MEXICO IMPRISONS TWO GENERALS, LONGTIME SUSPECTS IN DRUG CASES

MEXICO CITY, Sept. 1 -- Two generals long suspected of corruption have
been arrested and imprisoned by the military on charges of
collaborating with the Juarez drug cartel, prosecutors said today. The
suspects are Gen. Francisco Quiroz Hermosillo, who retired from the
army in July, and Brig. Gen. Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro, a
counterinsurgency expert with a reputation for repression who is on
active duty.

Their arrests on charges of drug trafficking and bribery on Thursday,
on the eve of President Ernesto Zedillo's final State of the Union
Address, were an additional blow to the reputation of the Mexican armed
forces in their role as a narcotics enforcer.

President-elect Vicente Fox Quesada, who takes office on Dec. 1, has
promised to withdraw the military from the drug war after a decade in
which the drug barons bought off the armed forces as much as the
military fought the traffickers. The Constitution bars the military
from any role other than national defense.

The corruption at the highest levels became painfully apparent in 1997,
when Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, appointed by President Zedillo as
the first military figure to be the government's drug czar, was
arrested on charges that he had been paid off by Amado Carrillo
Fuentes, leader of the Juarez cartel.

Though his American counterpart, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, director of
the Office of National Drug Control Policy, had called General
Gutierrez Rebollo "a man with a reputation for impeccable integrity"
before his arrest, events proved otherwise. The general is now serving
a 71-year prison sentence.

One of the arrested officers, General Acosta Chaparro, has long been
identified by Mexican human-rights organizations as involved in the
repression and torture of leftists in the state of Guerrero. Army and
police forces in Guerrero have spent years battling a small armed
insurgency and a larger civilian movement that is seeking land rights
and political freedom. The general has been a leader in
counterinsurgency operations in the mountains and valleys there for
years, according to several authoritative military histories.

In 1996, Virgilia Galeana Garcia, a human rights advocate, gave
eyewitness testimony that placed General Acosta Chaparro at the scene
of one of Mexico's worst massacres in recent years.

In the killings, which were videotaped, the state police ambushed, shot
and killed 17 rural advocates at a roadblock in Aguas Blancas, not far
from Acapulco, in June 1995. General Acosta Chaparro denied involvement
in the massacre.

General Quiroz Hermosillo retired in July as a director of Army health
services. He had previously held high rank in the intelligence and
military transport directorates.

The generals were implicated by the testimony of at least three
witnesses who are under government protection, according to military
prosecutors in charge of combating corruption in the armed forces. The
prosecutors said the witnesses tied the generals to the Juarez drug
cartel organized by Mr. Carrillo Fuentes, who died in 1997.

The cartel remains a powerful drug-trafficking group, Mexican and
United States counternarcotics officials said.

Prosecutors did not specify when the witnesses first implicated the
generals. But both men have apparently been under suspicion for years.

General Acosta Chaparro's name is in the files of investigators from
the United States and Switzerland who have spent years trying to trace
connections between drug barons and the Mexican political and military
elite, according to court records. Published Mexican documents dating
from 1997 name him as being suspected of corruption.

Other documents, from the attorney general's office and dating from
1998, name General Quiroz Hermosillo as a suspect. One military
prosecutor, Rafael Macedo de la Concha, said both generals had been the
targets of investigations since at least July 1999.