DRUG-WAR BOOK GETS NOTICE

MEXICO CITY -- Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda put on his academic's hat
this week to attend the release by journalist Jean-Francois Boyer of a new
book, "The Lost War Against Drugs: Narcodependency in Today's World."

It was more attention than most new books get in Mexico.

The Wednesday release at the French Institute for Latin America featured a
debate on the book's major points by well-known Mexican researchers and
journalists, among them Boyer; Julio Hernandez Lopez, columnist for the
left-leaning daily La Jornada; Raymundo Riva Palacio, editor of the weekly
Milenio magazine; and Luis Astorga, social studies researcher at National
Autonomous University of Mexico.

But the star was the Sorbonne-educated Castaneda, the academic who managed
to move beyond the ivory tower to the Mexican halls of power to shape
President Vicente Fox's foreign policy.

Published by Grijalbo Mondadori, Boyer's book states that, after the demise
of large cartels such as Cali and Medellin, smaller organizations emerged
in several countries.

Two of these regional organizations, the rival Tijuana and Juarez cartels,
turned Mexico into a narco-state by making deals with politicians as early
as 1985, Boyer says. In return for investing their illegal gains in
Mexico, whose coffers were empty thanks to corruption and external debt,
then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari's government agreed to turn a
blind eye to traffickers' activities. Major architects of the deal, Boyer
says, were Salinas' father and brother, who is in jail now for money
laundering, and one of his presidential aides.

That initial pact has been replaced by more recent agreements, Boyer writes.

Boyer doesn't limit his accusations to members of the long-ruling
Institutional Revolutionary Party, which lost the presidency to Fox and his
National Action Party (PAN) last year. He identifies Ernesto Ruffo Appel,
Fox's border czar, as a "narco-governor" in the pocket of traffickers
during a tenure as governor of Baja California Norte. Diego Fernandez de
Cevallos, who headed the PAN during the 1994 elections, is also on Boyer's
list as a lawyer for known money launderers.

On Wednesday, Castaneda called Boyer's book one of the most important works
on the drug war.

"This book tells what I would call a story of new wine in old bottles," he
said. "Inter-national narcotics trafficking is today one of the most
lucrative enterprises in the world, grossing between $150 billion and $400
billion a year."

The book's most important lessons, according to Castaneda, are that
interdiction policies have not led to scarcer and more expensive drugs, but
instead have caused explosive production of better-quality drugs; that drug
organizations have used governments and mirrored big business in developing
networks, taking advantage of a communications revolution that has made
borders porous; and that the destruction of large cartels simply gave rise
to smaller, more flexible groups that dwarfed the profits of larger
predecessors.

Boyer says it remains to be seen whether the Fox government will make
significant strides against the cartels.

But he points to two recent "symbolic decisions" as promising signs: to
allow extradition of accused drug dealers sought by the U.S. government and
to allow the Mexican Attorney General's Office to reopen an investigation
into alleged money laundering by the Salinas family.