U.S.-Mexico Drug Forces Beset by Woes

To U.S. officials overwhelmed by the explosion of Mexican drug trafficking in the early 1990s, it seemed a bold solution: Fight the cartels with cross-border forces composed of elite officers rigorously vetted and trained in the United States.

Men like Nicolas Carrillo and Eligio Garcia.

But today, Carrillo and Garcia are in a Tijuana jail--among six Mexican members of the elite forces accused of serious crimes in various cities. Outraged U.S. officials suspect that the six are being framed by traffickers working with corrupt local authorities.

The charges against the officers are a serious blow to a program the Clinton administration has called a cornerstone of the fight against Mexican drug lords. The cases illustrate the frustrations of battling cartels in a country awash in corruption, say U.S. and Mexican officials.

And the cases are just the latest problems to bedevil the 3-year-old Border Task Forces, or BTFs. U.S. officials say the forces have been thwarted by cross-border squabbles and excessive bureaucracy.

The task forces are under scrutiny as the U.S. Congress decides by March 26 whether to challenge President Clinton’s recent ruling that Mexico is an ally in the war on drugs. Some U.S. officials say the forces show how bilateral cooperation isn’t working.

Their “achievements in attaining investigative goals to date have been minimal,” Thomas A. Constantine, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, testified this month before Congress.

If U.S. lawmakers vote to decertify Mexico as a drug ally, economic penalties could follow.

The Border Task Forces were created in July 1996, with Mexico contributing vetted police officers to the teams and the United States providing DEA, FBI and customs officers. They set up four headquarters in Mexico--in the border cities of Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez and the drug hubs of Monterrey and Guadalajara--and five satellite units in smaller Mexican cities.

The new forces were to work together far more intensely than border agencies ever had. U.S. officials screened and trained the Mexican agents, and committed about $4 million to the Mexican teams--paying for everything from their lunches to their sophisticated radio system in Ciudad Juarez.

But the program quickly ran into trouble. U.S. authorities refused to allow their agents to commute across the border after Mexico declared they couldn’t bring their guns. As a result, only U.S. anti-drug agents already based in Mexico worked with the task forces.

That problem was solved in recent weeks with an agreement to meet on the U.S. side.

But the forces now have a fresh problem: the agents who wound up behind bars.

From Model Agents to Prison Inmates

The case of Carrillo, 24, and Garcia, 30, illustrates how even the best agents can be neutralized by Mexico’s drug world. The men had seemed models of a new generation of Mexican police. Fresh out of the police academy, they had passed a battery of U.S. and Mexican exams testing their honesty, U.S. officials say. In July 1997, they attended a one-month training course run by DEA, FBI and customs officials in Leesburg, Va.

The two agents quickly proved themselves to their DEA counterparts. Sent to Guadalajara, they worked closely with DEA agents and helped in the arrests of the elusive Luis and Jesus Amezcua, the alleged methamphetamine kings of Mexico, officials say.

“If these [anti-drug] guys were crooked, they could have made the big bucks with the Amezcuas,” said a U.S. official, one of several who spoke on condition of anonymity. “So, suddenly, they’re going to make chump change in Tijuana?”

The Mexican agents’ troubles began in September. Just days after being transferred to Tijuana, Carrillo and Garcia were contacted by two men they had previously met through a DEA informant, they said in testimony and in a jailhouse interview with The Times. The two informants offered enticing news: They could set up a buy-and-bust operation to snare a major marijuana dealer.

The next day, the two agents said, the informants called and summoned them to Tijuana’s Terranova Hotel.

The deal was going down.

But on arriving, the two Mexican anti-drug agents were arrested, along with the informants. State authorities charged the agents and the two informants with kidnapping Julio Monge, a convicted drug dealer who had been in a room with the informants.

U.S. and Mexican authorities believe that Monge had been planning to sell marijuana to the informants but then realized something was fishy and called his father for help. The father, also a convicted trafficker, told authorities his son had been kidnapped. The father had earlier revealed that state police officers were his allies in drug deals, one of the informants recalled in court testimony.

Other Task-Force Agents Facing Probes

Today, the case against the two agents appears to be near collapse. According to court documents, the younger Monge recently retracted his accusations against the anti-drug agents and blamed the two informants for the kidnapping. Aside from his accusation, there had been little evidence of an abduction; Monge wasn’t even bound when police found him.

Mexican officials say the case is an example of how drug traffickers and their proxies, corrupt police officers, are sabotaging the task forces.

The forces “have hurt drug-trafficking groups in the border area,” Mariano Herran Salvatti, the head of Mexico’s anti-drug agency, said in an interview. “Now they’re trying to strike back at our agents through false charges.”

The two Tijuana agents were only the first to face investigations. Last month, a task-force member in Mexicali was accused by a federal police officer of stealing from a confiscated marijuana shipment, said Jorge Espejel, the Mexican supervisor of the task forces. Espejel insists on the innocence of the agent, who is under investigation but not jailed.

Meanwhile, state police in Monterrey arrested three BTF members earlier this month as they met with a local man in a city parking garage. The man, Rogelio Garcia Gutierrez, had told police that the three agents were trying to extort $50,000 from him, state police officials say.

Mexican anti-drug authorities vigorously dispute that charge. According to Herran Salvatti and Espejel, the three agents were set up by state police working with excolleagues who are being investigated by the anti-drug task forces for trafficking.

U.S. authorities say the string of accusations is so serious that it could destroy the program.

“If they start getting arrested on trumped-up charges by corrupt state and local officials, that will bring an end to” the forces, a U.S. official said.

The jailed Tijuana agents said Mexican authorities have been supportive, continuing to pay them and helping with their legal fees. Mexican officials say they can’t shield the agents from the legal process, although they insist that the men are innocent.

Some Believe That Units Are Tainted

But others believe that the units may have been tainted by corruption. The judge handling the Tijuana case, for example, notes that one of the agents, Carrillo, is facing two additional kidnapping charges. In both cases, Carrillo and the two informants are accused of abducting Tijuana men in September to pressure their families for money, state Judge Gloria Fimbres said.

U.S. and Mexican anti-drug officials said they did not know about those charges.

Corruption has been common in Mexico’s anti-narcotics programs, and it has tarnished even the task forces. In 1997, the forces had to be rebuilt after Mexico’s drug czar, Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was arrested and accused of helping drug lords.

That same year, a BTF commander in Monterrey was “asked to leave” after he invited traffickers to the unit’s “safe house,” a U.S. official said.

Corruption isn’t the only impediment to the task forces’ effectiveness, U.S. officials say. The Mexican government still hasn’t provided all of the 70 agents that it originally pledged, U.S. officials say. Mexican officials deny the units are understaffed.

And U.S. authorities complain that in Mexico’s highly centralized system, local agents must clear everything with Mexico City, wasting precious hours.

U.S. officials say that’s what happened in November, when the forces received a tip about a meeting of leaders of the Arellano Felix drug gang in Tijuana. Mexican task-force members staked out the house and requested backup for a raid, several U.S. officials said in interviews. But no help arrived for hours.

The Mexican officials disputed the U.S. account, saying the delay was necessary to obtain an arrest warrant and check out the tip--which they said proved false. U.S. authorities, however, still believe that a drug meeting took place.

Despite the setbacks, U.S. and Mexican officials aren’t ready to give up on the task forces. They say they have produced valuable information leading to seizures and indictments. And, given the long history of distrust between law enforcement officers on the border, even flawed teamwork is a step forward, some officials say.