DANGEROUS ALLIES: U.S. HELPS MEXICO'S ARMY TAKE BIG ANTIDRUG ROLE

MEXICO CITY Hoping to build a new bulwark against the flow of illegal
drugs from Latin America, the United States is providing the Mexican
military with extensive covert intelligence support and training hundreds
of its officers to help shape a network of antidrug troops around the
country, U.S. and Mexican officials say.

The officials say the assistance has included training, equipment and
advice from the Central Intelligence Agency to establish an elite army
intelligence unit that has quietly moved to the forefront of Mexico's
antidrug effort, sometimes ahead of a new civilian police force that the
United States is also pledged to support.

The effort has proceeded despite growing U.S. concern that it may lead to
more serious problems of corruption and human rights in one of Mexico's
most respected institutions, U.S. officials say. In fact, a new U.S.
intelligence analysis of the military's drug ties will cite evidence of
extensive penetration of the officer corps, two people who have seen draft
versions of the assessment said.

Clinton administration officials have described the U.S. aid as a stopgap.
Echoing Mexico's president, Ernesto Zedillo, they insist that the
military's lawenforcement actions will be limited and temporary, helping
to disrupt the country's thriving drug trade only until its badly corrupted
federal police forces can be overhauled.

But according to many officials, the Pentagon and the CIA have pressed
their help partly out of their need to find new tasks after the Cold War.
They hope to use the aid to expand their roles in the antidrug campaign in
Mexico and to improve their relationships with a secretive, nationalistic
neighboring army that has often looked at them with suspicion, the
officials said.

"They didn't have anybody to play with on the Mexican end of the drug
issue, so they went for the military," a former senior official who was
involved in U.S. policy in Mexico said, referring to the Defense Department
and the CIA. "They knew the risks, but they thought they could control the
situation."

Some of those risks have resounded in recent news reports: the jailing of
army generals on charges of protecting major drug traffickers; allegations
that military officers have been linked to the torture and disappearance of
criminal suspects; failures of due process and proper legal procedure by
soldiers stepping in for the police.

Other pitfalls have been less apparent. Some officials, for instance, worry
that U.S. intelligence officers may face conflicts in trying to build good
relationships with Mexican army officers to sustain the cooperation, and
trying to remain watchful of military corruption at the same time.

A few other current and former U.S. officials date their unease to what
they described as a disastrous CIA program in the late 1980s to deploy a
Mexican army strike force against the traffickers. The force was disbanded
after several failed operations, one of which resulted in the killing of
four Mexican civilians.

Mexico has long stood out in Latin America for the sureness of its civilian
control over the military. But U.S. officials said they had been troubled
by indications that some officers detailed to the federal police have
operated with considerable independence from the judicial authorities. With
the Mexican army searching for new missions, many U.S. officials doubt that
it will limit its participation in law enforcement to the twoyear deadline
that Zedillo and his aides set last summer.

"The whole thing has snowballed," said a senior U.S. official who, like
others, would discuss the matter only on condition that he not be
identified. "We are now seeing two separate antidrug efforts in Mexico
one by the military and one under the attorney general. If I were in the
attorney general's office, I would be asking whether it has gone too far."

To some degree, the policy debate is fueled by old rivalries between U.S.
lawenforcement agencies and their intelligence and military counterparts.
But the two sides also have some philosophical differences, which center on
the question of whether U.S. support for the military complements or
competes with efforts to transform Mexico's crippled criminaljustice system.

"They have basically got to rebuild their entire police force," a senior
drugenforcement official said of the Mexican government. "You can't do
that in a year or two. And the longer the emphasis is put on the military,
the longer it is going to take to get the police up and running."

Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon disputed the idea that the two directions
of U.S. antidrug aid in Mexico were at cross purposes. "There is no
conflict," he said.

James R. Jones, who left Mexico City this summer after serving for four
years as the U.S. Ambassador there, echoed that view, and denied that U.S.
officials had encouraged the Mexican military's new role.

"The temporary detailing of military officers to civilian lawenforcement
was the Mexicans' and Zedillo's decision we had nothing to do with
that," Jones said. "Our efforts to improve the quality and exchange of
intelligence information and our training programs for certain military
units had nothing to do with their decision."

The CIA's chief spokesman, Bill Harlow, declined to comment on the agency's
activities in Mexico.

Past Experience: Corruption Seen in Old Program

Despite a widespread belief in the corruption of Mexico's federal and state
police, Mexicans and their political leaders have been wary about seeking
the help of the military to enforce civilian laws.

In the late 1970s, Mexican officials turned to the army to help drive
marijuana and heroinpoppy growers from their sanctuaries in the rugged
folds of the western Sierra Madre. Their sweep succeeded in temporarily
dislodging the traffickers, and it institutionalized a program in which
about 20,000 of the army's 150,000 soldiers are detailed to drugcrop
eradication campaigns.

For an army that has relatively little to do to secure the country's
borders, the drug eradication program has been a source of pride. Yet even
while it avoided policetype activities, the military was shaken during the
1980s and early 1990s by public allegations that some senior officers
including a former defense minister, a secretary of the navy and several
senior army commanders colluded in the drug trade.

After Carlos Salinas de Gortari became president in late 1988, U.S.
officials said, they gave relatively little thought to the Mexican army
because of their hopes that at least one of the government's many
policereform campaigns would succeed. Some also harbored cause for concern
in the experience of the Mexican army strike force created years earlier.

With antidrug efforts stalled in 1987, U.S. agents developed information
that big traffickers were building nearly impenetrable compounds in the
countryside. Working with the military, current and former officials said,
CIA officers helped form what they envisioned as an elite team of about 50
young soldiers that would strike more effectively and operate more securely
than the police. Mexican lawenforcement officials were told nothing of the
plan, they said.

The team's first operation, against a stronghold of a cocaine smuggler in
Sinaloa state, ended with one soldier's capture by a police agent working
for the traffickers, two former officials said.

The next foray went considerably worse. On the morning of April 11, 1988,
helicopters swung out of the dawn sky near the northern town of Caborca, a
sanctuary of a reputed marijuana smuggler.

"The idea was that you could take a welltrained military unit and go in
there and boom take everybody out," a former official said.

The soldiers did take everyone out, but they did so at what turned out to
be a workshop in a residential neighborhood, killing four apprentice
welders. As protests rang out, former officials said, the Mexican attorney
general at the time, Sergio Garcia Ramirez, was so mystified that he first
asked the U.S. Embassy whether its agents had carried out the raid
themselves.

Eventually, the military issued a terse statement taking responsibility for
the attack but not disclosing the CIA's involvement. After a third,
unsuccessful raid on another suspected drug base, the program was shut down
for good, the officials said.

Zedillo's Effort: Military Is Given a Bigger Role

Mexico was near the same point in its political cycle the end of a
sixyear presidential term, a period when corruption has historically
flourished among outgoing officials when U.S. officials looked to the
military again in 1994.

The idea of greater army support for the police was raised first by U.S.
diplomats and again during a visit by the U.S. Army chief of staff, Gen.
Gordon Sullivan, current and former U.S. officials said. But at the time,
they said, it was rejected by Mexican justice officials.

Zedillo, who took office on Dec. 1, 1994, has called drug trafficking one
of Mexico's most serious problems of national security. U.S. officials
strongly endorsed that view, briefing his aides on such developments as the
use of passenger jets to fly cocaine into Mexico from Colombia.

"The military was the only trained, disciplined force that you could use to
deal with this situation in the short term," one of Zedillo's closest aides
said. "There was no one else."

Zedillo first brought army commanders into the redesign of the government's
drugcontrol strategy. He then authorized them to work with U.S. officials
in an ultimately abortive effort to deploy its aging F5 fighters to chase
drug jets. Finally, he began allowing military officers to replace federal
police agents in several border cities plagued by smugglers.

In October 1995, when William Perry made the first official visit to Mexico
in memory by an U.S. secretary of defense, antidrug aid was at the center
of several cooperative ventures he proposed to Mexican military officials,
U.S. and Mexican military officials said.

"You were looking for general ways to engage, military to military," a
Pentagon official said. Within months, a first group of young Mexican Army
officers were training in antidrug operations at Fort Bragg, N.C.

Of some Mexican 3,000 soldiers who are expected to have passed through
Defense Department training courses by next fall, 328 young officers will
have completed special 12 and 13week programs intended to create a corps
of antidrug specialists. Those trainers are being sent in turn to train
airmobile special forces units that are now stationed at the headquarters
of the 12 regions and 40 zones that make up Mexico's military geography.

Defense Department officials said the antidrug curriculum of the units,
called AirMobile Special Forces Groups, ranged from airassault operations
and military policing to human rights. The Pentagon has also given Mexico
73 aging UH1H helicopters to transport those troops.

The helicopters may be used only for antidrug operations. But Mexican and
U.S. military officials said there was nothing to stop the transfer of
U.S.trained army officers to similar special forces units that might be
deployed against leftist insurgents in southern states like Guerrero and
Chiapas.

CIA Support: Special Force Gets Mixed Reviews

U.S. officials said that what is perhaps the most significant U.S. support
for the Mexican military's antidrug efforts is probably the least visible.
It comes, they said, in the training, equipping and operational support of
CIA officers for a special force of the army intelligence section called
the Center for AntiNarcotics Investigations.

The unit, comprising some 90 carefully chosen young officers, began to come
together about three years ago, officials said. Like the civilian
intelligence groups the CIA works with in Mexico, the military antidrug
force is not supposed to be an "action" unit like the group trained by the
agency in the 1980s. But it does appear to sometimes take the lead in raids
as well as surveillance actions.

Several U.S. officials compared the program to the CIA's work in Colombia,
where the agency has been credited with critical help in the capture of
major drug traffickers. A key difference, they noted, has been Mexico's
extreme sensitivity to anything involving the CIA

Officials familiar with the operations of the intelligence team said that
after a clumsy start at one point its agents lost track of an important
Bolivian drug broker they had under surveillance because they insisted on
asking a superior for instructions rather than simply following him it
has emerged as probably the most active of all Mexican antidrug units.

Officials said the unit played a central part in the pursuit of Amado
Carrillo Fuentes, then Mexico's most important trafficker, before he died
during plastic surgery last summer. It also worked closely on the
investigation of Carrillo Fuentes' organization after his death, and on a
series of raids against the Tijuanabased drug mafia run by the Arellano
Felix brothers.

Yet reviews of the unit, which is known by its initials in Spanish as the
Cian, have been mixed.

Officials said some Mexican prosecutors have complained privately that the
unit's officials have demonstrated spotty notions of the law, at times
handing captured suspects over to the civilian authorities without ever
gathering evidence to hold them. Some Mexican police investigators have
also questioned why if the United States is willing to provide the sort
of sophisticated surveillance and intelligencegathering equipment that it
is said to have given to the Cian it will not offer the same support to
new antidrug units created in the attorney general's office.

U.S. officials said questions had been raised about the unit's integrity
after two of its agents were dismissed this year for what one official
described as "unprofessional conduct." Some have also wondered about its
independence from both Mexican civilians and U.S. intelligence officers.

"It could be a time bomb," a former intelligence official said, "because
they have a lot less control over that unit than they think they do."

The Mexican army's chief of staff, Gen. Juan Heriberto Salinas Altes
praised the unit, saying it has gathered important information for both
army specialforces troops and the federal police. He denied, however, that
the unit has any formal or continuing relationship with the CIA.

"There could have been some contact, but it was not any official contact,"
Salinas Altes said in an interview, his first since becoming the chief of
staff three years ago.

Vulnerability: Can the Military Resist Temptation?

For their part, Clinton administration officials said the closer military
relationship that antidrug cooperation had already paid dividends for the
United States. In recent months, they noted, Mexican officials agreed to
streamline procedures by which U.S. drugsurveillance planes are allowed to
fly over Mexican airspace, and those by which Coast Guard ships can dock at
Mexican ports.

The impact of U.S. support on the Mexican military's antidrug efforts
remains somewhat to be seen. Thus far, Defense Department officials said
they knew of no instance in which special forces officers trained in the
United States had been sent off on an U.S.donated helicopter in the
pursuit of a drug flight.

But many U.S. officials said it had already become evident that although
the Mexican officer corps may be more resistant to the traffickers' bribes
than the police, it faces a more serious threat than most U.S. officials
foresaw.

Clinton administration officials were shocked this year when the army
commander installed as the Zedillo government's drugenforcement chief,
Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was arrested for taking bribes from Carrillo
Fuentes, the trafficker. Since then, though, it has become clear that the
episode was not an isolated one.

Other highranking officers have been implicated in connection with
Carrillo Fuentes' organization, including one retired general who was
arrested after the wedding of the trafficker's sister. Several more senior
officers have been arrested for their supposed ties to the rival
trafficking organization run out of Tijuana by the Arellano Felix brothers;
one has been charged with offering $1 million monthly bribes to another
army general who serves as the attorney general's representative there.

Still, U.S. officials are divided between those who see new proof of the
military's vulnerability and those who see evidence of an institution
fighting aggressively against temptation. Mexican officials, not
surprisingly, side strongly with the latter camp.

"If there is action, there are going to be people hurt," Salinas Altes
said. "We have people killed. We have people wounded. We have people in
jail."

Salinas Altes has himself been a focus of the U.S. scrutiny.

According to officials familiar with U.S. intelligence reports in which the
chief of staff is mentioned, he first came to the United States' attention
after he moved from Baja California in 1988 to head the 9th Military Region
headquarters in the city of Acapulco. There, he spent six years in charge
of drugeradication efforts in Guerrero, the state that is Mexico's leading
producer of heroin poppies.

Several years later, two U.S. officials said, Salinas Altes was again
briefly a subject of scrutiny when intelligence officials intercepted a
drug trafficker's telephone call for a "General Salinas." They described
the report as disturbing but unclear.

Most recently, U.S. officials became concerned again this summer when it
emerged that Salinas Altes and several other senior officers had met with a
top lieutenant of Carrillo Fuentes. According to a military document
published in the Mexican magazine Proceso that appears to be notes from the
Jan. 14 meeting, the lieutenant, Eduardo Gonzalez Quirarte, said the
trafficker had offered essentially to clean up his business halting the
sale of drugs in Mexico, eschewing violence, helping the economy if he
were allowed to keep half his fortune and continue operating in peace.

Salinas Altes was interviewed at his Mexico City offices on condition that
he not be questioned about the allegations against him, but only about the
cooperative efforts he oversees as the military's representative to an
antidrug group of senior officials from the two countries.

But in a separate interview, Gen. Tomas Angeles Dauahare, a senior aide to
Mexico's defense minister, Gen. Enrique Cervantes Aguirre, dismissed the
allegations against Salinas Altes vehemently.

Angeles said that in the 1992 episode, Mexican military officials received
an unsigned U.S. report forwarded from the Foreign Ministry. After an
extensive investigation, in which U.S. officials did not answer repeated
requests for supplementary information, he said, it was found that the
guilty officer was in fact a Gen. Javier Salinas Payares, the commander of
a military air base, and that he was eventually imprisoned in the case.

Similarly, Angeles said there was no evidence that Salinas Altes had acted
inappropriately in meeting with Gonzalez Quirarte, who he said had posed as
a young businessman with information about the Carrillo Fuentes mob.

"He spoke about Amado Carrillo," Angeles said. "He gave information about
the drug organization internationally. It was only discovered later that
this was Eduardo Gonzalez Quirarte."

Angeles also strongly denied a claim made by Gutierrez Rebollo during his
trial that Gonzalez Quirarte had two other meetings and that he paid a $6
million down payment on a promised gratuity of $60 million to government
officials.

"You can be fully certain that had he done that, he would have been
arrested because that is bribery," Angeles said. Referring to Gutierrez
Rebollo, he added, "That is characteristic of his accusations the lies,
the infamy, the slander."

One current and one former U.S. official said there was credible
information that Gonzalez Quirarte had been to see military officials more
than once, and they added that a recent assessment of Gutierrez Rebollo's
testimony concluded that much of it was true.

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company