MEXICAN PLAN SEEKS TO OVERHAUL POLICE, COURTS

MEXICO CITY -- Declaring war on crime, impunity and national insecurity,
President-elect Vicente Fox's top aides unveiled a blueprint yesterday to
radically transform Mexico's corrupt police and judiciary and to
demilitarize its anti-narcotics efforts.

The bold proposal includes a new public security system that would unify
and professionalize Mexico's many police forces and a new federal
prosecutor general's office that would replace the police and judicial
functions of the long-troubled attorney general's office.

The prosecutor general would also oversee a new FBI- style Federal Agency
of Investigations, which would replace the attorney general's ineffective
and discredited Federal Judicial Police.

Former federal prosecutor Jose Luis Reyes and Sen. Francisco Molina, the
two aides who presented the sweeping plan at a news conference, are
expected to be given top law-enforcement posts in the next government after
Fox becomes president Dec. 1.

Both men cautioned that the proposals will be honed and refined in the
coming months, and that most of them will need the approval of Mexico's
next Congress. Fox's National Action Party significantly increased the
number of seats it holds in both houses of Congress in the July 2 election,
but it lacks a majority.

Analysts said the proposals form the framework of how Fox plans to make
good on post-election pledges to create a rule of law in a nation where
insecurity and injustice have reigned for years.

"Mexican society demands of Vicente Fox a true rule of law, not just in
words ... a true rule of law in which public security authorities are
genuine protectors of society and not the source of fear for its citizens,"
Reyes said.

"Mexicans also demanded of Vicente Fox as Mexico's next president that he
once and for all take the hands [of the presidency] out of the prosecution
and application of justice."

Molina, a ranking member of Fox's National Action Party who served for
eight months as Mexico's anti-drug czar in 1996, emphasized that Fox's
image of being untainted by the allegations of drug corruption that have
haunted the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party gives the next
government the ability to transform Mexican law enforcement.

"While in the past we could have thought of a suspicious plot between
politicians and drug dealers, today that will not be the case," said
Molina, who was dismissed as head of Mexico's now-disbanded National
Institute for Combating Drugs when his boss, the country's first opposition
attorney general, was fired for failing to solve two major political
assassinations.

The anti-drug institute was decommissioned when Molina's replacement, Gen.
Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was charged -- and later convicted -- of having
criminal links to Mexico's most powerful drug cartel.

Among the more controversial proposals advanced yesterday were plans to
gradually diminish the role of the army in the war against the wealthy and
powerful Mexican mafias that smuggle some 60 percent of the Colombian
cocaine sold in the United States. After four years, the
multibillion-dollar industry has begun to corrupt even the army, one of the
nation's few professional institutions.

Molina said that relations between Mexico and the United States in the war
against drugs "will continue to strengthen" under Fox.

In Washington, the Justice Department said that Attorney General Janet Reno
had been informed in advance of the proposals, and that she looks forward
to working with Fox's aides to improve bilateral law enforcement efforts.
Justice Department officials declined to discuss details of Fox's proposals.

Molina suggested that the Mexican army had assumed too much of a police
role in the drug fight.

"There are certain areas that definitely have resulted in successes, and
one must recognize it," Molina said, praising the military's role in
eradicating marijuana and opium fields and intercepting cocaine shipments
on land and sea.

But unlike Colombia, where he said drug trafficking is linked to guerrilla
movements trying to destroy the state and, thus, a national security issue,
"in Mexico it is fundamentally a problem of violence linked to criminal
organizations." And that, he said, is best dealt with by civilian police.

"In Mexico, undoubtedly what we have to strengthen is precisely the
credibility of our police forces, fiercely eliminating the corruption that
is there and professionalizing the forces that we have."

The proposals that Reyes and Molina put forward yesterday go far beyond any
of the reform measures tried in the past.

Quashing rumors that Fox plans to "disband" the entire attorney general's
office after years of scandals brought down one top Mexican law-enforcement
official after another, the advisers said their plan will transform it.

In effect, Reyes said the attorney general's office will be replaced by the
office of the Federal Prosecutor General, which will prosecute federal
crimes uncovered by the Federal Agency of Investigation. Reyes said the
agency will "have some characteristics similar but not identical to the FBI."

He emphasized that the new federal prosecutor "will enjoy clear autonomy"
from the president, who will merely propose a candidate for the job. The
Senate will be given the power to confirm or deny the choice. And the upper
house will also have the final say on dismissing a prosecutor general.

"These proposals we have made are ... not decisions adopted from today,"
Reyes said. "And once they have become reform initiatives, they will be
widely discussed, enriched and perfected by the Congress of the Union."