Latest Fight in War on Drugs Leaves All Parties Feeling Bruised

The decision over whether to certify Mexico as an ally in the war on drugs has left many bruises: President Clinton averted a foreign policy debacle but angered important members of Congress. Mexican leaders won relief but were humiliated by the process. Drug fighters in both countries suffered embarrassment and loss of credibility.

The process is so peculiar that a growing number of analysts are calling for its abolition.

Despite the difficulties, neither the White House nor the State Department belittled the congressionally required process as they issued their list of assessments: Twenty-three countries, including Mexico, were certified as cooperating in the drug war; six were denied certification; three were denied certification but were exempted from punishment for reasons of U.S. “national interest.”

The Clinton administration, no matter how distasteful it may find this annual report card on the actions of other countries, is not about to antagonize Capitol Hill by attempting to get rid of a weapon that Congress put into a massive anti-drug law 11 years ago.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright went out of her way to defend certification, even as she explained that the president has no legal choice but to apply it every year.

“Certification . . . requires difficult up or down judgments to be rendered in a public manner that engenders in some cases deserved embarrassment, in others unhelpful resentment,” she told reporters. “It is vital, therefore, that we bear in mind the deadly serious purpose behind this provision of U.S. law. That purpose is to strengthen the bonds of cooperation in the war against drugs. To the extent that purpose is achieved, the decent and law-abiding people of every nation will benefit.”

Congress has 30 days in which it can try to overturn the president’s certification of Mexico. He has received notice from 40 senators and from important House members such as Democratic leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri that they intend to do just that.

Congress’ withdrawal of certification would anger Mexican officials but perhaps not as much as Clinton would have upset them by ruling differently Friday.

“The Mexicans would feel less upset about decertification by Congress,” said a former State Department official, “because they would feel the endorsement by Clinton was far more important.”

The perennial endorsement of Mexico, despite its shortcomings, will surely irritate agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration who work in Mexico. They have long denounced many of their law enforcement counterparts there as corrupt; their argument gained new support when Mexico dismissed its top anti-narcotics official, Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, for his alleged links to Mexico’s most notorious drug trafficker.

The DEA, State Department sources said, has called for withholding certification from Mexico before and presumably did so again this year.

Assistant Secretary of State Robert Gelbard was careful to obscure the agency’s position when he told reporters that the recommendation to certify Mexico “was a unanimous decision . . . by the relevant Cabinet members.” The DEA administrator does not hold Cabinet rank.

But the process left some DEA bruises as well. Its agents either failed to uncover Gutierrez’s record, or, if they did, the agency failed to pass the information on to other officials in the Clinton administration.

Although the decision to certify may have been a nettlesome one for Clinton, he had little choice from the point of view of foreign policy.

“For the United States to decertify Mexico,” said Peter Hakim, director of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank, “would be shooting itself in the foot. . . . Decertification of Mexico would be one of those events in U.S.-Latin American relations that would have reverberations around the region. Mexico is too important for the United States to decertify.

“Certification is self-defeating,” Hakim said, “because it makes cooperation more difficult over time, and it forces our own government officials and officials in the foreign country not to do a careful, nuanced analysis of the problems but to become advocates of certification or not certification.”

Still, Mexico can hardly take solace in Friday’s action. For years, Mexican officials had maintained the position that they did not care about certification, one way or another. In the last few days, however, they were making public appeals for certification.

Nor did the humiliation end there. Albright said Clinton had asked her, Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and drug czar Barry R. McCaffrey “to monitor Mexico’s cooperation continuously and to report our findings to him regularly.”

In short, the American report card on Mexico will no longer be filled out once a year but all the time.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster contributed to this report.