MEXICO'S CLEAN SWEEP

Corruption Crackdown: Fox's Aides Announce Plan To Overhaul Nation's
Law And Order System.

MEXICO CITY -- Declaring war on crime, impunity and national
insecurity, President-elect Vicente Fox's top aides Monday unveiled a
blueprint to radically transform Mexico's corrupted police and
judiciary and 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.

End of Judicial Police

The prosecutor general also would 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 LFAs Reyes and Sen. Francisco
Molina, the two aides who presented the sweeping plan at a news
conference in Mexico City, 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 most ultimately will need the approval of Mexico's
next Congress. Fox's National Action Party, or PAN, significantly
increased the number of seats it holds in both houses of Congress in
the July 2 election, but lacks a majority.

Analysts said the proposals clearly form the framework of how Fox
plans to make good on post-election pledges to create a new 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.

He said Mexicans also demanded of Fox 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 the PAN who served for eight months as
Mexico's anti-drug czar in 1996, stressed 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.

Anti-Corruption Push

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 Monday 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 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," Molina
said.

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

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."