MEXICO SENDS 'JUNK' CHOPPERS BACK TO U.S.

Aircraft Donated To Aid Drug War

MEXICO CITY, Oct. 5 - Three years ago, U.S. and Mexican officials lauded the
donation of 73 U.S. Army helicopters to Mexico for narcotics interdiction as
a potent symbol of cooperation in the war against drug trafficking.

Last month, 72 of the Vietnam War-vintage choppers were loaded
unceremoniously onto trucks and driven back to the United States, rejected
as junk by a frustrated Mexican military that never got more than a dozen of
the clunkers airborne at any one time, according to U.S. and Mexican
officials. The 73rd helicopter had already been destroyed in a crash.

"This is a microcosm of the schizophrenia of the U.S. policy in fighting
drugs," said a congressional staff member who has followed the saga of the
UH-1H Huey helicopters. "We always try to do it on the cheap. . . . Throwing
these choppers at Mexico was an ill-conceived initiative in the first place.
The administration saw the choppers as a way to leverage open the door and
have more cooperation. But it was star-crossed when it got down to the
hardware."

U.S. officials agreed earlier this year to refurbish 20 of the helicopters
at U.S. expense, at a cost of about $1.4 million per chopper. But the
Mexican military has told its U.S. counterparts it still does not want them,
according to Pentagon officials. Mexican officials said civilian law
enforcement agencies are considering accepting the U.S. offer, but meanwhile
the aircraft are in the United States.

The donated helicopters were intended to boost the Mexican military's
efforts to combat drug production and trafficking, improving the mobility of
anti-drug squads over rough terrain. But the entire fleet had been grounded
since March 1998, when two Mexican Army crew members were killed in a crash
that contributed to a temporary worldwide stand-down of all Hueys because of
possibly faulty gearboxes.

"The government of Mexico has decided it does not believe it is
cost-effective for them to continue to fly them and asked us to take them
back," said a senior U.S. Defense Department official. "We've taken all the
helicopters back."

The aircraft have been mired in controversy since the Clinton administration
conceived the program in 1996 as its most visible symbol of improving
relations between the United States and Mexico. That was a time when such
symbols were needed; the U.S. Congress was considering decertifying the
southern neighbor as a cooperative partner in combating drug trafficking.

"Everybody's happy to be in the photo signing the document saying we're
going to have a lot of cooperation with the U.S.," said one Mexican official
who has monitored the controversy. "But the Mexican generals have been very
angry since the beginning . . . as soon as they saw the technical
conditions" of the helicopters.

In the view of Mexican officials, not only did the U.S. Army send aging
castoffs, but the U.S. Congress insisted on American oversight of the
helicopters as a result of Mexico's use of law enforcement helicopters
donated earlier to help quell the Zapatista uprising in the southern state
of Chiapas in 1994. The U.S. oversight demands created headaches for Mexican
politicians in a heavily nationalistic country that has not forgotten
various U.S. military invasions over the last two centuries.

Even before the Mexican military suffered two fatalities in the March 1998
Huey crash, it was having difficulty keeping the helicopters in service. So
few helicopters were usable Mexican newspapers began referring to them in
headlines as "junk helicopters."

Last year, the U.S. General Accounting Office, the congressional watchdog
agency, reported that the choppers had been "of limited usefulness" to
Mexico "because they cannot perform some counter-narcotics missions and lack
adequate logistical support."

Mexican officials insist that the inability to use the helicopters has not
hampered their drug enforcement efforts. The Mexican Embassy in Washington
said the helicopters flew 4,766 missions totaling 8,876 flight hours when
they were usable.