DRUG SEIZURES AT BORDER SOAR, CAUSING ALARM

Trend Indicates More Shipments From Mexico In U.S. Undetected

MEXICO CITY -- Cocaine and marijuana seizures inside the southwestern U.S.
border and along Mexico's Pacific coast have escalated dramatically in the
past two years, alarming U.S. law enforcement authorities who say Mexican
traffickers are sending greater quantities and larger loads of drugs into
the United States.

Seizures of marijuana by U.S. agencies along the southwestern border --
where 70 percent of all illicit drugs enter the country -- are up as much as
33 percent over last year, according to U.S. drug interdiction agencies.

Between 1991 and 1998, seizures jumped from 113 tons to 720 tons. At the
same time, cocaine loads off Mexico's Pacific coast appear to have increased
dramatically, and this year the U.S. Coast Guard made the largest cocaine
hauls in its history in both the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean.

The heavier flow of drugs has exacerbated ongoing problems of trust and
cooperation between American and Mexican authorities and is particularly
troubling to U.S. law enforcement in light of new statistics showing rising
marijuana use among American teen-agers.

The rising amount of seizures reflects not only greater smuggling activity
but also dramatic increases in drug production in Colombia and Mexico,
according to U.S. officials and reports from law enforcement agencies.

U.S. authorities estimate they capture 10 to 15 percent of all drugs
smuggled into the country. While many officials credit improved coordination
among U.S. law enforcement agencies for the increase in seizures, they say
the trend clearly indicates more drugs are arriving in the United States.

The year's mounting tally of drug seizures, along with new U.S. calculations
of significantly increased cocaine production in Colombia and expanding
opium poppy and marijuana production in Mexico, are sending "shock waves
through the system," said a senior U.S. official involved in monitoring drug
trafficking.

Mexican authorities dispute some of the U.S. conclusions, but said they
would not compile Mexican seizure totals until next month and declined
repeated requests to discuss this year's trends until their figures are made
public.

Earlier this year, Mexico's top anti-drug official, Mariano Herran Salvatti,
said he believed that cocaine shipments into Mexico had dropped 50 percent
this year, but he did not provide detailed supporting data.

Herran said in a press conference this summer that marijuana and poppy
yields were up in Mexico because eradication was becoming increasingly
difficult, noting that "the illicit plantations are turning ever more away
from populated areas and into federal lands in the mountains."

Mexican drug cartels appear to be reorganizing their operations to improve
the transport of South American cocaine and Mexican marijuana and heroin to
the United States at a time when many Mexican anti-narcotics units are in
serious disarray and have made little progress in targeting the country's
biggest cartel leaders, according to U.S. law enforcement agencies.

"The drug groups are flexible and innovative and are using ever more
sophisticated and well-organized countersurveillance and
counterintelligence," according to a new U.S. government intelligence
assessment. "They are constantly identifying and exploiting law enforcement
predictability, patterns, weaknesses, vulnerabilities and routines."

While politicians at the highest levels of both countries capitals continue
to say that cooperation has improved, Richard A. Fiano, chief of operations
for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, told a congressional
subcommittee in September: "Until such time that adequate anti-corruption
assurances and safeguards can be implemented, DEA will exercise extreme
caution in sharing sensitive information with our Mexican counterparts."

Fiano described the "investigative achievements" of Mexico's most elite
anti-drug units against major cartels as "minimal." A special fugitive
apprehension team created by Mexico's anti-narcotics agency to track down
the leaders of the Tijuana-based Arellano-Felix cartel -- one of Mexico's
two largest drug mafias -- "has not participated in any significant
enforcement activity," Fiano said.

Even Mexican political leaders this year became so frustrated with failed
attempts to clean up the country's corrupt law enforcement agencies that
they created a new national police force for fighting drug-trafficking and
other crime.

Top political leaders also pledged a multimillion dollar increase in support
to the military and existing civilian agencies for counternarcotics efforts.

The surge in Mexican marijuana loads comes in the face of new U.S.
government statistics showing that marijuana use among American youth
between the ages of 12 and 17 has doubled in the last six years. In the
first nine months of 1999, marijuana seizures nationwide were up 29 percent,
from 513 tons during the same period last year to 663 tons this year.

Although those figures include domestically produced marijuana, the seizure
figures for Mexican marijuana are up by even more staggering amounts.

Borderwide, seizures are up about 33 percent, and in southeast Texas --
which has become the hottest transit zone on the international boundary in
recent months -- marijuana seizures were up nearly 70 percent over last
year, according to law enforcement agencies.