THE BORDER'S ASPIRING RACKET-BUSTER

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico -- Moctezuma Rodriguez Meza says he has learned a
thing or two about the corrupting power of greed during a long career in
law enforcement, corrections and security.

And it has come in handy, he says, now that he is here in his native town
trying to reform one of the most notoriously corrupt and violent police
forces along the trade-booming, drug-rich United States-Mexican border.

"For three years here in Nuevo Laredo, it was chaos," said Rodriguez, the
new Police Chief of the city, directly across the Rio Grande from Laredo,
Tex., at what is by far the border's busiest commercial crossing. "There
was violence, robberies, shootings, and we've discovered that in a number
of the incidents, police officers were involved. Ordinary people were
abused by the police regularly; bribes were demanded."

Rodriguez was talking about the Nuevo Laredo governed by the previous
administration, which presided over a city where by all accounts drug wars
and official corruption had reached alarming dimensions even by the
standards of border towns.

Cleanup claims by new administrations are common on both sides of the
border, of course, and the purported cleanup here comes just after the
Mexican Government announced a new "total war" on narcotics and just before
the annual March 1 deadline for the President of the United States to
certify to Congress whether Mexico is a reliable partner in the war against
drugs.

So Rodriguez will understand if his listener is a bit wary.

But he insists that he and the new Mayor, Horacio Garza, are in earnest,
determined to cleanse this teeming city, which has nearly doubled in
population, to 400,000, in the five years since the North American Free
Trade Agreement was adopted.

Rodriguez, 49, works out of a dark corner office on the second floor of the
city's shabby police headquarters, at the southern edge of the downtown
tourist district. Since taking office on Jan. 1, he has dismissed 130 of
the department's 600 officers, including all 6 division commanders. The
only thing slowing him is that the police academy he created in January
will not turn out the first of its every-other-month class of 60 officers
until March, and he can manage to reduce the force only so much before
fresh graduates become available.

United States officials say they are cautiously optimistic, hopeful that
Rodriguez's seemingly energetic efforts mean he is a genuine reformer.

"We are very positive about what he's done thus far," said Rudy Watkins,
principal officer at the United States Consulate here.

"But he's only been in there since Jan. 1, so it's too early to tell much.
So far, we haven't seen much change."

Ernesto Garza, director of the Commission for Human Rights here in the
state of Tamaulipas, also finds it too early to declare victory. Even if
Rodriguez proves as good as his promises and his early crackdown, the
question remains whether official corruption is too much an endemic problem
for him to solve.

Garza (no relation to the Mayor) says that his office handled nearly 400
complaints of human rights violations in prisons and towns throughout the
state last year and that the majority involved abuses by Nuevo Laredo
police officers, everything from curbside shakedowns to torture. "We'll
have to wait to see how this story will end," he said.

Rodriguez acknowledges that it is common for a new police chief -- or, for
that matter, a department head in any new administration -- to make
dismissals a first order of business.

But he vows that his drive will be no fleeting thing and will be aimed not
at earlier patronage hirings but at corrupt, undisciplined and lazy officers.

Already, he says, just a few weeks into his tenure, he senses less violence
and less tension on the narrow, rutted streets of Nuevo Laredo, thick with
traffic and pedestrians, some of them among the growing number of tourists
from north of the border.

Rodriguez was born in Nuevo Laredo and became commandant of the overcrowded
La Loma prison here before serving an initial two-year term as the city's
Police Chief beginning in 1983.

Later he worked for the state police and the Mexican Attorney General's
antismuggling task force before returning here to become chief of security
for a local politician's campaign for the Mexican Congress.

Then, three years ago, "I thought Las Vegas might be worth trying," he said.

He went to work there as a casino security officer, but late last year,
homesick and energized by the reform promises of Mayor-elect Garza, decided
to apply for the Chief's job again.

"The biggest problem I found when I came in here was lack of discipline and
leadership," he said. "Before, police would abuse people, be involved in
robberies, have shootings for no real reason, act as bodyguards for
narco-traffickers -- and they would not be punished, not even reprimanded.
So everything unraveled."

Within a matter of months this fall and winter came a series of horrors:
Two Nuevo Laredo officers were grabbed off the streets by unidentified
abductors and have not been seen since. Another two officers were killed
when automatic weapons fire tore through their patrol car. And then 12
Nuevo Laredo policemen were involved in the shooting of a state officer.
Rodriguez says he has no doubt that all these incidents were somehow
related to drugs and smuggling.

The new Chief says that he has taken no special precautions for his own
safety since the dismissals began and that he has had no real trouble other
than a handful of threatening phone calls.

He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a glossy magazine about law
enforcement in Central and South America. On the cover was a general in
Colombia who used to be among those in charge of that country's anti-drug
efforts.

"I know him," Rodriguez said proudly. "The cartels have put a price on his
head of $10 million."

Out of another drawer he pulled a snapshot of himself and the Colombian
officer standing at attention.

"I have no price on my head," Rodriguez said, a thin smile forming at the
corner of his mouth. "Not yet. It is early."