MEXICO'S NEW ANTI-DRUG TEAM WINS THE TRUST OF U.S. OFFICIALS

MEXICO CITY - After five years of failure, American and Mexican officials
fighting the war on drugs say they have created a trusted group of
undercover Mexican investigators who are arresting long- sought suspects
and attacking all the big drug cartels, instead of selling out to them as
in the past.

This breakthrough in no way means that the tide has turned in the drug war,
they acknowledge. A never-ending river of cocaine and heroin still flows
north from Mexico to meet never-ending demand in the United States. Drug
barons are still using their profits to try to corrupt Mexican law
enforcement at every level.

But in the last few months, something significant has changed: with the
creation of a 117-member Mexican organized-crime unit, which works side by
side with the United States Drug Enforcement Administration in Mexico, both
sides say they are starting to trust each other.

"We have got counterparts down here whom we trust and with whom we can
share sensitive information without that filtering out to the traffickers,
and we haven't been proved wrong yet," said a senior United States law
enforcement official in Mexico. "We have found some people in whom we have
confidence."

The creation of the new drug police unit, each member rigorously vetted by
both nations, has meant a new way of doing business, said Joseph Keefe, the
United States drug enforcement agency's chief of operations.

"We can sit down and freely share information with the Mexicans, they can
share information with us, the information doesn't wind up on the street,"
he said. "They are going out and attacking drug organizations."

Jose Santiago Vasconcelos, chief of Mexico's special organized-crime unit,
who oversees the vetted unit, as it is known, said: "Information is flowing
on both sides, almost instantaneously. We obtain information, we
communicate it to the Americans immediately; they obtain information, and
they communicate immediately, and we are connecting, coordinating, on cases
as much in the United States as much as in Mexico."

Both nations have tried without success since 1996 to form a cadre of
trustworthy undercover Mexican investigators. The 117 Mexicans under Mr.
Vasconcelos have been through financial audits, psychological screening and
polygraphs. Their neighbors and families have been grilled. Their blood and
urine have been analyzed. The screening was done by Mexican government
officials with American help. Then they have gone to the United States for
more tests and extensive training.

They have been working since April for Mr. Vasconcelos and his organized
crime unit. He is the only man in Mexico empowered to run wiretaps and
undercover operations against drug cartels.

The Americans give Mr. Vasconcelos information. He takes it to a trusted
Mexican judge - a judge who, he hopes, will not leak details of the
investigation to drug gangs - to win approval for wiretaps against suspects
in Mexico. The information gleaned from bugging in Mexico can provide
probable cause to seek more wiretaps in the United States.

That sets information flowing across the border, "and there's a real
synergy there," said a senior United States official in Mexico. Members of
the Mexican unit then run the cases from investigation to arrest.

They have attacked all the major drug cartels this year - "the entire
spectrum of narcotics trafficking, making it very difficult to assert that
this is anything other than real," said this American official.

"In years past, to the extent that the government in Mexico did anything
against one of the major cartels, it was typically viewed as a means of
protecting another cartel someplace." he said. The implication had been
that "the government was lining its pockets with money from one cartel,
while trying to curry favor with the United States or others by going after
another one."

But now, he said, "there's a fundamental difference down here." Since
President Vicente Fox took office in December, "there has been a
broad-based offensive against all of the cartels."

This year, the unit has helped arrest a former governor, Mario Villanueva,
and a drug cartel operator, Alcides Ramon Magana, jointly accused of
conspiring to ship more than $2 billion worth of cocaine to the United States.

Mr. Villanueva had been slipping in and out of Mexico since his term ended
in 1999. But in May he was detected in Cancun. He was tracked for eight
days, until officials had dotted every i and crossed every t for his arrest
and potential extradition to the United States, Mexican and American
officials said.

"We worked side by side, we had live sources on Villanueva's comings and
goings, and we seized the right moment," Mr. Vasconcelos said.

Mr. Magana, a former federal police officer, had been in plain view, off
and on, for close to four years. American agents had given their Mexican
counterparts his home addresses, telephone numbers and safe-house
locations, officials said. But nothing happened until June, when Mexican
agents cornered him.

This year ships hauling more than 50 tons of cocaine off the Pacific coast
have been seized, officials said, and large drug smuggling and money
laundering rings that reached from the Canadian border to Colombia have
been at least temporarily destroyed.

The arrest roster also includes three senior military officers, several
drug cartel lieutenants, and a Tijuana cartel enforcer charged with
shooting a Roman Catholic cardinal in 1993. After Mexico's Supreme Court
approved extradition of drug suspects, four suspected major traffickers
were sent to the United States for trial.

Mr. Vasconcelos said the underlying trust in his new vetted unit "comes
from a new openness" between the Americans and Mexicans. "We've created it
among ourselves and it's generating confidence," he said. "And at last we
understand we have a common enemy" - instead of fighting one another.

The history of the drug war in Mexico suggests that tactical government
victories are fleeting. The cartels have billions of dollars to buy off
officials. They feed a seemingly insatiable demand with "ever-increasing
supplies, delivered by ever-more sophisticated means," said Michael
Massing, a longtime analyst of the drug war and author of "The Fix"
(University of California Press, 2000).

"Can it make a difference?" he said, referring to the new unit. "I'd be
surprised if these changes lead to a substantial decrease in drugs going to
the U.S. or a decrease in the violence and power of the cartels."

The Drug Enforcement Administration in Mexico is essentially an
intelligence service. Its agents cannot carry guns or make arrests. It
gathers and analyzes information and hopes that its Mexican counterparts
will act on it.

If it cannot pass on information with confidence, in its view, nothing good
will happen - and many bad things could, like the collapse of
investigations or the death of colleagues.

Its officials say they do not want to paint too rosy a picture.

Only two years ago, Thomas Constantine, then the director of the Drug
Enforcement Administration, said Mexican drug enforcement was corrupt and
incompetent. And its previous attempts to form a trusted cadre of Mexican
officers also began with enthusiasm, but failed miserably.

"There is little effective law enforcement leading to the arrest of major
traffickers in Mexico," he said. "Investigations have been compromised,"
usually when drug traffickers bought information from corrupt Mexican
agents. His depressing and largely undisputed assessment meant that the
drug war, from the Americans' standpoint, was a losing battle and perhaps a
lost cause.

From 1996 onward, the drug agency, the F.B.I, the United States military
and the C.I.A. have tried forming vetted units. Between 1997 and 1999, the
American drug agency alone spent $4.5 million on training, equipment and
lie-detector tests for Mexican agents and prosecutors.

Seventy passed the test. Shortly after they were mobilized, the unit
collapsed - corruption in the ranks, Mr. Constantine said.

That left the number of trusted Mexican drug agents, and therefore the
effectiveness of counternarcotics operations in Mexico, at "zero - or less
than zero," said Mr. Keefe, the agency's operations chief.

Part of the problem was the "massive ignorance and arrogance" of United
States officials, said Barry R. McCaffrey, the retired Army general who
served as the American antidrug chief for five years. He cited his own
public assessment of his Mexican counterpart in the war on drugs, Gen.
Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, as "a guy of absolute unquestioned integrity."

General Gutierrez was trusted with highly secret information by White
House, Drug Enforcement Administration and intelligence officials.
Presumably, every bit of it ended up in the hands of the traffickers.

He was arrested in February 1997 and convicted of working for a major
Mexican drug trafficker.

A predecessor, Mario Ruiz Massieu, Mexico's drug policy chief in 1993 and
1994, killed himself in 1999 rather than stand trial in Texas on drug and
money laundering charges.

The moral, said General McCaffrey, was, "Watch your step - honest men die
in Mexico," while the corrupted thrive.

But the real lesson, said Mr. Fox's national security adviser, Adolfo
Aguilar Zinser, is that the nations have to work harder to establish
trusted units.

"President Fox convinced President Bush to try this" when they met at Mr.
Fox's ranch on Feb. 16, Mr. Aguilar Zinser said.

A senior American official in Mexico said the two men had issued "orders
from on high to make this thing work."

Mr. Keefe said: "We're certainly sharing a lot more intelligence than we
were a year or two ago. We're sharing it sooner. This is what's new - the
straightforwardness of it. And it's been successful. So far."