ANTI-DRUG PLAN SPURS DOUBTS

Mexican Experts Fear Corrupt Police Will Hinder Fox's Crusade

MEXICO CITY -- Moving to keep a key campaign promise, President Vicente Fox
has launched a major "crusade" against crime and drug trafficking that he
vows will mark a new era in Mexico's long-troubled war against organized
criminals.

But some experts worry that the country's inefficient and corrupt police
are not up to the task Fox has set for them. Others fear that the
government and the public are not prepared for the violence that a
concerted anti-crime effort could spark.

"Today, we ratify our war without quarter against the pernicious criminal
mafias," said Fox, who announced the initiative while on tour of the
Pacific coast state of Sinaloa, a hotbed of Mexico's drug trade. "It will
perhaps be a bitter struggle, because of the perverse influence of dirty
money. Nevertheless, I'm certain we will fulfill our commitments."

Besides drug trafficking, Fox said, his campaign would target ordinary
street robberies, carjackings and kidnappings, which in recent years have
become a fact of life in many Mexican cities.

Fox said another priority of his crusade will be to try to eradicate the
official corruption that has allowed organized crime to flourish and to
build greater cooperation between federal, state and local law enforcement
agencies. Often in the past, those agencies have been at virtual war with
one another, sometimes in defense of their varied criminal paymasters.

And, perhaps influenced by the easy escape from a maximum-security prison
of a major drug criminal last weekend, Fox pledged that his government
would work to clean up the rampant corruption in Mexico's prison system.

"Delinquency finds a welcome space in societies that condone corruption,"
Fox said in a speech Wednesday that launched the campaign. "Legal norms and
police tools become inoperable in the face of corruption and impunity."

Fox's initiative appears to be leaning more on the armed forces than
federal police.

The recently formed Federal Preventative Police, whose ranks are filled
with former soldiers, will be at the forefront of Fox's crusade. His
attorney general, Rafael Macedo, is a former army general who headed the
service's judicial office.

Campaigns against Mexico's powerful drug gangs are not new. Every Mexican
president of the past several decades has made well-publicized attacks on
the country's entrenched crime syndicates the cornerstones of their public
policies. And each of those efforts has failed.

However, some analysts said that while Fox's crusade may also prove a
failure, it could at the same time unleash a wave of violence that the
police cannot control.

"The "Colombianization" (of Mexico) is possible and Mexico can wind up with
trustworthy elections but ungovernable cities," political scientist Sergio
Aguayo, an expert on Mexican national security matters, wrote in an opinion
column in the newspaper Reforma.

"Colombianization" has become a catchword to describe a country wracked by
a high level of drug-related violence. Since the 1980s, U.S.-promoted
efforts to combat cocaine-smuggling cartels have contributed to a wave of
violence that has penetrated nearly every corner of the Andean country.

"Sometimes, the cure is worse than the disease," said political scientist
Jorge Chabat, who specializes in U.S. and Mexican anti-narcotics policies
at a Mexico City think tank. "The government still has weak institutions,
and the enemy is very powerful."

"There is more political will to confront the problem," Chabat said, "but
with what police? With what tools?"

The Fox government, which ended 71 years of one-party rule when it took
office Dec. 1, has also begun efforts to overhaul the federal attorney
general's office and its 3,000-member judicial police force, which is
charged with drug enforcement.

However, Chabat and other analysts say the changes so far have only
scratched the surface of the problems, the greatest of which is
institutionalized corruption in the police and other security agencies.

That corruption was highlighted again in recent weeks by two examples. In
late December, authorities arrested the attorney general's top
representative to the border state of Chihuahua on charges of trying to
sell a key law enforcement post.

And last weekend, convicted drug gang leader Joaquin Guzman -- called El
Chapo or "Shorty" -- reportedly bribed his way out of a maximum security
prison in Guadalajara, apparently out of concern that the Fox government
would make his confinement more uncomfortable or possibly extradite him to
the United States.

Since Mexico has become a major producer of marijuana and heroin, and a key
transit point of South American cocaine bound for the United States, the
country's smuggling gangs have become powers unto themselves, bribing
police and politicians alike, operating with near total impunity.

"It's a war that doesn't have an end, it's a war without a solution," said
Luis Astorga, a sociologist at Mexico's National Autonomous University who
investigates the narcotics industry. "Perhaps, there are good intentions to
break the links between government and organized crime, but I have the
impression they haven't prepared enough to undertake the task."

Astorga, who has written extensively about the relationship between Mexican
authorities and the narcotics smuggling gangs, warned that cleaning up law
enforcement, while necessary and commendable, could also serve to free
corrupt officials from any political control, making the situation worse at
least in the short run.

"There will be more freedom of action, more autonomy," on the part of
former police officials to work openly with the drug gangs, Astorga said.

That occurred in the mid-1980s when then President Miguel de la Madrid
disbanded Mexico's feared secret police, the Federal Security Directorate,
when its ties to drug traffickers became too obvious.

Several former commanders of the agency quickly emerged as some of Mexico's
leading drug lords.

Using the army in the drug war has been tried before, with decidedly mixed
results.

Former President Ernesto Zedillo put army officers in charge of
anti-narcotics efforts across Mexico in the mid-1990s with little success.

The policy hit bottom in February 1997 with the arrest on corruption
charges of Army Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, whom Zedillo named national
drug czar.

Some analysts say that despite the periodic crackdowns on smugglers by a
succession of Mexican administrations, the Institutional Revolutionary
Party, or PRI, long ago reached an "understanding" with organized crime
gangs that allowed profits to be shared between officials and criminals.

While such an arrangement eroded the authority and legitimacy of the
government, the analysts say, it also permitted Mexico to escape the sort
of drug-related violence that has shaken Colombia and other countries.

Now, as Fox vows to take on the Mexican drug gangs in a frontal assault,
some experts worry about the consequences.

"Through the years, a fabric of corruption, impunity and indifference was
weaved, which facilitated the growth of criminal power," Aguayo wrote in
the Reforma column. "The arrival of the new government signified a change,
an alternation, to the understanding that so benefited the drug traffickers.

"Although we can't blame the Fox government for an inherited corruption, we
hope -- we demand -- that they show us that they have a strategy behind
their action," Aguayo continued.

"If they are going to break the understanding that the government had with
the drug barons, do they know that the answer will be war?"