AT U.S. URGING, MEXICO TO TIGHTEN SOUTHERN BORDER TO FIGHT CRIME

MEXICO CITY -- The Mexican government plans to sharply increase the
presence of soldiers, police, naval patrols and immigration
checkpoints near its porous southern border. The plan, which has not
yet been made public, is an unprecedented effort to choke off flows
of illegal immigrants, drugs and guns entering the country from
Central America.

Most of the illicit human and drug traffic coming into Mexico is
heading to the United States, and Washington has long urged Mexico to
more tightly control its 750-mile border with Guatemala and Belize.
While much attention has been placed on Mexico's northern border,
officials say many of the problems there start with Mexico's
notoriously corrupt and loosely enforced southern border.

Hundreds of thousands of undocumented people, many from Guatemala and
El Salvador but increasingly from as far away as China and Iraq,
enter Mexico through the south. When immigration or police officials
do stop truckloads of people, or shipments of cocaine or arms, they
frequently wave them through for a cash bribe.

Interior Minister Santiago Creel said in an interview that getting
Mexico's southern flank under control was critical to President
Vicente Fox's promise to crack down on corruption, and to Mexico's
commitment to Washington to reduce the flow of U.S.-bound illegal
immigrants.

``We have never had the security we want in the south; things were
very loose,'' said Creel, who is in charge of the ``South Plan,'' or
``Southern Zone Plan.'' ``This is part of our big challenge to
modernize and find new ways of doing things in Mexico.''

``We are very encouraged to hear this,'' said Johnny N. Williams,
western regional director of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service. ``Mexico is used as a transit point,'' for illegal traffic
into the United States, he said, and what happens on Mexico's
southern border is of ``extreme importance to both countries.''

Williams said there has been a ``revolutionary'' change in the way
Mexico and the United States work together on immigration issues.
Friday, the countries issued a statement outlining new joint rescue
and training operations aimed at preventing more deaths of illegal
immigrants crossing the border into the Arizona desert. During the
hot summer months, the United States will put more helicopters and
personnel in the region and Mexico has added rescue workers on its
side of the border.

Creel said that in return for Mexican efforts to reduce illegal
immigration, the United States should help with immigration issues
important to Mexico. He said he hoped negotiations with Washington
would produce results on increasing guest-worker programs and
``regularizing'' the legal status of Mexican workers already in the
United States. ``The U.S. has to present results, as well as
Mexico,'' he said.

No one knows exactly how many people illegally cross into Mexico via
its southern border. Mexico last year deported more than 150,000
foreigners, almost all of them trying to reach the United States, and
most of them had entered across the southern border. Officials
estimate that for every illegal immigrant caught, three to five more
evade authorities.

U.S. officials last year caught 28,000 non-Mexicans who illegally
entered the country across the U.S.-Mexico border. More than 22,000
of those were from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, and most of
them are believed to have arrived in Mexico through its southern
border.

Creel said $10 million has been allocated for the National
Immigration Institute, and much of that new money will go to
modernizing 13 tumbledown southern-border checkpoints. Four or five
new ones also will be built. Construction is to start next month.

Perhaps the most innovative feature of the plan, whose final details
have not yet been worked out, is the focus of elite groups of
soldiers and police along a critical highway. The Trans-Isthmus
Highway crosses Mexico at one of its most narrow points, connecting
the Gulf of Mexico in the north to the Pacific Ocean 150 miles to the
south. It runs from the town of Coatzacoalcos in Veracruz state to
the town of Salina Cruz in Oaxaca state.

All land traffic from the southern border to the rest of Mexico must
cross this relatively short highway. Creel said that guarding this
key choke-point would be easier than trying to patrol the entire
border. And for those who try to beat the new system by going by sea,
the plan calls for naval ships to sharply increase their patrols in
southern waters.

Creel said concentrating manpower in the narrow Isthmus of
Tehuantepec would be less expensive and more efficient than the
traditional system of haphazard checks and patrols. ``In the past the
policy wasn't effective at all. . . . There was no plan. Now we are
working with clear objectives,'' Creel said.

Another critical element of the new plan is attacking official
corruption and human rights violations. Officials here said the new
system will not work unless Mexico can stop bribery of officials and
robberies of immigrants.