BUSH SEEKS $500 MILLION FOR MEXICO'S DRUG WAR

Another $50 Million Would Go to Central America's Efforts in the Joint
Project

WASHINGTON - President Bush asked Congress Monday for $550 million to
help Mexico and Central America fight drug trafficking amid escalating
drug-related violence, particularly on the Texas-Mexico border.

The funding request, part of a two-to three-year package that would
total about $1.4 billion, is included in a $46 billion request to
increase funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"It delivers vital assistance for our partners in Mexico and Central
America, who are working to break up drug cartels, and fight organized
crime, and stop human trafficking," Bush said at the White House,
shortly after calling Mexican President Felipe Calderon.

Bush said the anti-narcotics funding, along with funds to care for
wounded soldiers and to bolster the United Nations peacekeeping
mission in Darfur, are "urgent priorities of the United States," and
asked Congress to approve the funding by year's end.

The aid package, which U.S. and Mexican officials have been
negotiating since Bush met with Calderon in Merida, Mexico, last
March, would include money for additional helicopters and other
surveillance aircraft, drug-sniffing dogs and telecommunications
equipment. And it would pay for training Mexican police and military
involved in intercepting drug shipments en route to the United States.
(Central American nations would share $50 million of the $550 million
total.)

Thomas Shannon, the State Department's top diplomat for the Western
Hemisphere, said the plan does not call for additional U.S. personnel
working on the ground in Mexico.

He said Mexico already has invested $3 billion of its own money to
fight organized crime and drug trafficking and is making progress.

The aid package, dubbed the "Merida Initiative," comes "at a
particular moment in which organized crime presents a real threat in
Mexico and Central America, and we have leadership in Mexico and
Central American to fight that threat," he said. "The kind of
cooperation we have been able to establish is historic."

Working as partners with Mexico and Central America, the United States
has started a dialogue that will reap long-term benefits, Shannon
said, not just in reducing drug trafficking and the violence that
accompanies it, but in creating a regional security strategy that also
could keep terrorists from attacking the United States and its closest
neighbors.

"I know $550 million is a relatively small amount of money, but from
our point of view, it is a really important initiative," he said.

In addition to the new request, Shannon said the Bush administration
has spent $17 billion to reduce demand for drugs in the United States,
and the United States also has worked with Mexico to improve law
enforcement cooperation in the borderlands and to prevent weapons from
flowing south into Mexico.

U.S. Rep. Gene Green, D-Houston, who recently returned from Mexico
where he and other lawmakers met with their Mexican counterparts to
discuss the plan, said that since Calderon's election last year,
"Mexico has made a much stronger effort to deal with drug trafficking
and they have paid a big price: They have lost a number of their
soldiers and police chiefs."

"If they don't do it, people will be bringing that (violence) across
our border," he said. "We want to do whatever we can to support them
in their effort."

Green said the plan appears to have the support of Democratic
leadership in the House; he noted that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi,
D-Calif., asked him and other lawmakers to make the urgent trip to
Mexico.

But Pelosi and others indicated it could be tough for Bush to get the
overall funding package through Capitol Hill when support for the war
in Iraq is at an all-time low and when Bush has recently vetoed
funding for children's health insurance, a move that angered many Democrats.

Matt Mackowiak, a spokesman for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas,
said the senator "believes it is of the utmost importance that we
secure the United States and protect the Western Hemisphere from
narcotics trafficking and the criminal organizations that finance
their operations."

"These criminals cross our borders and threaten Texans by doing
inestimable damage to our communities," Mackowiak said.

Hutchison recently met with Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan to
discuss the issue, he said.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, also "is inclined to support this
initiative" but wants more information, said his spokesman Brian Walsh.

In Mexico City, U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza called the plan "the single
most most aggressive undertaking ever to combat Mexican drug cartels
and the associated violence they pose to citizens in both the U.S. and
Mexico."

"Mexicans understand the stakes and realize that security is every bit
as much a priority for them as it is for us," Garza said.

Mexico produces marijuana, methamphetamines and heroin for the U.S.
market, and the country has long served as the main trafficking route
for South American cocaine bound for the United States. Violence has
spiraled in recent years amid feuding over prime smuggling routes
between rival gangs, which are better armed than most Mexican police
forces and have long been able to win cooperation from officials and
police through bribery or intimidation.

Since taking office in December, Calderon has made the crackdown on
narcotics traffickers a cornerstone of his administration. He has
ordered thousands of soldiers to take up law enforcement roles in
violence-plagued states and has extradited senior drug traffickers to
the United States to stand trial.

In recent weeks, Mexican soldiers and police captured nearly 15 tons
of cocaine, including nearly 12 tons in the port city of Tampico - the
largest drug bust in the country's history.

"These seizures are cyclical and the greater part are made with
information from the United States," said political analyst Jorge
Chabat, who specializes in Mexican narcotics enforcement and national
security issues. "That doesn't mean we will see such seizures in the
coming years.

"But it means that the Calderon government is determined to prosecute
the drug war," Chabat said. "And that's going to help in the
negotiations with the United States."

Successive Mexican administrations through the past 20 years have
frequently purged their anti-drug police forces and deployed the army
at crucial times to take on drug traffickers. Scores of senior
narcotics gangsters have been killed or jailed. Tons of narcotics have
been seized.

Yet the trade continues to flourish. A senior Mexican justice
department official said over the weekend that U.S. proceeeds from the
drug trade pump some $10 billion a year annually into the Mexican
economy, nearly half as much as the country's oil exports.

Reinert reported from Washington; Althaus from Mexico City.