INTERVIEW-MEXICO SAYS DRUG TRADE CHANGING, WARNS OF VIOLENCE

MEXICO CITY, July 5 (Reuters) - Mexico's national security adviser
believes recent strikes against leading drug cartels have caused a
fragmentation of the cocaine trade but warns they could also lead to
a new round of violent turf battles.

Adolfo Aguilar Zinser said the cartels were being forced to split up
different parts of their business in response to an assault on their
networks by U.S. and Mexican forces, now working closer with each
other than ever before.

He said the emergence of smaller drug gangs and independent operators
showed the cartels were in trouble but he stopped well short of
claiming victory in the war on drugs and said there could be a surge
of violence if rival traffickers go after each other.

"If the business of the cartels is breaking down and the number of
people entering into the different sectors rises, there could also be
an increase in violence," Aguilar Zinser told Reuters in an interview
late on Wednesday.

"You have more players stepping on each other's territory."

About two-thirds of the Colombian cocaine sold in the United States
passes through Mexico and that transshipment trade has for long been
controlled by a handful of cartels which ruthlessly stamped out
upstart competitors.

But violence can surge whenever a cartel is in crisis.

In the year after the notorious drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes died
while undergoing plastic surgery in 1997, his Juarez cartel imploded
in a power struggle that claimed about 60 lives in and around the
border city of Ciudad Juarez.

The seven-month-old government of President Vicente Fox has won
praise for arresting several high-profile drug traffickers and a
former state governor as well as disrupting some key smuggling routes
with a series of sweep operations.

New Players

Aguilar Zinser said the government was already seeing clear evidence
that those successes had helped disrupt and fragment the cocaine
trade, inadvertently allowing new players to assert themselves.

Although he warned of violent turf disputes, he said they might also
represent an opportunity for security forces on both sides of the
U.S.-Mexico border.

"When they (the drug traffickers) are fighting each other, then it
could indicate they are more vulnerable."

U.S. officials speak glowingly of the Fox government's commitment to
the war on drugs and Aguilar Zinser said the result was a more
balanced relationship in which a "vicious cycle" of suspicion and
bitterness had been replaced by trust.

U.S. President George W. Bush has stressed the need to reduce cocaine
consumption in the United States rather than simply demanding that
producer nations cut the flow of cocaine, heroin, amphetamines and
marijuana.

Aguilar Zinser said that, even as Mexico and the United States work
together against the cartels, they need to "evaluate where all of
this is taking us" because traffickers would still find a way to
supply U.S. cities even if the trade was wiped out in Mexico.

But he insisted the drugs war was still a top priority for Fox's
government because it needs to regain control of security forces and
public institutions corrupted by the cartels.

"This is a fight against corruption," he said, adding that Mexico was
also seeing a rise in drug addiction rates.

"It is a function of the breakdown of the cartels and the entry into
the market of smaller independents who are being paid with drugs and
sell them in the Mexican market," he said.

"Cocaine in urban centers was always for the higher-income brackets
but now we are seeing it going down to lower income groups."