U.S. MILITARY AID TO MEXICO IS EXTENSIVE, REPORT SHOWS

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. 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 nongovernment groups reported yesterday.

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.

Mexico ranked third 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. military assistance totaled at least
$260 million in 1997, said Adam Isacson of the Center for International
Policy, co-author of the report.

Isacson and Joy Olson, the report's other author and director of 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 stripped the Mexicans of huge swaths of
their territory.

The rancor over American intervention is still so great that although
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, 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, although larger than
expected, still does not match the large sums of military aid sent to
Central America in the 1980s, when guerrilla wars raged. 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.

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

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)