Mexico Bolsters Its Battle on Drugs

With sharply expanded U.S. support, the Mexican government is quietly upgrading its force of investigators and prosecutors in hopes of extending a surprising string of victories against drug traffickers and organized crime.

Officials on both sides of the border exude confidence that President Vicente Fox’s government will win back even more of the ground lost to the drug cartels that have run roughshod over the country--and its police--for more than a decade.

Estuardo Mario Bermudez, the new anti-drug chief, said Mexico and the United States are intensifying exchanges between police and prosecutors, so that each side can learn how the other’s system works. That’s just one sign of a fresh willingness by both countries to work together more closely on law enforcement issues.

“We are no longer talking in a framework of suspicions and resistance but rather one in which there is steadily more trust and a tightening of the links between us,” Bermudez said.

Backed by U.S. funding that has nearly tripled since 2000 for law enforcement assistance such as training and apprentice programs, Mexican police also are revamping the country’s detective service to ensure that its officers can actually make cases stick against traffickers and other criminals.

U.S. officials have responded to these initiatives with uncharacteristic praise. Perhaps the most unusual tone of optimism came from Joe Keefe, special operations chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA has often been the most skeptical among U.S. government agencies, believing that widespread corruption in Mexican agencies has undermined any attempts at cooperation.

Calling himself “cautiously optimistic,” Keefe said: “They are showing us things early on. . . . I really think, honestly, that the Fox administration is dealing with corruption that has been endemic for many moons.”

Of course, the power of the cartels remains enormous, and drug-related violence and corruption continue to corrode Mexican institutions. In January, for example, drug chieftain Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman walked out of a maximum-security prison in Guadalajara with the help of dozens of prison officials. And Mexico remains the channel for more than half the cocaine smuggled into the United States each year.

Yet Keefe and other U.S. officials note that Mexican police have already made significant, tangible progress against drug cartels in the first few months of the Fox administration. Those include the arrests of former Quintana Roo state Gov. Mario Villanueva and his alleged lieutenant, Alcides Ramon Magana, who are suspected of turning the Yucatan Peninsula into a major drug shipment route.

Mexican authorities acknowledge that U.S. intelligence, shared in ways that would have been unlikely in past years, was an important factor in both arrests. Such exchanges of intelligence would also have been unlikely under the previous Mexican government, which was sullied by numerous cases of sometimes deadly tip-offs to drug lords of police operations.

The willingness of U.S. officials to share information, coupled with the apparent care Mexicans have taken to ensure that no leaks ensue, appears to be building an upward spiral of confidence.

In the past, new Mexican administrations also have achieved initial successes, often focusing on one cartel while seemingly letting others flourish. This time, the actions have been widespread. Police last week arrested Ivonne Soto Vega, alias “La Pantera,” a suspected chief money launderer for the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix cartel.

Bermudez, who previously was a prosecutor of electoral offenses, noted that he had to undergo a strict vetting, including a lie-detector test and an investigation of financial assets, before taking the top anti-drug job.

He said such vetting is now required for all top law enforcement officials, not just lower-level team members, as in the past, and is being extended to federal prosecutors serving in Mexico’s 31 states and the federal district.

The DEA’s Keefe said the vetting system, which sputtered for four years until the Fox administration took over, was a central factor in building up a core of trustworthy agents.

But he noted: “What they are doing at federal level now, they are going to have to do at state level too. The U.S. has to understand that. It’s not going to be quick.”

The main driver of the restructuring of the national prosecuting agency is the attorney general himself, Rafael Macedo de la Concha. Formerly the chief army prosecutor, Macedo has instilled military discipline and introduced modern technology in a moribund agency where manual typewriters were common.

Macedo has also initiated a broad restructuring, focusing on the organized-crime and investigative divisions.

Bermudez said he expects the process to create an integrated organized-crime unit embracing the various specialized units that now operate separately, including his own anti-narcotics division, a kidnapping unit and agencies investigating human and arms trafficking.

A new Federal Agency of Investigation, akin to the FBI, is being formed that will become the primary detective service for all federal agencies, including the revamped organized-crime division. This agency will absorb the federal judicial police, the current investigative unit, which is much maligned for chronic corruption and is being overhauled and cleaned up ahead of the changeover.

“Before, they had fiefdoms that didn’t share intelligence,” said a U.S. official involved in law enforcement policy. “This puts all the investigators in one unit. It makes a lot of sense.”

In response to these initiatives, the U.S. government has sharply increased funding for training and other technical assistance. From a low of $4 million in funding in 2000, the budget rose to $10 million this year and is expected to grow to $12 million in 2002.

The 2002 U.S. international narcotics funding budget summary says Fox’s election, ending 71 years of rule by the former Institutional Revolutionary Party, has brought a new commitment to take on corruption and fix the judicial system. This “offers us an unprecedented opportunity to further binational cooperation in the area of narcotics and law enforcement,” the summary says.

The U.S. assistance focuses heavily on training.

“In the past, we funded a lot of here-and-now programs,” the U.S. official said. “Now we are focusing much more on basic law enforcement institutions. Mexico needs a long-term institution-building strategy.”

Mexican training programs have shifted emphasis “to turn them into real criminal investigators, so they can actually make cases,” with impressive initial results, the official added.

“These people have been making tremendous strides. They are hitting all the key cartels,” said another, Mexico-based U.S. official. “They have clearly been given their marching orders, and even the ones who’ve stayed on from the past are thinking more can-do, thinking outside the box.”

One shaper of this new attitude comes from outside the security world. Leftist academic Adolfo Aguilar Zinser holds the new position of national security advisor, coordinating all security agencies.

Aguilar Zinser wrote in a recent newspaper column that drug traffickers had created a myth of invincibility, as if their power were so great that they could never be controlled. In fighting back, he said, “the democracy we are constructing must be able to show its usefulness and relevance.”

Aguilar Zinser tacitly acknowledged the suspicions in Mexico that cooperating with the United States will bring unwanted intrusion.

“A good part of the task is to link the domestic struggle against trafficking to a new strategy of international cooperation,” he said. “If we break taboos and ally with other countries to combat trafficking where it hurts us most, we will defeat it.”

Michael Chertoff, U.S. assistant attorney general for the criminal division, led a Justice Department delegation to Mexico last week to carry forward talks on cooperation in areas ranging from money laundering, gun smuggling and extradition of fugitives to migrant trafficking, customs fraud and cyber-crime.

He said the two governments plan to establish working groups on many of these issues, adding, “We have throughout this meeting talked about expanding the breadth of cooperation on a whole spectrum of law enforcement issues.”