MEXICO CALLS INS-LED IMMIGRANT ROUNDUP A SURPRISE U.S.

Announcement Creates Confusion Over Arrest Of 5,000 From Central America

MEXICO CITY - When the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service
announced this week a multinational operation that nabbed about 5,000
Central American immigrants in Mexico, the country's president,
foreign minister and interior minister said it was all a surprise to
them.

"We don't understand why that information was released," Mexico's
Interior Minister Santiago Creel, who oversees the Mexican
Immigration Institute, said in an interview. "It does not match
reality. We expect a retraction from the institute that issued the
information, today, or tomorrow."

That retraction will not be forthcoming, U.S. officials in Washington
said Friday, remaining steadfast in their version of events.

The confusion had leaders in both capitals perplexed, yet insisting
that their version of events is the correct one.

But late Friday, another high-ranking Mexican official offered an
explanation that suggested the two countries have to work harder at
keeping open lines of communication on significant law enforcement
operations.

Mexican National Security Adviser Adolfo Aguilar Zinser said U.S.
officials may have seen the immigration dragnet as a single, specific
sweep, while Mexicans simply saw it as routine cooperation in the
battle against smugglers of undocumented immigrants.

"For [the United States] it was called Operation Crossroads, that's
their bureaucratic term," Mr. Zinser said in an interview. "For us it
was simply part of an ongoing agreement to share intelligence, so if
you ask any Mexican official, 'Do you know anything about Operation
Crossroads?' they will have no idea of what you're talking about.
This, I think, explains the confusion."

The dispute began earlier in the week when the INS in Washington
announced that law enforcement agencies in the United States, Canada
and 12 Latin American and Caribbean countries worked jointly to
arrest nearly 8,000 undocumented immigrants from 39 countries.

Officials of the Mexican Migration Institute said those numbers
aren't anything special, since by their own estimates they nab about
15,000 Central American immigrants each month.

U.S. officials said the INS served as the overall coordinator of
Operation Crossroads International, providing assistance to 13
participating countries that varied according to the needs and
desires of each country. The INS called the effort, in which most of
the arrests were made along the southern Mexico-Guatemala border, the
largest anti-smuggling operation in the Western hemisphere.

"In the case of Mexico, INS shared information on smuggling routes
and activities with the Mexican Federal Preventive Police and the
Mexican Institute of Migration to assist Mexican authorities in
carrying out their own nation's ongoing anti-smuggling initiatives to
enforce Mexico's immigration laws," INS spokesman Greg Gagne said
after the U.S. version was challenged.

"INS agents were not directly involved in Mexico's on-the-ground
operations," Mr. Gagne added. "We tailored our support according to
the needs of each country."

In announcing the results of the operation at a Washington news
conference earlier in the week, INS officials praised Mexican
officials for their cooperation during the 16-day sting. They said it
marked a significant departure from existing procedures and a sign of
the good relations between the administrations of President Bush and
President Vicente Fox.

Yet Mr. Fox said he was caught by surprise when he saw the report of
the operation in the newspapers, and that he promptly sent an aide to
investigate.

The aide returned with a pile of newspaper clippings trumpeting the
INS operation, he said, to which he remarked: "We need to get to the
bottom of this."

Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda said, "Either I didn't hear about
it, or wasn't told about, which is highly unlikely, or none of this
ever happened."

"The only thing we ask for is for an explanation, for a clarification
of what happened," Mr. Creel said. "Obviously when bad information
distorts reality it affects the institutions, but it has not created
an insurmountable obstacle."

"We still stand by the scope of our statement," said Mr. Gagne of the INS.

Staff writer Michelle Mittelstadt in Washington contributed to this report.