THE LOST BATTLE AGAINST DRUGS

The death of Pablo Escobar and the imprisonment or death of the main bosses
of the Cali cartel during the past decade have not put an end to drug
trafficking. Never before has so much cocaine from Colombia been entering
the European and North American markets. A new type of heroin from South
America, which is purer and can be smoked or inhaled, is displacing the
Asian variety. "Made in Mexico" amphetamines are invading the raves and
technotheques of Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, Paris, Sao Paulo, and Mexico
City. The numbers are staggering: 1,000 tons of cocaine and 6 tons of heroin
sold in the northern hemisphere every year; $57 billion spent in 1999 by
American consumers alone; $500 billion in dirty money recycled annually in
the world's above-ground economy.

This is the picture that French journalist Jean-Francois Boyer paints in his
book "La bataille perdue contre la drogue' [The Lost Battle Against Drugs],
which is to appear soon in France.

The crackdown, devised in Washington and aimed mainly at the Colombian
kingpins, has had disastrous consequences, Boyer argues. Local gangs have
reorganized into smaller, more flexible units and have had to yield a
growing proportion of the drug trade to new and powerful drug gangs from
Mexico, Chile, Nigeria, and the Dominican Republic.

Even more worrisome, the gangs from the industrialized north that import and
distribute the narcotics on the market are doing more business than all of
the Latin American gangs put together. Drug money is making gangs in the
consuming north richer today than those in the producer south. In addition,
the profits are being reinvested much more in the banking systems of Europe
and the United States than in the systems of the southern hemisphere.

Among other episodes, the book relates how one of the leading banks in the
United States, Citibank, closed its eyes to suspicious movements of funds by
Raul Salinas, the Hank family, the people who financed Amado Carrillo, and
the Chilean drug gangs, and how traffickers from Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana, and
Matamoros, with their political alter egos, have managed to control the
Mexican Government, an objective that their Colombian counterparts never
achieved despite what the world press may say.

The book is the fruit of 15 years of special reports, research, and studies,
and its sole purpose, according to its author, is to reveal to the public at
large that the truth has been hidden from it. It also disputes the widely
accepted theory that drug trafficking can be defeated merely by removing the
heads of criminal organizations in the southern hemisphere.

Jean-Francois Boyer has been living in Mexico since 1993. He was an
international affairs reporter for French television in the 1980s, covering
the Middle East and Latin America, and a correspondent for the French
newspaper Liberation. He is the author of "L'Empire Moon" (1986), a work
that has been translated into Spanish and other languages. "The Lost Battle
Against Drugs" will be in French bookstores on 15 January 2001.

Proceso reproduces below excerpts from the second part of the book, entitled
"The Mexican Drug State and the Alternative Mafias." It is, of course, just
part of the story of what has been happening with drug trafficking in our
country in recent years.

Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo is not just another general in Mexico. He was
commander of two of the country's most important military regions and had
serious support in the ruling party.

Shortly before being placed at the head of the INCD [National Institute for
Combating Drugs], he was seriously considering the possibility of running
for governor of the state of Morelos.

In spite of all this, General Gutierrez Rebollo was arrested by his comrades
in arms on 6 February 1997 and quickly convicted, thanks to an informant
inside the military itself.

The arrest of Mexico's drug czar in 1997 came as a shock to the DEA and the
US Government, which had been gratified by his appointment. It was a
surprise to Mexicans. His apprehension and conviction suggested that the
president had decided to suddenly end 30 years of complicity between the
State and organized crime. The latter years of his term would prove
otherwise.

The attorney general of the republic again revamped his office's
counter-drug services after the general was arrested. He divided the INCD in
two and named jurists from academia as their heads.

Jose Tomas Colsa McGregor, the jeweler who was a buddy of Amado Carrillo,
was nabbed in 1996. Before his final arrest, he was with his boss at several
meetings in the state of Jalisco with politicians and military personnel who
were collaborating with "The Lord of the Heavens." After his arrest he
decided to talk in an effort to get his sentence reduced. A new law on
organized crime in Mexico had just established the category of "protected
witness," inspired by the US system. Colsa McGregor gave investigators more
leads into Amado Carrillo's networks than any other trafficker in the past.
The jeweler emphasized in particular that Amado had excellent relations with
governors who until then had escaped the notice of the PGR [Office of the
Attorney General of the Republic], in Quintana Roo, Yucatan, Campeche, and
Chihuahua...

The Special Prosecutor's Office for Crimes Against Health (FEADS) and the
Special Unit Against Organized Crime (UEDO), the PGR's two new counter-drug
units, were thus able to start piecing together a concise organizational
chart of the Juarez Cartel. Starting in 1998, the UEDO launched a
full-speed-ahead investigation into the southeastern cell of the Juarez
Cartel. Under the command of Samuel Gonzalez, its director, it set up its
headquarters in Cancun in a large home seized from the crime rings of local
kingpin Alcides Magana, a former policeman whom Governor Mario Villanueva
was protecting. Gonzalez's right-hand man in this investigation was a
military officer from army intelligence, Colonel Froylan Cruz. The two men,
backed by a large team from the Public Prosecutor's Office, intelligence
officers, and a detachment of special army forces (GAFES), seized more than
20 homes and offices belonging to the traffickers and several luxury hotels
financed by dirty money. They discovered that the airport in Cancun was
being guarded by a security firm that the drug traffickers had "bought."
They also took apart the system of protection that Alcides Magana had put
together inside the Quintana Roo government, a system revolving around the
local government secretary, the governor's personal secretary, and the
state's police chief...

All that remained was to put the handcuffs on Mario Villanueva Madrid, a man
who had boasted of his friendship with Presidents Salinas and Zedillo.

But the powerlessness of the State vis-a-vis this other drug State was soon
going to be made starkly clear...

As the investigations moved forward in Cancun and the rest of the country,
Samuel Gonzalez and Froylan Cruz became convinced that the southeastern cell
of the Juarez Cartel (and, in fact, the entire organization) had accomplices
in the army. The two men had testimony from several people about the
complicit relations between Amado Carrillo and Generals Mario Arturo Acosta
Chaparro and Francisco Quiros Hermosillo, who were present back in December
1990 at the famous "summit meeting" in Las Mendocinas. This information came
mainly from the confessions of the Guadalajara jeweler, Jose Tomas McGregor;
the former chief of the Federal Judicial Police, Adrian Carrera Fuentes, and
traffickers Michael Batista and Margarita Ruiz Pelayo, who had once been
Raul Salinas Lozano's secretary.

They also learned that the two generals had been questioned personally by
the secretary of defense on at least two occasions, in 1997 and 1998, after
Colsa McGregor had reported them to the PGR. In addition, aside from this
testimony, the two men had accumulated material evidence against General
Quiros. The UEDO actually seized two cars that Amado Carrillo had given the
general as gifts: a white armored Mercedes and a luxury, four-wheel drive
station wagon. The UEDO managed to demonstrate that the general's son had
taken possession of the two vehicles. In spite of this body of evidence,
however, the two generals were still in their posts as 1998 drew to a close.

Within the Army Staff, Arturo Acosta Chaparro and Francisco Quiros
Hermosillo seemed untouchable. The PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party]
and the Mexican State owed them a great deal: they were the ones who had
broken up the guerrillas in Guerrero in the 1970s. Back then they headed the
"White Brigade," a paramilitary unit responsible for hundreds of murders and
atrocities. They both worked closely at the time with the future secretaries
of defense under Presidents Salinas and Zedillo.

Involved in military intelligence from the beginning of their careers, they
represented the army in the Federal Directorate of Security in the 1980s.
Acosta Chaparro also headed the Guerrero State Police, serving one of the
system's most fearsome "dinosaurs," Governor Figueroa. In spite of the
suspicions hanging over their heads, Acosta was still discreetly in charge
of security and counterinsurgency in the Army Staff, while General Quiros,
who until 1998 headed the Army Staff Transportation Directorate, had just
been named director of Armed Forces Social Security. He was among the few
members of the Staff whom Defense Secretary General Cervantes Aguirre
treated as a close friend. Until late 1998, the two officers had not been
disturbed.

The UEDO was on the verge of indicting them, however. The file on them was
almost complete. Quiros's son was interrogated for hours by Samuel
Gonzalez's men and provided new and valuable information. On 10 December
1998, the newspaper Reforma revealed that the two generals had been taken
discreetly to a large home in the residential district of Pedregal in Mexico
City that had been seized from the Juarez Cartel. According to the paper,
they were interrogated there for four weeks by a very small group of people.
The heads of the UEDO so mistrusted their colleagues from the Public
Prosecutor's Office and the police at that time that they preferred to work
far from their official offices, almost clandestinely.

The article angered the defense secretary. The secretariat's services
categorically denied the article. General Cervantes let the nation's
attorney general and the president know that he did not appreciate the
behavior of the UEDO chief, who he said was responsible for leaking
information to the press. The fact is that Samuel Gonzalez confided almost
nothing to Reforma's reporters. It was the DEA that gave them the heart of
their story.

Just a few days after this episode, the head of the UEDO suddenly resigned
and had to travel to Seville, where he had been named consul...No one
doubted that he was paying the price for his rash investigation of the
military officers: he had moved too quickly and too vigorously.

One of his friends later admitted to this author that Samuel Gonzalez told
him before he left for Spain that he had become "a danger to the national
security of Mexico and the United States." The pertinence of this remark
would become starkly clear in the ensuing months.

In January 1999, Mario Villanueva fled before the PGR was able to arrest
him. He admitted to the reporters who found him living in hiding (while all
of the country's policemen were supposedly hunting him down) that he had
been tipped off just before his imminent arrest.

On 28 July 1999, in the thick of the election campaign, the PGR discreetly
forwarded the Acosta Chaparro/Quiros Hermosillo file to General Rafael
Macedo de la Concha, the judge advocate general. This information was not
reported to the press. A year later, on 30 August 2000, two months after the
presidential election in which opposition candidate Vicente Fox defeated PRI
candidate Francisco Labastida, a judge in the First Military Region indicted
them. The next day they were imprisoned in Military Camp Number One in the
capital. In his last message to the country on 1 September, however,
President Ernesto Zedillo was careful not to mention corruption in
government and paid emphatic homage to the Armed Forces.

Why didn't the PGR send the case file to the military justice system in
early 1999 and why did General Macedo de la Concha wait so long to indict
the two "narco-officers"?

The military authorities have not answered the first question. As for the
second, the judge advocate general intimated that it took the investigators
a long time to gather evidence of the two officers' guilt and cited the
argument that his services had to interrogate new traffickers who were
turning State's evidence.

This is an unconvincing explanation. The witness list shown to the press to
justify the indictment of the two generals offered no surprises. It consists
of well known figures who had fallen into the hands of the police over the
past three years and more: jeweler Jose Tomas Colsa McGregor, Jose Jaime
Olvera Olvera (Amado Carrillo's driver), Adrian Carrera Fuentes (the head of
the Federal Judicial Police in the days of Mario Ruiz Massieu), Carlos Colin
Padilla (Amado's financier), Michael Batista (a trafficker whose job it was
to bribe politicians), etc. There were almost 20 on the list. Macedo said
that the military courts had to conduct new interrogations of these
individuals in order to become convinced of the case. Yet we know that all
of these witnesses had already been thoroughly interrogated by the UEDO
under Samuel Gonzalez. They had "spilled the beans" long ago. We are talking
in particular here about Michael Batista, whom the US courts sent back to
Mexico in the knowledge that he could furnish fresh evidence against the
drug State (the UEDO has been very tight-lipped about his return to Mexico
and his interrogations), and Adrian Carrera Fuentes, who was the first to
provide details about the military officers. Without their testimony for the
prosecution, Samuel Gonzalez would not have taken the risk of challenging
the generals. Let us not lose sight of the fact that the UEDO was on the
verge of indicting the generals when Samuel Gonzalez and Froylan Cruz were
removed from their posts. It is not very plausible either that General
Macedo would have had to wait for the outcome of the presidential election
to become convinced of the generals' guilt.

Indeed, the names of Acosta Chaparro and Quiros Hemosillo have been
mentioned for quite some time in military intelligence reports (probably
since the DEA and FBI first made charges against the former Guerrero police
chief in 1993 in the wake of testimony from Margarita Pelayo, Raul Salinas
Lozano's former secretary).

The army also knew since 1997 that the two generals were meeting with The
Lord of the Heavens at the Jalisco home of a former PR leader, the son of a
former defense secretary. Finally, Froylan Cruz, Samuel Gonzalez's
right-hand man in 1997 and 1998, was in the military, and all of the UEDO's
investigations were also based on military intelligence case files. Froylan
Cruz regularly kept his colleagues up to date on the progress of his
investigations.

The fact is that the Defense Secretariat had for several years been
protecting two officers whom it knew to be guilty. It then asked the Office
of President of the Republic to slow the pace of the investigations so that
the Armed Forces could prepare to cope with a bigger scandal.

In addition to the two famous generals, some 15 superior officers had been
in Samuel Gonzalez's and Froylan Cruz's crosshairs since 1997. By turning
the case file over to the judge advocate general, the president took the PGR
and civilian authorities out of the limelight in the case of the
narco-generals. This reduced the danger that any future attorney general
from the opposition might restart the diabolical machinery of the judicial
system some day. Merely by sacrificing a few scapegoats the Army Staff would
finally be able to shelve the case ...

The belated indictment of Generals Acosta and Quiros, whom the Army Staff
had publicly defended two years before, prompts us to pose another question:
Are the charges that President Zedillo and his circle were in collusion with
drug trafficking during the final years of the administration, charges that
the PGR quickly dismissed, really as groundless as the government says?

>From his jail cell, General Gutierrez Rebollo has said that he was arrested
because he had uncovered complicity with drug traffickers in the president's
family. The low ethical standing of this individual and, above all, the
circumstances under which he leveled these attacks enabled the Office of
President to easily brush aside the charges. It had more of a problem
squelching the rumors threatening Ernesto Zedillo's closest aide, Jose
Liebano Saenz, his private secretary. Liebano, who in practice was his
right-hand man, shared all secrets and was part of all difficult
negotiations. Discreet, very tactful, intelligent, and likeable, he was held
in wide esteem. He was, successively, the coordinator of Luis Donaldo
Colosio's and Ernesto Zedillo's election campaigns. The fact that the second
presidential candidate kept the manager of his predecessor's campaign so
close to him does not fit in with Mexican tradition. It demands a very
convincing explanation. Liebano Saenz, a close friend of the assassinated
candidate, knew exactly what sort of relationship his former boss and friend
had with the drug State. We will not know for some time whether it was
marked by complicity with or an overt struggle against it.

Shortly after General Gutierrez Rebollo was arrested, the PGR discovered
some notes that he had taken during the interrogation of a pilot who worked
for Amado Carrillo. The notes indicate that the flyer once heard The Lord of
the Heavens speak of a home that the cartel had given Liebano Saenz. The
president himself asked the PGR to investigate discreetly. Doubts mounted
when the drug police gathered additional testimony from individuals linked
to drug trafficking or money laundering.

A jailed drug kingpin said that he had given Liebano Saenz a fleet of
vehicles for the 1994 presidential campaign. A businessman who was a
childhood friend of the president's private secretary said that he had
stopped seeing him after discovering that the drug police had him in their
sights. A driver of Amados's heard The Lord of the Heavens express delight
over the pact he had made with the president's confidant, with the backing
of 60 heads of Mexican gangs, for the modest sum of $60 million. Finally,
the crooked attorney general of a Mexican state bordering the United States,
who was suspected of money laundering, confided to an undercover agent of
the US Customs Service that the president's secretary might be interested in
recycling some of his income.

On 5 February 1999, the PGR officially closed the file after a two-year
investigation. None of the accusations could be taken seriously, it said. No
trace could be found of the fleet of vehicles that the PRI had supposedly
inherited. All of the testimony was "hearsay," it claimed. The psychological
tests administered to the witnesses proved that at least one of them was
lying. The PGR did not say which one and provided no details about the
content of the confessions. In a bid to calm the uproar caused by the
affair, it stressed the fact that Liebano Saenz himself had asked for an
investigation into the matter so that he could be cleared of any suspicion.

What the attorney general of the republic did not say at the time was that
the president's private secretary was interrogated for seven hours by the
directors of the UEDO and the FEADS, the two units in charge of the battle
against drugs. That is a long time for a meeting that should have been no
more than a formality, since the police cannot hold a major figure for that
long unless it has a solid case. The substance of the interrogation has been
kept completely confidential.

On 2 June 1999, The New York Times published a lengthy front-page article
that gave renewed life to the scandal. Its author, Tim Golden, was at the
time the journalist with the best connections in counter-drug circles in the
United States and Mexico. For years he spent time with the attorney general
of the republic and his aides, Mariano Herran Salvatti and Samuel Gonzalez
Ruiz. He was, of course, in constant contact with the DEA.

In his article Tim Golden described in detail the progress of the DEA
investigations, reported on the substance of the testimony, and revealed
that Janet Reno, the US attormey general, and the DEA did not entirely share
the Mexican Government's conclusions about the case. What is more, they told
the Mexican Government as much and were pleased when President Zedillo did
not appoint his private secretary to the post of interior secretary, as they
had feared he would.

Los Pinos and the PGR had nothing to say about the substance of the article.
They did not deny the information that Golden presented. Mexico's foreign
relations secretary merely accused "certain sectors" of trying to sabotage
Mexican-US relations.

The "shelving" of the Liebano Saenz case prompts a multitude of questions.
Jorge Madrazo, the attorney general of the republic, told Tim Golden in
September 1998 that he regarded one of the witnesses accusing the
president's secretary as among the PGR's best informants. In another
interview six months later, after the Saenz case had been closed, he
described the same informant as "a guy with psychiatric problems." "His
information is totally false," he told Golden at that point. Not much
bothered by the contradiction, a year later the PGR again extracted from its
files the testimony of the same informant, Jose Jaime Olvera Olvera, Amado
Carrillo's former driver, to try and shed some light on the odd relationship
that a famous TV announcer whom traffickers had murdered had developed with
The Lord of the Heavens. And the Judge Advocate General's Office used Olvera
as one of its main witnesses against Generals Acosta and Quiros.

Another question: Did the police investigate the presidential adviser's
past? In 1989 and 1990, Jose Liebano Saenz was the director of operations at
Mexico's Customs Service. Back then, the general manager of Customs was
Enrique Guinea, a man whom the counter-drug chief who is still guiding us
through the labyrinth of the Mexican drug State described as the "dark side
of Raul Salinas de Gortari, the man who did his dirty work." Our expert had
no doubt that Guinea played a decisive role in protecting the Gulf cartel.
Another coincidence: a fellow named Arturo Ruiz worked for the Mexican
Customs Service during those years; this is the same money launderer that
the US Customs Service nabbed and who accused Liebano Saenz of wanting to
recycle his ill-gotten gains.

The suspicions about the regime undoubtedly influenced the outcome of the
presidential election on 2 July 2000...The candidate whom the PRI chose was
himself unable to avoid accusations.