CORRUPTION CROSSES THE BORDER

Drug Money Tempts More American Officials To Step Over The Line

DONNA, Texas

- -- In November 1997, when Miguel Carreon was hired as the police chief
of this small town nine miles from the Mexican border, he vowed to
restore the integrity of the force.

The department had been sullied by the indictment of six officers
accused of helping to smuggle 1,700 pounds of marijuana into the
United States.

Within months, however, a local figure approached Carreon and hinted
that the police should continue to cooperate with drug smugglers. "He
told me that drug smuggling has always been a way of life, and as long
as nobody gets hurt, nobody will know the difference," the 42-year-old
chief recalled. "I stopped the conversation before he said, `Let's
work together.' "

U.S. officials and politicians are blasting the Clinton
administration's decision to certify Mexico as an ally in the war on
drugs in the face of Mexico's endemic drug corruption. But Carreon's
encounter suggests that a growing number of American law enforcement
officials might also have trouble staying clean amid the flood of
dirty money and drugs across the 2,000-mile border.

>From small-town police departments to the expanding ranks of federal
anti-drug agencies, American officials say they are alarmed by their
own vulnerability to the corrupting influence of the drug trade. In a
report to Congress last month, the U.S. Customs Service called drug
trafficking "the undisputed, greatest corruption hazard confronting
all federal, state and local law enforcement agencies today."

The number of state and local law enforcement and other public
officials investigated by the FBI and convicted for drug corruption
has increased from 79 in 1997 to 157 last year. Between 1994 and 1997,
there were 46 drug-related indictments in the United States of border
law enforcement officials.

"It's been overwhelming on the Southwest border," said Wayne Beaman,
the special agent in charge of the McAllen, Texas, field office for
the Justice Department Inspector General's office, which investigates
allegations of corruption along the Texas-Mexico border. "We are
woefully understaffed."

The congressional General Accounting Office is about to release a
yearlong study that says drug-related corruption along the Southwest
border is a serious and continuing threat, according to a draft of the
report obtained by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

The GAO examined 28 convictions between 1992 and 1997 of U.S.
Immigration and Naturalization Service and Customs Service officials
for drug-related crimes on the Southwest border, which extends from
Brownsville, Texas, to Imperial Beach, Calif.

The cases included U.S. officials waving vehicles carrying drugs
through ports of entry, coordinating the movement of drugs across the
Southwest border, transporting drugs past Border Patrol checkpoints,
selling drugs and disclosing drug intelligence information.

In one case, a Customs inspector in El Paso used a cellular telephone
to send a prearranged code to a drug smuggler's beeper, telling him
which lane to use at a border crossing and when to use it.

In another, an immigration official in Calexico, Calif., agreed to let
her boyfriend, a member of a drug-smuggling family, drive a vehicle
loaded with marijuana through her lane without inspection. On numerous
occasions, the GAO report says, INS detention officers smuggled drugs
past Border Patrol checkpoints in INS vehicles.

The report concludes that both Customs and the INS missed
opportunities to provide in-depth anti-corruption training to
employees and failed to conduct background investigations that are
required every five years. In some cases, the report says, background
checks were overdue by as much as three years.

The two agencies also failed to require sufficient financial
information from their employees, or else did not use what was
available to sniff out possible corruption, the GAO found.

In one case, the INS did not question a Border Patrol agent who owned
a $200,000 house with a five-car garage, and an Olympic-size swimming
pool housed in its own building. The agent also had six vehicles, two
boats, 100 weapons, $45,000 in Treasury bills and 40 acres.

Because neither INS nor Customs had completed an evaluation of its
policies and procedures or corrected internal weaknesses, the GAO
concluded, "neither agency can be sure that adequate internal controls
are in place to detect and prevent employee corruption."

The Customs Service, which is part of the Treasury Department,
conceded in its report to Congress last month that it may not have
adequate internal controls in place to detect and prevent corruption.

INS spokesman Greg Gagne said he would not comment directly on the GAO
report because it was still in draft form. But he said the agency is
confident that its training practices and background checks are
thorough and rival those of any other agency.

Although Gagne said there is no indication of an increase in
corruption in its ranks, he also said the INS is concerned that its
growing number of employees along the border are being targeted more
often by drug smugglers. By year's end, Gagne said, the INS hopes to
have a work force of 29,000, compared to 10,000 in 1992.

"It has become perfectly evident that drug smuggling and the use of
money to penetrate the border has become a more serious problem," he
said.

Mexican officials agree.

"You read a lot about how drugs make it from South America, through
Mexico and to the border," said Juan Rebolledo, the Mexican foreign
ministry's undersecretary for North American affairs. "But are the
same sources . . . telling the public how it is that these same drugs
make it from the border to Chicago?

"They don't just magically make it there overnight. Drug dealers
spread their money all along the trail from source to consumption, so
it's naive to think that it is not spread north of the border as
well," said Rebolledo.