TOP MEXICAN DRUG UNIT IS TAINTED, U.S. ASSERTS

WASHINGTON -- Most of the top investigators of an elite Mexican police
unit that was trained by Americans might 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.

Officials say even now 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. "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 that was
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.

Last week The Washington Post reported that Mexican officials planned
to press drug-corruption charges against a handful of army soldiers
who had been stationed at the Mexico City airport as part of the armed
forces' growing role in the anti-narcotics fight.

For 10 years, as successive administrations in Washington have sought
to work more closely with the Mexican authorities, both to fight the
flow of illegal drugs to the United States and to strengthen the rule
of law in a strategically vital neighbor, U.S. officials have publicly
embraced senior Mexican prosecutors, police commanders and other
officials who have later been revealed, one after another, to have
taken bribes from major drug smugglers.

In the most serious case, the Mexican government announced early 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 Fuentes.

Days earlier the official, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, had been
basking in the praise of the U.S. anti-drug czar Barry McCaffrey.

Checked-by: Patrick Henry