FACE IT, DRUG ALLIES HAVE CHOSEN BRIBES OVER BULLETS

PLATA o plomo. Silver or lead. That is the choice drug traffickers in
Mexico have given their allies and enemies for years: the bribe or the bullet.

The graves now being exhumed on the Mexican-U.S. border near Juarez are
thought to contain the remains of anti-drug agents, informers and rival
gangsters who refused the silver offered by the Juarez drug cartel and
their allies to join up or shut up during the last half decade. Hundreds of
families of victims of violent crime in the area are now coming forward to
see if the graves might contain their loved ones.

The magnitude of the past brutality in Juarez -- the violence, the murders,
the hundreds of disappearances -- cries out for action by Mexican
authorities. The mounting evidence of drug-related atrocities will almost
certainly fuel calls by drug warriors in Washington for more military and
police aid to help Mexico fight these criminals. President Clinton has
already declared that the evidence "reinforces the imperative" to "work
with the Mexican authorities to try to combat these cartels."

But there is a troubling underside to the story that U.S. drug warriors
refuse to confront honestly: Many of our drug-war allies have already
chosen the silver, and the lead we provide them may serve to undermine
rather than advance U.S. objectives. One of the perverse consequences of
the U.S. war on drugs is that it drives corruption: giving traffickers both
strong incentives and ample illicit profits to buy lax law enforcement. It
is no surprise that this corruption is particularly visible on the border
where the flow of drugs meets the lucrative U.S. market.

The Juarez cartel may be behind the killings, but there is evidence that
the Mexican military and police have been deeply involved. Many of those
who have disappeared in the Juarez area reportedly vanished after police
officials, presumably in the pay of the traffickers, detained them, and
local police have been excluded from current investigative activities.
Arturo Gonzalez Rascon, attorney general for the state of Chihuahua, has
publicly suggested a police role in disappearances of people feared buried
in the mass graves.

Evidence of widespread official corruption in the drug war is an open
secret. U.S. drug-enforcement agents say they knew of the mass graves in
1993 but did not act because Mexican drug traffickers and police were
believed to control the secret cemeteries. Local U.S. counternarcotics
agents widely share the view of former FBI agent Richard Schwein, who
headed the El Paso office: "You don't share information with your
counterparts across the river, because you don't know whom you can trust."
In November, the former FBI boss for Mexico, Stanley Pimental, even accused
some officials of Mexico's ruling party of using the police, the army and
the legal system to extort money from drug traffickers, exchanging impunity
for donations to party coffers.

Given the record of corruption, how can U.S. drug warriors possibly justify
more aid? Their story is as simple as it is simple-minded: We'll tell
Mexican officials to clean things up, or we'll cut off aid, and we'll
provide training and assistance to help create cleaner forces. But there is
a Catch-22 here: If the United States were to cut the flow of aid to Mexico
and other Latin nations, who would fight our drug war? Meanwhile, the
internal logic of a war on the drug supply guarantees the corruption will
get worse.

Look at the evidence: U.S.-backed cleanup schemes fail time and again. Take
for example the recent corruption of the military. It was the widespread
corruption of the police and top politicians under former Mexican President
Carlos Salinas de Gortari that led the United States to pressure President
Ernesto Zedillo to turn the drug war over to the more professional and less
corrupt military. In December 1996, he put generals in charge of the
Federal Judicial Police and the top drug-control agencies, and moved
military personnel into the top law-enforcement posts in two-thirds of
Mexico's states. Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, highly respected by
U.S. Drug Czar Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, was called in as Mexico's drug czar
to clean up the national drug agency.

Gutierrez aggressively targeted major drug cartels -- all except the Juarez
cartel, which had him on the payroll to help knock off the competition. He
was arrested in February 1997. A month later, another general was arrested
after offering a $1 million bribe to a top federal justice official. In
1997, Defense Ministry files indicated that 10 generals and 22 other
military officers were under investigation for ties to traffickers.

The U.S. response was to urge Mexico to create a new elite anti-drug force
scrupulously vetted to prevent ties to traffickers and carefully trained by
the United States. But in 1998 and 1999, these new units came under
suspicion for ties to powerful drug gangs. The most heralded was the
hand-picked, U.S.-trained Organized Crime Unit within the Mexican attorney
general's office. The names of 15 officers from the unit were found in
documents seized from drug traffickers in mid-1998; five were fired when
they failed lie-detector tests. Last month, all 570 soldiers in the elite
96th Infantry Battalion were placed under suspicion for the disappearance
of cocaine they had seized. This September, Robert A. Fiano, chief of
operations at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, grimly concluded before a
congressional subcommittee that the "investigative achievements" of
Mexico's most elite anti-drug units was "minimal."

The repeated failure to break the cycle of drug-war corruption is no
accident. It is a product not of Mexico, but of our own drug-war strategy.
As ironic as it seems, the U.S. strategy ensures that the very corruption
we abhor will continue. The reason is that the drug warriors are not simply
up against a particular cartel or drug lord -- but an entire market system.

The lucrative black market in drugs, itself fueled by the U.S. war on
supply, will keep generating traffickers and drug lords as fast as they are
killed or arrested. That is because making war on this market aims to raise
the price of drugs from their real cost (a few dollars a gram) to a high
black-market price (hundreds of dollars a gram). But that artificial
increase in price, a kind of drug-war subsidy, creates enormous profits,
which entice new traffickers to replace those arrested. It is these high
profits, in turn, which finance the criminal organizations, spur violent
competition for market share among the cartels and ensure deepening
corruption.

The logic is the same for drug-enforcement agents everywhere. U.S. agencies
charged with fighting the drug war, from U.S. Customs and the armed forces
to local police departments across the country, have struggled with their
own drug-corruption problems. Latin American anti-drug agencies, with fewer
resources and less accountability, face a more serious problem. The Juarez
cartel earns tens of millions of dollars a week. Enormous bribes to local
police, officials and military officers are petty cash to the drug lords
and an extraordinary temptation to underpaid enforcement agents. Retired
FBI agent Schwein put the logic clearly: "If you're a Mexican police
officer making $300 a month and the cartel pays you $10,000 a month, what
are the odds? It's a matter of economics." Meanwhile, the more efficient
Mexican security forces become, with the help of increased U.S. aid, the
greater the incentives local drug lords face to buy them off. It is a
self-defeating policy.

Drug warriors in Congress and the administration are right to want to
address the drug problem here in the United States. But the evidence
suggests that they are aiming their guns at the wrong target. U.S. drug-war
leaders should stop hiding behind their ungrounded zealotry and blind faith
and come clean: They need to give us evidence and argument that their
strategy can work before we waste more money and lives on a fatally flawed
policy. Given the logic of the drug market, there is no reason to believe
that more police and military aid will solve rather than spur corruption.
The more plomo we give to the Mexican security forces, the more plata will
be extorted -- and the more drug-war violence will escalate.