A LACK OF POLITICAL WILL

The United States, Too, Could Do Much More To Break The Arellano Felix Cartel

The federal government has no plan for bringing down the AFO (drug cartel)
and capturing the Arellanos," says Charles G. La Bella, with an emphasis
born of frustration.

Were it otherwise, at least through last year, La Bella would have known.

From December 1993 through June 1998, he was First Assistant United States
Attorney in San Diego, chief of the office's criminal division and the
principal deputy to U.S. Attorney Alan Bersin, the Justice Department's
designated chief law enforcement officer on the Southwest Border.

When Bersin left in June 1998 to become superintendent of the San Diego
Unified School District, La Bella succeeded him. La Bella held that post
until May 1999, when he resigned and accepted a private-sector job.

A tough-minded prosecutor with a distinguished record, La Bella won
widespread respect for his aggressive approach on drug trafficking and
pursuing the Arellano Felix principals. One participant who attended
closed-door meetings with La Bella said he didn't shrink from telling
corrupt Mexican officials to their faces that he couldn't trust them enough
to share sensitive intelligence information on the Arellanos.

La Bella also had specific ideas on how Benjamin and Ramon Arellano and
other cartel principals might be brought to justice.

"You would need a team of Mexican 'untouchables' kept on this side of the
border, secretly stationed at a military base. U.S. intelligence would
locate one or more of the Arellano brothers. The Mexican team would then
board the helicopters at the base, fly to the location, surround it and
arrest them.

"People say this could never be done, but it could be done. Leaving the
Mexican team in Mexico would probably guarantee failure because they would
be compromised."

This bold idea apparently went nowhere among Washington's cautious bureaucrats.

"What is lacking," La Bella argues, "is the political will, in Washington
and certainly in Mexico City, to get this job done. We could get these guys
if we really wanted to, and were really trying to."

La Bella's stinging critique goes beyond indicting Washington and Mexico
City for an absence of political will. What is also missing, he contends,
is a proper strategy for attacking the Arellanos and Mexico's other drug
cartels.

"This is not a criticism of (U.S.) law enforcement," La Bella stresses.
"They are doing a terrific job with the tools they have. They just need
more tools."

Alan Bersin emphatically agrees. Two years removed from his former job as
U.S. Attorney, Bersin has concluded that Washington needs a far broader
strategy for taking down the Arellanos and for neutralizing the serious
threat posed by Mexico's drug cartels.

"Using the domestic law enforcement model to attack this problem isn't
working. It's much more than a law enforcement problem alone. When you
consider what drug trafficking and the drug cartels are doing, to Mexico
and the United States, this is a foreign policy problem and a national
security problem in addition to a law enforcement problem," Bersin says.

"It can't be effectively attacked until we start treating it for what it is
- -- a threat to Mexico's national security and, partly because of that and
partly because of what drugs do to our own society, a threat to our
national security."

La Bella says that what is lacking in American drug policy "is a
comprehensive plan to bring the Arellanos to justice. And I think that plan
must of necessity have several components."

"Law enforcement is clearly one component, and a significant component. But
equally significant are the intelligence agencies. There has to be an
intelligence component. There has to be a political component. There has to
be an economic component. There has to be a diplomatic component.

"There has to be a multi-discipline approach to this problem. And it is not
just about this organization (the Arellano cartel). There are probably
three or four other drug organizations in Mexico that need this same
attention," La Bella says.

The Bersin-La Bella record against the Arellanos demonstrates the
limitations of having to rely almost exclusively on domestic law
enforcement mechanisms to counter a complex threat based in a foreign
country. Bersin's prosecutors won some notable victories against the
Arellano cartel. But as Bersin and La Bella readily acknowledge, they never
came close to toppling the cartel or its principal leaders.

Bersin targeted mostly those Arellano syndicate members and associates his
prosecutors could reach on this side of the border. Bersin's team indicted,
tried and convicted nearly a dozen cartel members. These included several
cartel assassins recruited from the Logan 30s street gang in San Diego.
Bersin's prosecutors also convicted several of the border-crossing
"narco-juniors," sons of wealthy Tijuana families who worked for the
Arellano syndicate.

Perhaps Bersin's biggest victory against the cartel was his indictment and
provisional arrest warrant against Arturo Paez Martinez in 1997. Paez was
the most important narco-junior and had emerged as a key Arellano
lieutenant. He was indicted by a federal grand jury on cocaine trafficking
charges. Law enforcement sources describe the evidence in the Paez case as
overwhelming.

It was the resulting pressure from U.S. authorities that prompted Mexican
officials to arrest Paez in Tijuana in November 1997, initially on a charge
of illegally possessing a firearm. The U.S. Justice Department formally
requested Paez'extradition to stand trial on the drug charges in the United
States. The extradition request has dragged through Mexico's murky judicial
system for three years and is now before the Mexican supreme court.

U.S. law enforcement authorities consider Mexico's final answer on the
extradition request for Paez a litmus test of Mexico's cooperation in
combatting the binational drug trade. They know that extradition to the
United States is every Mexican drug trafficker's greatest legal fear. Tough
drug laws vigorously enforced by a criminal justice system the traffickers
cannot buy would be a potent antidote to the Arellanos, if ever it can be
applied.

Losing by default

Despite these initial successes, and the more recent arrests in Mexico of
"Chuy" Labra and Ismael Higuera, U.S. and Mexican law enforcement appear
hardly closer today than they ever were to apprehending the Arellanos
themselves and dismantling their cartel.

Not coincidentally, the gap between the comprehensive strategy Bersin and
La Bella advocate and the federal government's actual practice through much
of the 1990s is a yawning chasm.

On the decisive question of political will at the government's highest
levels, there is scant evidence that it exists in the Clinton White House.
President Clinton rarely mentions the drug-trafficking problem or the
federal government' s supposed war on drugs. Clearly, these are not
political issues of any urgency for the president and his chief advisers.

Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey's Office of National Drug Control Policy,
nominally a White House adjunct, is a forceful anti-drug lobby, but also an
advocate with little actual authority. McCaffrey himself is energetic,
articulate and personally committed to reducing both the demand for drugs
and their supply. What he lacks is real political support, and thus
Washington clout, from a Clinton administration plainly unenthusiastic and
seemingly even uninterested in the drug war.

Thomas A. Constantine, a Clinton appointee, headed the Drug Enforcement
Administration, the federal government's principal agency in combatting
narcotics, for five and a half years. In all that time, Constantine never
once was called to meet with the president on the drug issue.

With rare exceptions, the federal government's purported war on drugs drew
comparably blank stares through the 1990s at the State Department, which
had other priorities regarding Mexico. Always seen as much more pressing,
these included the North American Free Trade Agreement, the peso bailout,
illegal immigration and keeping political and economic reform in volatile
Mexico moving forward.

Law enforcement sources tend to rate Attorney General Janet Reno as merely
dutiful on narcotics issues but not an assertive leader.

In 1989, then-President George Bush assailed the deadly cocaine trade in
his inaugural address and vowed that "this scourge will stop." To that end,
Bush dramatically increased federal spending on drug interdiction and
ordered the Defense Department to use the American military against drug
trafficking.

Four years later, the newly elected Clinton appeared almost to reverse
course on drugs.

Clinton promptly cut his own drug czar's budget and staff by 75 percent. He
slashed drug-interdiction funding by almost half in just three years. In
addition, Clinton stood by silently as a shrinking American military found
steadily fewer surplus assets to aid in interdicting drugs.

A report this January by Congress' nonpartisan General Accounting Office
detailed the jarring extent of the Pentagon's retreat from the drug war:

"Since 1992, DOD's level of support to counter drug-trafficking in Central
and South America and the Caribbean has significantly declined," the report
said.

"For example, the number of flight hours devoted to counter-drug missions
declined 68 percent from 1992 through 1999. Likewise, the number of ship
days fell 62 percent over the same period. In fiscal year 1999, U.S.
Southern Command reported that DOD was unable to meet 57 percent of the
command' s requests for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance
flights to support its detection and monitoring responsibilities."

The report detailed drastic drops in flying hours on drug-surveillance and
interdiction flights for key types of military aircraft over the 1992-99
period: 64 percent fewer flying hours for Navy P-3Cs, 57 percent fewer
hours for Navy E-2s, 80 percent fewer for Air Force E-3s, and a 78-percent
decline in Navy SH2F helicopter flight time on drug missions.

The report went on to note that these sharp declines in support had
seriously weakened efforts to interdict and reduce the flow of narcotics
into the United States.

"Coverage in key drug-trafficking routes to the United States is lower,
leaving gaps in detection areas ...... In the Eastern Pacific, a key threat
area, DOD was unable to sustain its support in 1997 and 1998 to a
successful interdiction operation due to a lack of available assets," the
report noted.

McCaffrey defends the Pentagon. He argues that a U.S. military reduced by
more than a third since 1990, even as its overseas deployments multiplied,
lacks the resources to sustain its previous drug-war efforts. He has a
point. But so do those who wonder why the president hasn't at least tried
to do something about it.

An administration fully engaged in the drug war would presumably use
America's matchless intelligence assets to help the drug fighters. The
United States still spends an estimated $30 billion a year (the precise
figure is classified) to operate by far the world's most sophisticated
information-gathering capabilities. Yet, these seem rarely to be employed
against, for example, the Arellanos.

"It is inconceivable to me that the National Security Agency and the
Central Intelligence Agency could not identify where Ramon Arellano is
sitting right now," says a former senior Justice Department official.

"Why aren't we using this technology to detect (drug) loads coming across
the border? Why aren't we using (electronic) intercepts? If we could bug
(the late Soviet leader) Brezhnev's limousine during the Cold War, you
could certainly bug the cartel's telephones to figure out when the drug
loads are coming."

But interviews with numerous law enforcement officials suggest that the
United States'national intelligence agencies, in fact, contribute only
marginally to the drug-war effort.

"It is so filtered, and so late. We'll learn that something was happening
over here, say, eight or nine days ago. But now it's too late. It's over,
the bad guys are gone," recalls Vincent DelaMontaigne, the FBI agent who
headed law enforcement's multi-agency Arellano Task Force from 1997 to 1999.

The Clinton administration's marked lack of enthusiasm for a drug war it
apparently sees as a political loser isn't lost on those struggling to hold
the line along the Southwest border.

The U.S. Customs Service's William Cecil, who directs air and marine
interdiction operations from a headquarters at North Island Naval Air
Station, is blunt on the subject.

"There has never been any emphasis from the Clinton administration on the
drug war," Cecil says.

"I don't think the support is there. In the last couple of years, we've
gotten far more support from the Hill (Congress) than we have from the
administration. Whatever the reason, there has not been the effort to make
what needs to happen, happen."

Alan Bersin's conclusions focus on the immensely damaging consequences for
the Tijuana-San Diego region of allowing the Arellano drug cartel to
continue operating unchecked.

"For our region, the importance of dealing with the Arellanos remains
paramount. You cannot begin to conceive of a binational region here that
will take advantage of all the elements that are coming into play while
leaving the mafia, in effect, in control of so much of Tijuana's official life.

"That is a major obstacle to what I understand and perceive to be a very
important part of San Diego's future, which is designing, evolving and
nurturing a relationship with Tijuana and Baja California that benefits San
Diego as well as the border."