Clinton Seeks to Stop Flow of Drugs at Mexican Border

President Clinton has directed his administration to develop an ambitious strategy to stop the flow of drugs across the nation’s border with Mexico within five years, the president’s drug czar said Thursday.

Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the goal is achievable, even though an estimated 70% of illegal narcotics sold in the United States come into the country via Mexico.

“We’re going to try to stop drug smuggling into the United States across the Mexican-U.S. border in the next five years--substantially stop it,” McCaffrey told reporters traveling with the president in Miami.

Some politicians and law enforcement officials immediately questioned the feasibility of sealing the border from drugs. They noted that not only does demand for drugs remain high in this country, but that the North American Free Trade Agreement has increased cross-border economic activity.

McCaffrey disclosed the administration’s plans after an event at which Clinton praised the U.S. Coast Guard for a banner year in fighting the drug war. The president noted that the Coast Guard has tripled its seizures of cocaine.

The drug czar said he spoke with Clinton about the Southwest Border Initiative after the Coast Guard event, a discussion that followed a two-hour meeting with White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles on Wednesday. McCaffrey added that he expects the president to outline the initiative’s final shape in his State of the Union address early next year.

But Rahm Emanuel, assistant to the president, said no decision has been made about including it in the State of the Union speech. “The goal is to get something developed,” Emanuel said. “We have returned the rule of law to the border, but we have more work to do.”

Mark Kleiman, a professor of policy studies at UCLA and a leading analyst of U.S. drug policy, said the goal of shutting down drug trafficking across the border in five years is “surely possible.” But he said he viewed such a goal as more a matter of foreign policy than drug reduction.

“If we make the Mexican border less porous but don’t reduce U.S. consumption, then the drugs will simply come in some other way, which may still be a big win for us because of its benefit to Mexico,” Kleiman said.

McCaffrey said a key to stemming the tide of border drug trafficking will be improving the technology used by the Customs Service at 39 border checkpoints. “Now, we’ve got 20,000 men and women in the Customs Service who are trying to stop these drugs with hand-held mirrors,” he said.

One solution, he said, is to use the X-ray machines designed to examine Russian shipping containers as part of arms control agreements--technology that already has been tested along the border in California. “We said, ‘Let’s use them on trucks, let’s use them on rail cars,’ ” McCaffrey said. “They work--they absolutely work.”

Another part of the strategy is to beef up undercover intelligence efforts so that useful information reaches the appropriate border guards, customs officers and U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency personnel, McCaffrey said.

McCaffrey said the ultimate goal of the border initiative is to “make it so difficult to smuggle these incredibly lethal cargoes [of drugs] across the border that they’ll go to sea.”

The drug czar indicated that such a goal would improve conditions in both countries and the relations between them, which have been under stress because of the ballooning drug traffic across the border.

“We want [the drug traffickers] at sea, not wrecking the U.S.-Mexican civil population with corruption and violence,” McCaffrey said. “And, by the way, we’re going to follow them to sea too.”

Some drug control specialists were skeptical about the technological innovations, warning that drug traffickers are proficient at adapting their procedures.

Others cautioned that the goal of sealing the border for narcotics was unrealistic, given the growing commercial and social links between the countries. For instance, at the San Diego-Tijuana border, the urban sprawl of Southern California continues unbroken into Mexico, and so do business and family ties. At least 40,000 people cross the border every day to work or go to school on the other side, according to government officials.

Even McCaffrey has stressed these difficulties. In an interview with The Times a year ago, he said, “You’ve got 82 million cars, 3 million-plus trucks and 230 million people crossing the border a year,” he said. “It’s going to be a tough challenge to shed these cancerous cells from among this giant traffic.”

On Thursday, Roberto Martinez, head of the American Friends Service Committee Border Project, an advocate for immigrant human rights issues, said it is impractical to talk about stopping the drug trade until the demand that sparks the trafficking is reduced significantly.

“Drugs have always been the pretext for increased border enforcement,” he said. “It’s a waste, not only of taxpayers’ money, but time. They’re ignoring the demand side of it, the real cause of drugs. They wouldn’t have to pour money into these programs if there was no demand. They’re avoiding the real issues.”

With the United States consuming half of the worldwide market of illegal narcotics while accounting for only 4% of the planet’s population, both Clinton and McCaffrey said they recognize the need to staunch the demand.

“We can spend all the money in the world on law enforcement, we can spend all the money in the world even on preventive strategies, but somehow, some way, our children have to decide that we will stop becoming the world’s largest consumer of drugs,” Clinton said Thursday. “We have got to change the culture in America which has so many of our young people becoming willing drug users.”

The administration’s aim, McCaffrey said, is to reduce drug use by 50% in the next 10 years. To this end, administration officials hope to persuade the Republican Congress to increase funding for a national strategy to accomplish that goal.

McCaffrey is asking for an increase from $16 billion to $17.4 billion to pay for this effort.

Times staff writers Anne-Marie O’Connor in San Diego and Ronald J. Ostrow in Washington contributed to this story.