U.S., MEXICO ADMIT DRUG WAR IS FAILING

An ambitious U.S. effort to help train and equip Mexico's armed forces to
pursue drug smugglers is a shambles, officials of both countries say,
souring American 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 such as 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 the CIA's collaboration with a small
drug-intelligence unit of the Mexican army, although 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 still are 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 the steady expansion of the Mexican armed forces'
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."

Checked-by: Richard Lake