Mexico Highlights Its Anti-Drug Successes

Just days before the annual U.S. ruling on whether to certify Mexico as a cooperative partner in the war on drugs, Mexican officials Wednesday touted their successes last year in arresting cartel members and seizing illicit narcotics shipments.

Mariano Herran Salvatti, Mexico’s anti-drug czar in the attorney general’s office, said his country had been so successful in intercepting air shipments of cocaine that the cartels had been forced to switch to maritime and Caribbean smuggling routes.

Herran met with reporters ahead of the U.S. State Department decision, required by March 1 each year, on Mexico’s cooperation in the anti-drug battle. The Mexican government vehemently opposes the certification process as interference in its affairs.

Unlike last year’s bitterly disputed process, in which Mexico received certification despite the arrest of a previous anti-drug czar on charges of being on a cartel’s payroll, Mexico this year appears likely to pass muster with less controversy.

The certification process itself has come under increasing fire in the United States, with pressure mounting for a hemispheric treaty on drug cooperation as an alternative.

Herran was appointed last March as the fourth anti-narcotics chief in 12 months, and he has overseen a wholesale restructuring of the drug-fighting force to rebuild its credibility.

As part of that restructuring, about 1,500 former drug police officers have been reexamined; 635 have been accepted and 803 rejected so far, Herran said.

He said he was also negotiating with the Finance Ministry to more than double the officers’ current base wage of $750 a month to make them less vulnerable to corruption.

Eduardo Ibarrola, deputy attorney general for judicial and international affairs, said U.S.-Mexican cooperation on drugs has improved substantially, including daily sharing of intelligence, joint training exercises and technology exchange.

He cited as “one of the very best examples of Mexican-American cooperation” the recent arrest in the United States of Jorge Abrego Reyna, an alleged money launderer linked to former Jalisco state Gov. Flavio Romero de Velasco, who was arrested on drug trafficking charges this month.

Mexico has filed for Abrego Reyna’s extradition, and Ibarrola said he expected the request to be successful.

But Ibarrola repeated the Mexican government’s objections to the U.S. certification process, calling it “a procedure that in no way helps the true cooperation in the fight against a common enemy--organized crime and drug trafficking.”

The annual progress report issued Wednesday said the government arrested 10,700 people on drug-related charges in 1997, with a 96% success rate in prosecutions. The report said authorities seized 35 tons of cocaine and 1,038 tons of marijuana.

Herran said the Gulf cartel had largely been dismantled after the arrest of its leader, Juan Garcia Abrego, in January 1996 and the February 1997 arrest of alleged cartel lieutenant and hit man Oscar Malherbe in Mexico City.

Malherbe’s extradition to the United States is pending.

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After the bizarre death of Juarez cartel boss Amado Carrillo Fuentes during plastic surgery in July, several drug barons have battled for control of the cocaine trade in Ciudad Juarez and other cities along the U.S.-Mexican border, Herran said. None has emerged as a clear winner, but dozens of people have been slain.

Herran dismissed Mexican newspaper reports of a “federation” of cartels that would end the bloodshed and cooperate in the drug trade.

He said the Arellano Felix family, which allegedly runs the Tijuana cartel, has reportedly entered the struggle for control of Ciudad Juarez, contributing to the violence.

Herran said Mexican authorities intercepted a number of air shipments of cocaine in 1997, the result of greater cooperation with the United States and other countries in the region. As a result, he said, traffickers increasingly resorted to using land routes across Mexico’s southern border as well as coastal shipments.

He said the cartels were also shifting their routes to Puerto Rico, Jamaica and other Caribbean countries to avoid the more effective Mexican-American policing.