MEXICO'S DRUGWAR ALLY
CIA Trains Army and an Elite Intelligence Unit

MEXICO CITYHoping to build a new bulwark against the flow of illegal
drugs from Latin America, the United States is providing the Mexican
military with extensive covert intelligence support and training hundreds
of its officers to help shape a network of antidrug troops around the
country, American and Mexican officials say.

The officials say the assistance has included training, equipment and
advice from the Central Intelligence Agency to establish an elite army
intelligence unit that has quietly moved to the forefront of Mexico's
antidrug effort, sometimes ahead of a new civilian police force that the
United States is also pledged to support.

The effort has proceeded despite growing U.S. concern that it may lead to
more serious problems of corruption and human rights in one of Mexico's
most respected Institutions, American officials say. In fact, a new U.S.
intelligence analysis of the military's drug testing, will cite evidence
of extensive penetration of the officers corps, two people who have seen
draft versions of the assessment said.

Clinton administration officials have described the U.S. aid as a stopgap.
Echoing the Mexican president, Ernesto Zedillo, they insist that the
military's lawenforcement actions will be limited and temporary, helping
to disrupt the country's thriving drug trade. Only until its badly
corrupted federal police forces can be overhauled.

But according to many officials, the Pentagon and the CIA have pressed
their help partly out of their need to find new tasks after the Cold War.
They hope to use the aid to expand their roles in the antidrug campaign in
Mexico and to improve their relationships with a secretive, nationalistic
neighboring army that has often looked at them with suspicion, the
officials said.

"They didn't have anybody to play with on the Mexican end of the drug
issue, so they went for the military," said a former senior official who
was involved in U.S. policy in Mexico, referring to the Defense Department
and CIA. "They knew the risks, but they thought they could control the
situation."

Some of those risks have resounded in recent news reports: the jailing of
army generals on charges of protecting major drug traffickers; allegations
that military officers have been linked to the torture and disappearance of
criminal suspects, and failures of due process and proper legal procedure
by soldiers stepping in for the police.

Mr. Zedillo, who took office Dec. 1, 1994, has called drug trafficking one
of Mexico's most serious problems of national security. He first brought
army commanders into the redesign of the governrnent's drugcontrol
strategy. Then he authorized them to work with American officials in an
ultimately abortive effort to deploy its aging F5 fighters to chase drug
jets. Finally, he began allowing military officers to replace federal
police agents in several border cities plagued by smugglers.

In October 1995, when Williarn Perrymade the first official visit to Mexico
in memory by an U.S. secretary of defense, antidrug aid was at the center
of several cooperative ventures he proposed to Mexican military officials,
American and Mexican military aides said.

"You were looking for general ways to engage, military to military," a
Pentagon aide said. Within months, a first group Mexican Army officers were
training in antidrug operations at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Of some Mexican 3,000 soldiers who are expected to have passed through
Defense Department training courses by next fall, 328 young offficers will
have completed special 12 and 13weekprograms intended to create a corps
of antidrug specialists. Those trainers are being sent in turn to train
airmobile special forces units now stationed at the headquarters of the 12
regions and 40 zones that make up Mexico's military geography.

Defense Department officials said the antidrug curriculum of the units,
called AirMobile Special Forces Groups, ranged from airassault operations
and military policing to human rights. The Pentagon has also given
Mexico73 aging UHlH helicopters to transport those troops.

The helicopters may be used only for antidrug operations. But Mexican and
American military officials said there was nothing to stop &e transfer of
U.S.trained arrny officers to similar special forces units that might be
deployed against leftist insurgents in southern states like Guerrero and
Chiapas.

American officials said that what is perhaps the most significant U.S.
support for the Mexican rnilitary's antidrug efforts is probably the least
visible. It comes, they said, in the training, equipping and operational
support of CIA officers for a special force of the army intelligence
section called the Center for AntiNarcotics Investigations.

The unit, comprising 90 carefully chosen young officers, began to come
together about three years ago, officials said. Like the civilian
intelligence groups the CIA works with in Mexico, the military anti drug
force is not supposed to be an "action" unit like the group trained by the
agency in the 1980s. But it does appear to sometimes take the lead in raids
as well as surveillance actions.

Several American officials compared the program to the CIA's work in
Colombia, where the agency has been credited with critical help in the
capture of major drug traffickers. A key difference, they noted, has been
Mexico's extreme sensitivity to anything involving the CIA.

Reviews of the unit, which is known by its initials in Spanish as the Cian,
have been mixed. Officials said some Mexican prosecutors have complained
that the unit's officials have demonstrated spotty notions of the law, at
times handing capfured suspects over to the civilian authorities without
ever gathering evidence to hold them.

American officials said questions had been raised about the unit's
integrity after two of its agents were dismissed this year for what an
official described as "unprofessional conduct."

Some have also wondered about its independence from both Mexican civilians
and American intelligence officers.