Law Enforcement:

Elite unit trained by U.S. experts has had a spotty record prosecuting drug
smugglers.

Washington-most of the top investigators of an elite Mexican police unit
that was trained by Americans may have ties to drug traffickers,U.S.
officials say.The disclosure threatens to undermine an ambitious effort to
overhaul the deeply corrupt law enforcement system of Mexico.

U.S. government experts traveled to Mexico late last month to administer
routine lie-detector tests to dozens of police agents. Now officials say
some investigators who failed had been chosen for their posts after
elaborate U.S. designed screening.

U.S. officials said they were just beginning to assess the damage that
corrupt investigators might have wrought, a task that could take months.
Most senior officials in the unit were implicated by the lie-detector tests.

But already, officials are saying that much of the sensitive information
that U.S. law-enforcement agents shared with Mexican counterparts over the
past year may have been compromised.

"You have to assume that everything we've been giving them has ended up in
the hands of the traffickers," said a senior U.S. law-enforcement official
who, as did others, insisted on anonymity. "It's a disaster."

Mexican officials are expected to undertake their own inquiry into the
case, which involves a force called the Organized Crime Unit, set up 18
months ago.

Some Mexican officials have challenged the lie-detector tests, U.S.
officials said.

The penetration of the unit, apparently by powerful drug gangs, is the
latest in a series of such calamities.

For 10 years, as successive administrations in Washington have sought to
work more closely with the Mexican authorities, U.S. officials have
publicly embraced senior Mexican prosecutors, police commanders and other
officials who have later been revealed to have taken bribes from major drug
smugglers.

In the most serious case, the Mexican government announced last year that
its drug-enforcement chief was in fact working secretly with the man then
considered the biggest cocaine trafficker in the country, Amado Carrillo.
Days earlier the official, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez, had been basking in the
praise of the Clinton administration's drug-policy director, Gen. Barry
McCaffrey.

McCaffrey and other administration officials vowed that such a debacle
would not occur again. They pressed for a sweeping reorganization of how
the United States gathers and disseminates intelligence about trafficking.
The reorganization plans have run into wide opposition among Mexican
law-enforcement officials.

But more important for Mexico, U.S. law-enforcement officials also provide
extensive help in writing a new law against organized crime, in setting up
an investigative unit to enforce the law and in screening hundreds of
police agents assigned to drug enforcement.

Prospective members of the Organized Crime Unit were submitted to extensive
background and financial checks, lie-detector tests and psychological
evaluations. Nearly all those chosen also received training from the FBI,
the Drug Enforcement Administration or both.

But after a year and a half, during which the team of 70 investigators,
prosecutors and intelligence analysts has been responsible for
investigating many of the most important drug-trafficking and kidnapping
cases, its record is mixed.

Mexican and U.S. officials praise the unit for what they say was its
leading role in the arrests of a handful of important smugglers and the
dismantling of a kidnapping ring that terrorized central Mexico while
receiving protection from state official.

In particular, Samuel Gonzalez Ruiz, 38, a former university professor who
heads the unit, has won wide respect from U.S. officials for what they say
is honesty and courage. Gonzalez Ruiz was one of three top unit officials
who were said to have passed the lie detector tests.

Increasingly, though, U.S. officials have grown critical of the unit for
failing to capture leaders of the biggest trafficking gangs, despite having
access to some of the most sensitive intelligence that Washington has ever
given the Mexican government.

Checked-by: Pat Dolan