FOX OUTLINES BIG CHANGES TO COMBAT GRAFT, DRUGS

He's Aiming To Overhaul Law-Enforcement System

MEXICO CITY - Minutes after Mexicans learned they had elected Vicente Fox
Quesada as president, they watched him glare into the cameras in his first
nationally broadcast interview and issue a sober warning to drug traffickers.

"To the criminals, those who commit violence and live outside the law, they
should know the one thing we don't want in Mexico is criminality, violence,
drug trafficking, organized crime," Fox said Sunday evening after Mexico's
presidential balloting. "To them I say, this is the last call."

In the days since, Fox has vowed that fighting organized crime will be one
of his priorities, and he has outlined plans to overhaul Mexico's federal
law enforcement institutions.

His proposals would require several constitutional amendments, and, experts
said, they suggest that he intends to bring the power of the presidency to
bear in the fight against crime more than his recent predecessors.

Fox has pledged to tear down much of the tottering edifice of corrupt
police forces and special prosecutors' offices that constitute Mexico's
federal law enforcement system. Command of various parts of this
bureaucracy is splintered among the attorney general, the Interior Ministry
and the armed forces.

The president-elect is not the first Mexican leader to announce grand plans
for ending corruption, but none of the others have offered plans quite this
ambitious, the experts said.

"Fox's plans have to be sweeping because the process of rot and
decomposition has advanced so far," said Ernesto Lopez Portillo, a
consultant to the Mexican Senate and one of the authors of a 1994 study of
Mexico's criminal justice system.

Historians say the corruption of the police and prosecutors traces back at
least to the 19th century. But in recent decades, graft has worsened as
control over the police has been shifted, from scandal to scandal, between
the Interior Ministry and the Attorney General's Office.

Under Fox's proposals, the attorney general, who commands the federal
police and oversees prosecutors, would be eliminated completely, and the
interior minister would be stripped of police functions, the experts said.

Control of the federal police would pass to a new cabinet-level Department
of Public Security, and the work of thousands of federal prosecutors would
be administered by a new, as-yet-unnamed agency.

The changes are aimed at reducing the police corruption that grew
dangerously in the 1970s, when Mexico faced several small guerrilla
insurgencies.

Successive presidents gave the federal police, especially an elite corps
known as the Federal Security Directorate, license to wipe out the
subversives using whatever means necessary.

By the early 1980s, the guerrillas had been suppressed. But the Security
Directorate, Mexico's political police, had acquired an array of extralegal
skills they began to use in the service of drug traffickers.

After agents of the Security Directorate, which was controlled by the
Interior Ministry, were discovered to be involved in the 1985 murder of a
U.S. drug agent, that agency was abolished.

President Carlos Salinas de Gortari opened his presidency in 1989 with two
spectacular police operations, which brought the arrest of a top trafficker
and a corrupt oil union leader. But the drug mafias nonetheless proliferated.

The narcotics corruption continued under President Ernesto Zedillo. Various
anti-drug agencies working for the Attorney General's Office have been
abolished or restructured, and corrupted again in a cycle repeated several
times during his tenure.

If the governing party has had little success in fighting organized crime,
Fox's National Action Party has done no better.

Through much of the last decade, National Action governors controlled the
states of Baja California Norte and Chihuahua, and the narcotics violence
only increased in both states, which are major staging areas for smugglers
moving drugs across the border.

Fox himself has little direct experience in combating organized crime
because Guanajuato, the state he governed, lies outside the major drug
corridors.

His proposal for a new Department of Public Security would lodge Mexico's
federal police in a new agency, independent of both the Attorney General's
Office and the Interior Ministry. The aim is to create a well-paid, modern
and apolitical police force.

The creation of a agency to oversee the work of thousands of federal
prosecutors would strip away the other half of the attorney general's duties.

The new agency would seek to improve prosecutors' abilities to gather evidence.

Currently, more emphasis is often placed on gathering intelligence on
traffickers than on assembling court-worthy cases, aides to Fox said.