AFTER 25 YEARS, DEA FINDS DRUG WAR STILL A MINEFIELD

Mexico, budgets are among its biggest battles, officials say

Operating in the shadow of the hallowed FBI, agents at the fledgling Drug
Enforcement Administration were something of an oddity in the early 1970s.

"When you made an arrest, you couldn't scream, 'DEA!' because nobody knew
what that was. You had to yell, 'Police!' But those days have passed. Now
you yell, 'DEA!' and people know who you are," said Greg Williams, the
agency's chief of operations.

As the drug-fighting agency celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, the
acronym DEA is indeed familiar to millions of people around the world. It
has grown from a 1,470-agent operation in 1973 to a sprawling $1.3
billion-a-year enterprise, with 4,231 agents and offices in such far-flung
spots as Karachi, Pakistan and Yangon, Myanmar.

But even as the DEA ventures into new territory, some of its toughest
battlegrounds are close to home - in such places as Mexico.

Drug-related violence and corruption have spiraled in Mexico, despite law
enforcement's best efforts. Gangland slayings and rarely solved executions
in border towns and other points along Mexico's rough-and-tumble
drug-transit routes have claimed at least 500 lives since 1990,
counternarcotics experts say.

In the latest episode, gunmen massacred 18 men, women and children in what
authorities said was a drug-related attack Sept. 18 in the Mexican town of
El Sauzal, about 60 miles south of San Diego.

The reported target - Fermin Castro, a man suspected of marijuana
trafficking - was shot in the head and later died of his wounds.

Such brutality - aimed at everyone from police to prosecutors - makes
Mexico more dangerous to U.S. drug agents than anywhere in the world, DEA
administrator Thomas Constantine said.

"The amount of violence directed toward Mexican law enforcement officials
is unparalleled," Mr. Constantine said. "A lot of it is emotional, almost
random violence. Colombia's Cali drug gang killed people, but there was
usually a purpose."

In Mexico, he said, some drug-related attacks are so vicious and
attention-grabbing that they trigger police crackdowns that can cost drug
organizations "millions of dollars in profit. But that doesn't stop them.
The violence goes on."

Mr. Constantine, former head of the New York state police, was appointed
DEA administrator in March 1994 and has seen the agency come into its own.

Stand and deliver

Just five years ago, Vice President Al Gore and other federal officials
were touting a cost-cutting plan that would have had the FBI taking over
the DEA. Mr. Constantine fought off the effort, and today few people talk
seriously about a takeover or merger, he said.

"I think we're past that. And what you do to get past that is to build your
own traditions," Mr. Constantine said. "You maintain strong internal
standards and discipline. Then you don't have to look to anyone else for
how to do things."

The mere suggestion that the FBI take over the DEA fueled the already
heated rivalry between two agencies. DEA agents had reason to be proud at
the time of the takeover attempt: Their agency had "five times as many
wiretaps, four times as many arrests and six times as many convictions as
the FBI," according to the 1996 book, Main Justice.

And today, Mr. Constantine said, the agency is the United States' premier
anti-drug force.

But as the DEA has grown and evolved over the years, the drug war has
become a hot political topic. The agency's harshest critics say fighting
traffickers is an expensive waste of time.

"Costly, destructive and failing in its stated mission, the War on Drugs is
government lunacy beyond the wildest waste-fraud-and-abuse accusations of
Rush Limbaugh and Ross Perot. Yet we soldier on," writes Dan Baum, author
of the 1996 book, Smoke and Mirrors.

Others criticize the DEA's growing ties with state and local law
enforcement agencies.

"When a DEA enforcement team comes to assist local police in some town in
Montana or Missouri, bringing in all their cars, agents and radios, it
costs a hell of a lot of money," a former senior DEA official said. "You
don't catch the drug traffickers who are corrupting Colombia, Mexico, Peru
and Bolivia by subsidizing local police in St. Louis."

To address such concerns, the DEA is asking lawmakers for an additional
$8.7 million and 17 special agents to build cases "against the leaders of
international drug trafficking networks." If Congress approves the plan,
the agency will add employees to its Mexico operation and expand its
presence in the Caribbean, Central America and Asia.

'Playing catch-up'

Phil Jordan, a former high-level DEA official who works as a security
consultant in Dallas, said the extra money is badly needed.

"We're playing catch-up," he said. "When I was with the DEA just a few
years ago, I was spending half my time figuring out ways to eliminate or
downsize agency operations while the drug cartels were expanding theirs. I
was opposed to cutting back, but those were my marching orders."

The federal government created the DEA in 1973 by combining five separate
agencies that had some role in counternarcotics.

"Everybody in law enforcement applauded the move because it was very
obvious that agencies were tripping over each other," said Joe Toft, the
former DEA country attache in Bogota, Colombia. "Unfortunately, what
started as an excellent idea was chopped into pieces, little by little. And
what we have today is the most decentralized anti-drug effort ever."

About 50 different federal agencies now have some degree of drug
enforcement responsibility, he said.

"The drug problem kept growing, and the federal government's panicked
reaction was to keep adding more agencies. And everyone's competing with
everyone else to look good, to get more funding," Mr. Toft said. "It gets
so crazy sometimes you have two different agencies trying to get credit for
the same arrest or the same seizure. The sad thing is, no one person is in
charge."

Some DEA officials agree with such criticism but say the federal
government's wide-ranging drug policy is out of their control. So they
focus on catching drug traffickers, and they say they've had success.

Measure of success

DEA agents and their state and local task force partners have made more
than 100,000 felony drug arrests in the United States in the last four
years, agency figures show. Such numbers, officials add, prove that it's a
good idea to work with state and local law
enforcement.

"We can be proud of ourselves. We've spent a lot of time making sure that
we serve very well the needs of police and sheriff's deputies, and I think
we've boosted our reputation as a federal agency," Mr. Constantine said.
"We tell our people, 'When you work with these state and local agencies,
you let the police chief or sheriff hold a press conference. Let him or her
take the credit. Then he'll say good things about you.' That's better than
running around beating your chest saying 'I'm wonderful.' "

As for progress in Mexico, DEA and other federal officials say it's an
uphill fight.

"By any objective measure, Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico partnership have a
long way to go," Rand Beers, the State Department's top counternarcotics
official, told lawmakers earlier this year.

The DEA's "biggest weakness," Mr. Jordan contended, "is having to be
politically correct all the time. That puts us behind the eight ball."

He believes that the Clinton administration turns a blind eye to drug
corruption south of the border to protect U.S. commercial ties with Mexico.

"Every time we applaud the Mexicans, we're hurting them," Mr. Jordan said.
"We should be constructively criticizing Mexican law enforcement. Dealing
with Mexico with kid gloves hasn't worked."

The DEA has been especially mindful of Mexico's anti-drug efforts since the
1985 murder and torture of one of its own, special agent Enrique "Kiki"
Camarena. After Mr. Camarena's murder, "every DEA agent from Borneo to
Boise swore an oath to shut down Mexico's illegal drug trade," a former
drug agent wrote in a blistering column distributed on the World Wide Web.

Mexican Attorney General Jorge Madrazo said recently that he is doing his
best to combat all forms of corruption, despite "crime that is growing,
getting ever more aggressive . . . more sophisticated . . . with ever
greater power to infiltrate and corrupt institutions."

Since his appointment nearly two years ago, Mr. Madrazo told Mexican
lawmakers, he has fired 1,264 employees and taken criminal or
administrative action against 1,776. But progress has been slow, he said.

"We're halfway up the road."

Checked-by: Joel W. Johnson