Mexico Investigating Soldiers in Cocaine Theft

In a fresh embarrassment for its anti-narcotics efforts, the Mexican military announced Friday that it is investigating several soldiers for stealing about 15 pounds of cocaine from seized shipments that the army was supposed to incinerate.

The incident made front pages in Mexico on Friday, reflecting fears that the army’s growing drug-fighting role is endangering a key national institution. Both U.S. and Mexican officials have pushed the respected military to become more active in anti-narcotics work because of extensive corruption in police and political ranks.

In an unusually sweeping investigation, the army confined the 96th Infantry Battalion to its barracks in recent days, administering drug-detection tests to most of the 560 members in the unit. The battalion is based in the city of Chihuahua, about 110 miles from the Texas border.

“We will take this to its ultimate consequences,” vowed the army’s top prosecutor, Gen. Rafael Macedo de la Concha, in an interview here.

The theft was detected Oct. 22 shortly before a ceremony in the northern city that was intended to highlight the government’s success in combating illegal narcotics. Authorities had planned to burn 2 tons of marijuana and cocaine seized over the past three months. The military was guarding the drugs.

But shortly before the ceremony began, government technicians noticed something wrong with several packages of cocaine that together should have weighed about 15 pounds, Macedo de la Concha said.

“In their place were other packages weighing about 12 kilos,” or 26 pounds, he said. “The experts did tests and discovered the substance wasn’t cocaine.” In fact, it appeared to be flour.

Macedo de la Concha said it wasn’t clear whether the thieves intended to sell the cocaine or use it themselves. Four low-ranking soldiers have been accused in the theft, he said, and others could be detained. The stolen cocaine has a street value of about $56,000 in Mexico, and at least four times that amount in the United States, according to official U.S. and Mexican estimates.

The incident became public late Thursday after families of soldiers complained that the battalion had been confined to barracks.

Macedo de la Concha said that most of the unit’s soldiers were subjected to drug-detection tests after the theft was discovered but that testing of the unit’s personnel occurs routinely. He declined to reveal the results of the recent tests.

The army, revered as a legacy of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, has a long history of involvement in eradicating poppy and marijuana plants. As Mexico has become a major route for U.S.-bound Colombian cocaine, the military has sharply stepped up its anti-drug work, aided by U.S. training.

That mission has exposed the military to such corruption scandals as the 1997 arrest of the country’s drug czar, army Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, on charges of aiding drug traffickers.

The anti-narcotics fight “opens them up to corruption and can only hurt the army in the long run,” said Roderic Ai Camp, a specialist on the Mexican military who teaches at Claremont McKenna College.

But, he said, military officers “would agree with President [Ernesto] Zedillo that there is no alternative. This is a mission they have to perform because of inadequate civilian capacity to do the job.”

The most unusual aspect of the cocaine theft in Chihuahua, Camp said, is the army’s willingness to discuss it. The Mexican military is notoriously secretive.

Camp noted, however, that the military is gradually opening up, even discussing its drug operations on its Web site. (https://www.sedena.gob.mx)

“They’re admitting openly in this process that they have a problem,” he said. “In the past, you would have never heard about this.”

A military spokesman said the 96th Battalion isn’t an elite anti-drug group but rather an ordinary unit.

In Washington, a senior Pentagon official said there is no indication that the members of the battalion are among the roughly 1,000 Mexican military officers who have been trained in the United States since 1996 as part of joint U.S.-Mexico counter-narcotics efforts.

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Times staff writer Esther Schrader in Washington contributed to this report.