WAR ON DRUGS IN MEXICO FALTERING

Narcotics: The Clinton Administration Has Asked That Mexican Officials
Reassess The Plan To Train And Equip The Military.

An ambitious U.S. effort to help train and equip Mexico's armed forces to
pursue drug smugglers is in a shambles, officials of both countries say,
souring relations with an ally that Washington has worked intensely to court.

Three years after the Pentagon began donating dozens of helicopters to the
Mexican army and training hundreds of Mexican soldiers in the United
States, officials have seen only a handful of the anti-drug operations
intended in the program. The helicopter fleet has been grounded by
mechanical problems, and Mexican generals are sharply cutting the number of
troops they will send to train.

According to U.S. intelligence reports, the drug flights that the plan was
designed to combat have virtually ceased. Nut that appears to be because
the traffickers turned to smuggling schemes like containerized shipping
before the enforcement strategy ever got off the ground. The flow of drugs
into the United States has continued apace.

Tensions over the failed strategy, the faltering equipment and continuing
reports of Mexican military corruption have grown serious enough, U.S.
officials said, that they have asked Mexico's commanding generals to
reassess the program altogether.

"The question, basically, is: How do we get out of this box?" a Clinton
administration official said. "We will talk about the plan that they come
up with, and we will talk about whether we want to support that plan."

The conflict underscores the competing agendas that the Pentagon and the
CIA have encountered as they have tried to use the fight against
international drug traffickers to remake their old alliances with military
forces in the region.

Like its counterparts in Colombia and Peru - and like the Pentagon itself -
the Mexican military seized on the drug fight as a mission of growing
importance and as a way to protect its budgets after the Cold War. But the
Mexican commanders have pursued the effort with secrecy and independence,
raising questions about whether the United States is strengthening powerful
and sometimes autonomous military forces at the expense of civilian
institutions like the courts and the police.

"The answer here is that there is no silver bullet," said Jan Lodal, who,
until his recent retirement as the principal deputy undersecretary of
defense for policy, oversaw the Pentagon's anti-drug cooperation with
Mexico. "Your are going to have to build an effective civilian
law-enforcement structure, and you're going to have to build it from the
ground up."

Administration officials contend that despite the tensions, the United
States' relationship with the Mexican armed forces is better than it was
several years ago. They say that the CIA's collaboration with a small
drug-intelligence unit of the Mexican army, while largely secret, has been
reasonably successful. And they emphasize that they turned to the Mexican
military only after President Ernesto Zedillo did so himself, giving his
generals a new public security role because the corrupting influence of the
drug trade had so paralyzed the federal police.

Clinton administration officials are still quick to say any long-term
solution to Mexico's criminal-justice problems must focus on civilian
institutions. But they also continue to spend considerably more on
anti-drug training for the military than on court officers and police, and
they have largely approved as the Mexican armed forces have steadily
expanded their influence over a range of law-enforcement programs.

"From the start, all of us have believed that if you don't have a judicial
system and a police force that are responsive to the elected civilian
leadership, you're in trouble," said the White House drug policy director,
Gen. Barry McCaffrey.

U.S. officials said that when they first offered to support the Mexican
military's drug-enforcement efforts in early 1995, Colombian drug
traffickers had begun flying huge loads of cocaine into Mexico on stripped
down passenger jets, easily out-running Mexican police aircraft.

Checked-by: Richard Lake