U.S.-Mexico Drug Statement Tinged by Acrimony

After exchanging barbs in public over a controversial U.S. sting operation on Mexican soil, President Clinton and Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo met in private Monday and issued a statement pledging “improved cooperation and mutual trust with full respect for the sovereignty of both nations.”

But the statement contained no American apology for Operation Casablanca, the money-laundering sting, nor any Mexican promise to refrain from attempting to prosecute U.S. operatives who carried it out on Mexican territory.

Obviously prompted by bickering between the governments over the three-year sting, Clinton told a special summit of the U.N. General Assembly that the argument between countries that produce drugs and countries that consume drugs “has gone on too long” and must end.

“Let’s be frank,” Clinton said, “this debate has not advanced the fight against drugs. Pointing fingers is distracting. It does not dismantle a single cartel, help a single addict, prevent a single child from trying and perhaps dying from heroin.”

But Zedillo, in a speech tinged with bitterness over the covert U.S. operation that led to the indictment of 26 Mexican bankers last month, said that, in the war on drugs, all countries “must respect the sovereignty of each nation.”

“No one country can become the judge of others,” he said. “No one should feel entitled to violate the laws of other countries for the sake of enforcing its own.”

Zedillo, hailed by Clinton and other leaders for conceiving the idea of the special session on how to combat narcotics, was clearly referring to Mexican charges that U.S. agents broke Mexican law by staging the operation within Mexican territory.

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Clinton and Zedillo then met with aides briefly and alone for 25 minutes in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, finally issuing a two-page statement that alluded to the operation without naming it. The two presidents, the statement said, “agreed to strengthen mechanisms in their countries to deal with anti-drug and money-laundering efforts and to improve cooperation, communication and information exchange between both governments.”

At a news conference, U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno defended the secrecy of the operation as a means to protect the American operatives. “It is not a matter of disrespect,” she said. “It is a matter of trying to . . . conduct an investigation . . . while at the same time protecting the lives of the agents involved.”

Twenty-nine heads of state and government are to address the General Assembly before its 185 members on Wednesday adopt a declaration committing themselves to “strategies to reduce both the illicit supply and demand of drugs.” The declaration was worked out in a year of preparatory meetings guided by Pino Arlacchi, a U.N. undersecretary-general who is executive director of the U.N. Office for Drug Control. Arlacchi, a former Italian senator who led his government’s campaign against the Mafia, insists that the war on drugs can be won if consuming countries reduce demand and producing countries encourage alternative crops for farmers who now sell narcotic plants to the drug cartels.

U.S. officials are wary of some of Arlacchi’s ideas because of the potential cost and because he has proposed funding of alternative crop projects in Myanmar, the former Burma, now ruled by a repressive military regime, and Afghanistan, a country largely ruled by the Taliban Islamic fundamentalists, who have deprived women of many rights. The two countries produce 90% of the plants used in the illegal opium market.

But the declaration due for adoption Wednesday avoids specifics, calling instead for “cooperation in alternative development” and for a significant reduction in opium poppy and coca plant cultivation by 2008.

This generalized proposal let Clinton, despite misgivings among some of his aides about the details, tell the General Assembly, “We will do our part in the United States to make this goal a reality.”

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Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, director of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, told a news conference that the United States is “absolutely supportive” of Arlacchi’s “visionary thinking.” But the American anti-drug czar added that the detailed plan for putting in force the U.N. anti-narcotics strategy “is not on the table yet.”

Delegates to the special session of the General Assembly were surprised to find an open letter to Secretary-General Kofi Annan as part of a two-page advertisement in the New York Times. The letter, whose signatories included many prominent figures such as former U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar and former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz, contended that “the global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself.”

Although those who signed did not call directly for legalization of drugs, they insisted that “persisting in our current policies will only result in more drug abuse, more empowerment of drug markets and criminals and more disease and suffering.”