MILITARY AID TO MEXICO GROWS

Attitude shift: Drug war overrides resentment toward U.S. armed forces.

WASHINGTON -- Smarting over its defeat by American military invaders in the
19th century, Mexico for years kept its relations with the U.S. armed
forces to a bare, polite minimum. But the war on drugs has changed that.
Mexico is now one of the main recipients of U.S. military assistance in
Latin America, a coalition of non-government groups reported Tuesday.

In 1997, Mexico received more U.S. money -- more than $1 million -- than
any other country in Latin America to send its service personnel for
training in the United States. In a statistic that would probably shock
Mexican critics of the United States, Mexican soldiers made up a third of
the student body at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in Fort Benning,
Ga.

Money for drug war

Mexico ranked No. 3 in Latin America in purchasing U.S. arms and other
defense equipment in 1997 and received more Pentagon money for anti-drug
warfare than any other country except Colombia.

For Latin America as a whole, U.S. total military assistance came to at
least $260 million in 1997, Adam Isacson of the Center for International
Policy, co-author of the report, told a news conference.

Isacson and Joy Olson, the report's other author and director of the
coalition known as the Latin America Working Group, said 56,000 American
servicemen and women worked, conducted training or took part in joint
exercises on Latin American and Caribbean soil in 1997.

None of the Americans, however, operated within Mexico, a nation that still
fumes over the 19th-century U.S. expansion that featured a sweeping,
successful military campaign that eventually stripped the Mexicans of huge
swaths of their territory, including what is now California, Texas and much
of the Southwest.

Lingering bitterness

The rancor over American intervention is still so great that, while Mexico
is willing to let its soldiers train in the United States, it does not want
U.S. military instructors or joint exercises on Mexican soil.

In their survey of U.S. military assistance to Latin America, Olson said
the researchers were surprised in three ways. ``It was bigger than we
thought,'' she said, ``more fragmented than we thought, and worse than we
thought in lack of congressional oversight.''

But Isacson acknowledged that the total assistance, while larger than
anticipated, still does not match the large sums of military aid sent to
Central America in the 1980s when guerrilla wars raged. And the aid has
shifted, Isacson said, from Central America to countries involved in the
anti-narcotics war, such as Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Mexico.

According to the report, 305 Mexican soldiers attended the U.S. Army's
School of the Americas in 1997. The school, formerly based in the Panama
Canal Zone, developed notoriety in the 1980s after several of its officer
graduates were later accused of human rights abuses. Defense Department
officials say the school's curriculum now includes courses on democracy and
the safeguarding of human rights.

Although details about the extent of the U.S. military program in Latin
America are not widely known, they are not secret.

Details obscure

But Olson and Isacson insist the details are difficult to obtain because
military assistance comes from numerous sources in the U.S. government,
especially from different units and divisions within the Defense
Department. ``There are three dozen programs, agencies and spigots,''
Isacson said. ``It is difficult to get the big picture.''

The report, funded in part by the Ford Foundation, is an attempt to put
that picture together. Olson said congressional staffers and administration
officials, including those in the Department of Defense, assisted the
researchers.

That information was hard to obtain was not ``nefarious,'' Olson said, but
stemmed instead from the numerous laws and agencies involved in military
aid and because the defense budget is so huge that details get lost in it.

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)