MEXICAN DRUG AIDE U.S. ACCUSED IS ATTACKED

MEXICO CITY, March 24, Friday -- Gunmen opened fire at a former federal
agent reportedly accused of having drug ties and three others as they
entered a hotel in Mexico City on Thursday, Mexican officials said. The
agent's bodyguard was killed, and the agent and two others were wounded.
The agent, Cuauhtemoc Herrera Suastegui, a former official with the
organized crime unit of the Mexican Attorney General's Office, was entering
the Imperial Hotel with a bodyguard and two women when four assailants, two
outside and two inside, began to shoot, officials said.

The bodyguard died at the scene. Officials initially said that Mr. Herrera
also died.

Later, Mariano Herran Salvatti, who leads the anti-drug operations of the
Mexican Attorney General's Office, told the Televisa network that Mr.
Herrera was in stable condition at a city hospital.

William E. Ledwith, international operations director of the Drug
Enforcement Administration, identified Mr. Herrera as an example of
corruption in Mexican anti-drug units in a Congressional hearing on Feb. 29.

Mr. Herrera, while director of investigations of the Organized Crime Unit,
an elite group that worked for Mexico's attorney general, failed a lie
detector test given by American officials in 1998, Mr. Ledwith said.

"You have to assume that everything we've been giving them has ended up in
the hands of the traffickers," one United States law enforcement official
said after Mr. Herrera failed the test. "It's a disaster."

But Mr. Herrera was not dismissed then. Rather, he was reassigned to
another high-level position within the Attorney General's Office, Mr.
Ledwith said.

"Additionally, there are indications that he provided assistance to the
Carrillo Fuentes drug trafficking organization," Mr. Ledwith said.

Mr. Ledwith's testimony passed largely unnoticed in Mexico until Monday,
when a Mexico City newspaper, La Cronica, published a front-page article on
the D.E.A. charges.

Mr. Herrera, who had resigned from the attorney general's office on Jan.
14, was under investigation for possible links to the powerful Juarez drug
cartel, La Cronica reported.

Mr. Herran Salvatti was quoted by the newspaper as saying that Mr. Herrera
had been asked to respond to the allegations this week.