Mexican Army Agents to Replace Baja Police

The entire Baja California federal police force is being replaced with army soldiers amid indications of new nationwide changes in the notoriously corrupt federal agency, authorities said Friday.

The 87 Baja agents were ordered to Mexico City on Thursday for drug tests and debriefing, according to Gen. Jose Luis Chavez Garcia, the new Baja federal delegate, who oversees the force. Federal police will be retrained or reassigned, but not fired, he said.

Forty-six new Baja agents--military men trained in combating drug traffic--have already arrived, he said, with the rest to come later.

The move to place the Mexican military at the front lines of the nation’s anti-narcotics effort comes as Mexico struggles with fallout from the firing of its top anti-narcotics czar, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, for his allegedly cozy relationship with a powerful reputed drug lord. The alleged smuggler, Amado Carillo Fuentes, is known as “Lord of the Skies” for his airborne shipments.

“Things must be changed from the roots,” Chavez Garcia, a former military judge who is now the lead federal prosecutor of Baja, said in a telephone interview from Tijuana. “We have a tradition of absolute honesty. There will be no dirty dealings that would disgrace us and our institution.”

Tijuana is a key anti-narcotics post. The city is home to a powerful drug cartel that moves Colombian cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine along the Pacific Coast to the United States. U.S. officials believe 70% of illicit drugs reach U.S. consumers via Mexico.

Baja has been shaken by a bloody barrage of assassinations of eight senior law enforcement officers in the past year.

The killings have left the Baja anti-narcotics effort a shambles and drawn increasing U.S. scrutiny of allegations that some police and judicial authorities are in league with drug traffickers.

Federal officials said they expect similar changes in critical anti-drug posts throughout Mexico, but said there has been no official word. Military generals have been assigned recently as federal delegates to three strategic northern states--Baja California, Baja California Sur and Sonora--said Gloria Vaszquez of the federal attorney general’s office in Mexico City.

“I have heard there will be broader changes,” said Carolina Nava, also of the attorney general’s office. “Every district will make these changes as they see fit.”

The allegations against Gutierrez have intensified doubts over whether military officers will be any more capable of resisting drug corruption than the Mexican police.

Gutierrez’s dismissal was announced just days before the March 1 deadline for President Clinton to certify whether Mexico is cooperating in the international anti-narcotics effort--a matter of profound economic and diplomatic consequence to Mexico. The United States, which shares close economic ties with its southern neighbor under the North American Free Trade Agreement, is widely expected to certify Mexican compliance.

Recently unsealed court documents in a drug-related case in San Diego unearthed the testimony of a former presidential guardsman for Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo and his predecessor, Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The army lieutenant, Gerardo Cruz Pachecho, told how he recruited soldiers to unload drug shipments and helped Tijuana cartel gunmen assassinate Baja federal police commander Ernesto Ibarra Santes in September.

A onetime cartel henchman who has agreed to testify against two alleged gunmen jailed in San Diego named a ranking Baja judicial authority and a Tijuana police leader as allies of the alleged leaders of the Tijuana cartel, the fugitive Arellano Felix brothers.

The former henchman said corrupt federal prosecutors told the cartel when Ibarra was traveling to Mexico City so he could be killed there by gunmen.

When Ibarra took charge of the federal police in Baja, half of the 120 agents were fired. They were “not just friends of the traffickers,” he told The Times two days before he was killed, “they were their servants.”

The fired Baja officers were part of a shake-up last August of more than 700 reputedly corrupt federal agents.

Some analysts doubt that the military officers who have been moved to several top anti-drug posts will prove any more stalwart.

“The government sold the myth that the military was incorruptible,” said Victor Clark, an independent human rights leader in Tijuana. “Putting them on the front lines of the drug war will have tremendous political and social cost to our society.”

Clark said most citizens in Tijuana are less concerned about seeing cartel leaders jailed than about cleaning up the myriad petty crimes that narcotics have spawned in their neighborhood.

Clark estimated that there are at least 500 neighborhood picaderos--heroin and cocaine dens--in Tijuana. He said each one pays police $5,000 a week for operating rights.

“People are happy to see the military arrive,” he said. “What they want them to do is get rid of the small-time neighborhood narcos who plague them every day.

“People here don’t care whether they get rid of the Arellanos or not,” he said.

“They know the Arellanos are a transnational corporation, and if they get rid of them, another group will come and take their place.”