U.S. PLAN TO HELP MEXICAN MILITARY FIGHT DRUGS IS FALTERING

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 U.S. 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 angry 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. But 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 in Latin America 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. "You 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 they have on court officers and
the 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," the White House drug policy director, Gen.
Barry McCaffrey, said in an interview. But he added, "You don't produce the
Swiss police in a year."

U.S. officials said that when they first offered to support the Mexican
military's drug-enforcement efforts in early 1995, they imagined a narrower
role. Colombian drug traffickers had begun flying huge loads of cocaine
into Mexico on stripped-down passenger jets, easily outrunning Mexican
police aircraft, and U.S. officials started by asking Mexican commanders to
use their small fleet of F-5 fighter jets to intercept the smugglers. The
F-5 plan was unsuccessful, but Pentagon officials soon proposed a more
elaborate one. That October, when William Perry became the first defense
secretary to visit Mexico in years, Mexican generals agreed to begin U.S.
training for special-forces troops that would chase traffickers to
clandestine air strips and remote safe houses.

To transport the soldiers on their raids, the Pentagon eventually donated
73 aging UH-1H helicopters, part of an equipment transfer worth about $58
million. The United States also gave Mexico's air force four C-26
surveillance planes and sold the Mexican navy two Knox-class frigates.
Finally, the two militaries agreed to consider further cooperation in areas
like disaster relief, education and force modernization. Since late 1995,
however, U.S. officials say they have not detected a single jetload of
cocaine flying into Mexico. In fact, they say, drug flights into Mexico
have stopped altogether as the traffickers have shifted to maritime
shipments through the Gulf of Mexico, into the Yucatan peninsula and up the
Pacific coast, and to overland transportation, mainly by truck. With no
planes to chase, Mexican commanders have used the helicopters for
everything from troop transport to spraying herbicides on drug crops. But
the Vietnam-era aircraft have been plagued by mechanical problems and a
lack of spare parts, and Mexico announced in March that it would ground the
entire fleet after the U.S. Army found engine problems in all the UH-1H
models. Mexican officials have complained privately that they were given
scrap. Pentagon officials say the problems stem from excessive and improper
use of the helicopters by the Mexican army.

Mexican officials also complain that the frigates they bought two years ago
for $7 million have been unusable until recently because they were
delivered without needed equipment. A long-promised system set up to share
the Pentagon's drug intelligence directly with the Mexican military has
been kept off-line because of lingering U.S. fears that sources of the
information might be compromised.

And despite U.S. hopes that anti-drug programs would bring the two
militaries closer together, Mexican generals have told the Defense
Department that they are no longer interested in other joint projects like
disaster-relief planning.

For their part, Pentagon officials have questioned the Mexican army's use
of the special-forces troops they helped to design and train. In September,
the attorney general's office announced the arrest of nine special-forces
soldiers after an investigation linked them to alien-smuggling and other
crimes. While their unit was not trained in the United States, U.S.
officials were nonetheless critical of its mission: they had been seconded
to the federal drug-enforcement police, to check luggage at the Mexico City
airport. "That's certainly not what we're training them for," a Pentagon
official said. Pentagon officials say that there is no practical way they
can monitor how Mexican troops trained by the United States are deployed,
although such a plan has been required in Colombia to try to keep U.S. aid
and training from going to counterinsurgency troops or human rights
violators. But the greatest frustration for U.S. officials may be the way
that Mexican commanders have responded to the difficulties in the program
and the public scrutiny that has come with it.

Saying they do not need or can no longer afford training for many of the
helicopter mechanics, sailors and special-forces troops they had planned to
send to U.S. bases, Mexican military officials have said they will cut the
flow of troops by about 40 percent over the next year. Mexico's only cost
for the program is a meal allowance for each soldier of $25 a day, U.S.
officials said.

Checked-by: Richard Lake