort until he was fired Tuesday--was in maximum-security federal prison here, accused of collaborating for years with Mexico’s biggest narcotics-smuggling cartel.

U.S. intelligence agencies were feverishly assessing the damage and whether it would jeopardize future cooperation with Mexico on the drug front.

“It’s a very serious revelation and deeply troubling,” Clinton acknowledged in Washington on Thursday when asked about the general’s arrest.

However, Clinton praised Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo for taking bold and swift action against Gutierrez.

At the same time, though, administration officials acknowledged that the Mexican general’s arrest also raised questions about the competence of U.S. intelligence forces, given that Tuesday’s announcement in Mexico City that Gutierrez was allegedly collaborating with drug traffickers appeared to have taken Washington by surprise.

“The question is being asked,” said Eric Rubin, spokesman for the White House National Security Council. “It’s one thing not to know he was corrupt, but it’s another thing not to even know that he had been [under investigation] for two weeks.”

For Mexico, the damage clearly was greater.

As head of the National Institute to Combat Drugs--Mexico’s equivalent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration--Gutierrez had access to all top-secret efforts by the Mexican government to combat drugs.

Officials said Thursday they believe that he may have warned Mexico’s top suspected drug lord that agents were going to raid his sister’s wedding in Sinaloa last month. That military operation was seen as a failure, and the suspect is now the target of a renewed manhunt.

And Gutierrez’s arrest has left Mexico’s counter-drug war in apparent disarray. Human rights officials in Guadalajara, where Gutierrez was military commander for seven years, said Thursday that at least 20 state and federal drug agents there had been reported missing in the scandal’s aftermath.

But for academics, independent analysts and some U.S. law enforcement officials, the latest scandal goes beyond illustrating how drug corruption has penetrated the highest levels of Mexico’s institutions. They say it underscores how neither the U.S. nor Mexican government can seem to stay ahead of the Mexican drug mafias, which reap billions of dollars by supplying up to 75% of the cocaine sold in the United States. And inside information on the cartels has always been a weak link in the war on drugs.

Just two weeks before Clinton is required to decide whether to certify Mexico’s cooperation in counter-narcotics efforts--a move with far-reaching economic and political implications--the scandal also calls into question the strategies of both nations in their effort to interrupt the flow of hundreds of tons of South American cocaine through Mexico and into the U.S.

Clinton told reporters Thursday that Gutierrez’s arrest showed both the level of corruption that impedes drug enforcement and the Mexican government’s resolve to root it out.

But neither Clinton nor his top anti-drug officials were publicly discussing the overall strategy that led to the scandal.

Gutierrez’s Dec. 3 appointment was, in fact, a key element in that strategy, which has been endorsed enthusiastically by the Clinton administration--a militarization of the drug war that includes U.S. military training for Mexican officers and the delivery of U.S. military hardware to aid Mexico’s counter-narcotics efforts.

When Zedillo turned to the army to name his new anti-drug chief last December, senior Mexican officials said he did so because the military is considered largely free from the drug corruption that has penetrated much of the nation’s federal police force. That same strategy has led to the placement of military officers in dozens of other sensitive law enforcement and administrative posts throughout Mexico in recent months.

What is more, Gutierrez was handpicked by Zedillo’s defense secretary, Gen. Enrique Cervantes Aguirre.

Cervantes stated that he did not know until earlier this month that Gutierrez, the regional army commander based in Guadalajara since 1989, allegedly had been collaborating with the nation’s largest drug cartel since 1993.

Officials in Washington said they do not yet know the extent of the U.S. intelligence information that Gutierrez received, or how that might endanger intelligence sources or compromise efforts in Mexico.

Exchanging information is a central part of the cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico.

“Our concern is with not only sources, but also methods of investigation that could have been compromised,” said Jim McGivney, spokesman for the DEA in Washington.

“This was a tremendous intelligence lapse,” concluded Roderic Camp, a Tulane University professor and author of a recent book on the Mexican military. “But also, it really places in doubt the feasibility of the broader strategy of presenting the [Mexican] military as a clean force in the counter-drug effort.”

Camp indicated that Gutierrez’s appointment--and the U.S. reaction to it--also appeared to reflect an intelligence failure in Washington.

There was ample evidence, he said, that drug corruption has existed for years within the officer corps of the Mexican military, and U.S. officials should have been more wary of Gutierrez’s selection.

“The military elements at the highest level have been contaminated by drug trafficking for years, and the officers in Guadalajara have been especially vulnerable to this,” Camp said.

He cited, for example, the 1990 dismissal of the admiral who headed the Mexican navy after he was linked to drug corruption.

Although the Mexican army traditionally rotates its regional commanders annually or every two years, specifically to avoid corruption, Camp and other experts on the Mexican military noted that Gutierrez somehow remained in command for seven consecutive years in Guadalajara--a notorious drug trafficking hub.

It was in that command post that Gutierrez won praise from military and civilian officials with the spectacular 1995 arrest of reputed Sinaloa drug cartel chief Hector Luis “El Guero” Palma.

Palma was acquitted of drug charges last month. Gutierrez also staged other high-profile military operations that led to arrests of accused key gunmen and lieutenants of other drug mafias in recent years.

But, in announcing the charges against Gutierrez this week, Cervantes indicated that not once did the former commander or his soldiers take action against the Juarez cartel or its alleged chieftain, Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren in Washington contributed to this report.