COPS SAID KEEPING DRUG RUNNER FREE

Outgoing U.S. drug policy director Gen. Barry McCaffrey said police
corruption is helping keep drug traffickers out of jail in Mexico, but
expressed confidence the country's new government is up to the task of
combating narcotics.

McCaffrey, who arrived in Mexico Thursday to attend President-elect Vicente
Fox's inauguration, also said the United States must do more to help Mexico
overcome drug and immigration problems.

He cited the case of the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix brothers, Mexico's
most wanted traffickers, who have managed to escape arrest for the past
five years.

"The corruption of state-level and local police, in particular, is so
intense, these people are so well armed and dangerous that it's very
difficult to get at them,'' McCaffrey said in a telephone interview prior
to his arrival in Mexico.

But he said federal police have made good-faith efforts to capture the
brothers, who he said run "one of the most dangerous criminal organizations
on the face of the earth. Literally hundreds of Mexicans get murdered by
these people on an annual basis.''

McCaffrey said he was encouraged by the law enforcement officials Fox has
chosen, calling them "a pretty solid team, pragmatist, bright as can be.''

Fox has said he wants to gradually decrease the army's large role in law
enforcement, but McCaffrey said he believes the Mexican military should
continue to patrol for drug shipments and eradicate drug crops.

"It's hard to imagine that Mr. Fox will want to walk away from the enormous
good being done by the Mexican armed forces,'' McCaffrey said.

He brushed aside a local newspaper report that an alleged money launderer
may have used an airplane owned by Fox's proposed federal police chief,
Alejandro Gertz, to fly to the United States.

"You never know what to make of this stuff,'' McCaffrey said, noting that
honest officials are sometimes linked to such reports. "As you vet new
names, if the druggies are worried about the guy, when the name comes up,
they kick up an objection.''

McCaffrey has been burned in the past: He praised former Gen. Jesus
Gutierrez Rebollo when he was appointed Mexico's drug czar in late 1996. A
few weeks later, Gutierrez Rebollo was jailed for taking bribes from a
Mexican drug cartel.

McCaffrey said traffickers appear to have come up with a new route to the
U.S. market, flying small planes below radar cover to land at properties
bought by Mexican traffickers inside the United States.

But Mexico is suffering as much or more from the drug trade. "Their drug
use rates are skyrocketing among their own domestic population, both in
Mexico City and along the border,'' he said, saying more must be done to
stop U.S. weapons and drug profits flowing south.

McCaffrey, who will leave his post in January to teach at West Point and
write a book about the drug war, also said the United States should address
the wider aspects of relations with Mexico.

"We need to come up with a political way for the United States to have the
labor it so desperately needs move across that border legally, in buses
with minimum wage, with protection, with health care, minimal standards of
housing,'' McCaffrey said.

"We ought to be ashamed on both sides of the border that we accept food on
our plates given us to by Mexican labor, and we haven't come up with a way
to ensure they're sleeping on cots and have sanitation.''