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. That screening is
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 ó 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 lord.

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 ó the straightforwardness of it. And it's been successful. So
far."