Mexico Takes Aim at Police Drug Corruption

The Mexican government plans to launch a sweeping reorganization of its anti-drug operations in an effort to break the links between corrupt law enforcement and the nation’s powerful narcotics cartels, U.S. and Mexican officials said this week.

The restructuring could take effect as early as next week.

The new program--unannounced and still in final planning stages--is said to feature an anti-drug unit with at least 1,000 specially trained and rigorously tested agents under a special prosecutor. The prosecutor would report directly to Atty. Gen. Jorge Madrazo Cuellar, according to U.S. and Mexican law-enforcement officials who asked not to be identified.

At the heart of the plan is a battery of tests for prospective agents, officials said. Candidates will be required to take drug, polygraph and psychological tests, submit detailed financial statements and open their doors for “home visits” by investigators who will compare their assets with their salaries.

“The idea is to clean out everyone who’s corrupt--top to bottom,” a Mexican official said. “It’s a sign that we really are changing.”

A U.S. official added: “It’ll be an entirely new structure. New credentials. New personnel. All the people to be assigned to that new unit will be vetted strictly according to Mexican law.”

Plans also reportedly include higher salaries and expanded benefits for the new unit. Counter-narcotics commanders now earn slightly more than $13,000 a year and agents make as little as half of that, sources here said.

The new force will replace Mexico’s badly tarnished National Institute to Combat Drugs, a 1,100-member group that was plunged into chaos after the Feb. 18 arrest of its commissioner, anti-drug czar Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, and two of his top lieutenants on charges of collaborating with the nation’s top accused drug lord.

Gutierrez’s arrest underscored allegations that the highest levels of law enforcement had been penetrated by Mexico’s drug cartels, and it helped drive a U.S. House of Representatives effort to decertify Mexico as an ally in the war against drugs. The House resolution died in the Senate after bitter public debate, but corruption and the multibillion-dollar cross-border drug trade are expected to be high on the agenda May 5-7 when President Clinton visits Mexico City.

The reorganization plans--aimed partly at rebuilding trust and increasing cooperation between Mexican and American agents--are based on recommendations sent to Madrazo by an independent commission of Mexican legal experts.

The commission earlier this month reported that the counter-drug institute is “in an advanced state of deterioration.”

Madrazo promised a sweeping restructuring of drug enforcement here after Gutierrez’s arrest.

The restructuring is the latest in a series of efforts by President Ernesto Zedillo to root out drug corruption. He has declared the drug trade Mexico’s No. 1 national security threat.

Some independent analysts doubt that the reorganization will go far enough to have much impact.

“This is just another sensational and spectacular measure that will fail like programs in the past have failed,” said Luis Astorga, a sociology professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in the capital and an author who specializes in analyzing Mexico’s narcotics trade.

“To think that these new police will be able to resist the incredible attraction of corruption is to think they are super humans, and super humans don’t exist either in Mexico or in the United States, or anywhere else for that matter,” he said.

Although many other analysts are similarly skeptical--the anti-drug institute itself was created just three years ago in a similar reform-minded restructuring--they agreed the reorganization plan is a critical first step.

Federal drug agents on both sides of the border have said that even doubling the salaries of anti-drug agents could not match the bribes offered by the cartels, which Mexican authorities say generate at least $30 billion in illicit profits each year.

A corruption case in Tijuana earlier this year starkly illustrated the problem: A Mexican army general was arrested after allegedly offering bribes of $1 million a month from the city’s most powerful drug mafia to Tijuana’s new top federal prosecutor--himself a military officer. In exchange, the prosecutor was told to ignore the cartel’s activities, allegedly run by the Arellano Felix brothers.

Citing the fact that the Tijuana prosecutor ultimately refused the $12-million-a-year bribe and turned his fellow military officer in to authorities, Mexican prosecutors say the counter-drug effort requires a change in attitude among its lower-level, front-line drug agents.

To address that, the reorganization plan also would require all future drug agents to attend Mexico’s police academy. Some would also be schooled in the United States, according to U.S. officials.

The attorney general’s planned new force--likened by one official to a U.S. Justice Department strike team--would be augmented by a lower-profile group within the attorney general’s office called the Organized Crime Unit. That squad, created last year by new legislation targeting not only drug trafficking but also money laundering, conspiracy and other drug-related crimes, is already staffed with about 50 agents.

Armed with new investigative tools that allow the agents to tap suspects’ phones and grant immunity and witness protection for the first time here, the organized crime unit ultimately will have more than 100 members directly under the attorney general’s command, U.S. and Mexican officials said.

These changes and the restructuring of anti-drug forces have won high marks from Mexican jurists and U.S. officials alike--as has Madrazo, who was national human-rights commissioner when Zedillo named him attorney general in December.

Many of them also approve of Madrazo’s stated plans to expand the reform effort to other federal law-enforcement departments.

Among those longer-term targets, U.S. and Mexican officials said, is Mexico’s federal judicial police force--a 3,500-member department that has been the target of dozens of official corruption charges in the past.

In addition, officials said, Mexico’s judiciary must be reformed and strengthened for counter-narcotics efforts to succeed.

On Thursday, a judge in Guadalajara granted an appeal to convicted Mexican drug kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero, who is challenging his 40-year prison sentence for the 1985 murder of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique Camarena. Prosecutors said they will appeal the ruling, which could reduce Quintero’s jail term.

Another Guadalajara judge in January dropped all narcotics charges against Hector Luis Palma, who was accused of heading another powerful Mexican cartel. That decision is being appealed.

“The weak link in a lot of this is the judiciary,” a U.S. official said. The prosecutors “are going to need a cadre of judges they can go to, and these judges are going to need training, protection, anonymity and good salaries . . . or they’re going to be vulnerable” to corruption.