MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS FIND MIDWEST MARKETS

Trouble: BigCity Woes Flow To Heartland.

CHEYENNE, Wyo. Here in the land of wide open spaces and clean living, as
well as in other communities across the midsection of America, Mexican drug
cartels are opening new and lucrative markets for contraband brought north
past the Rio Grande.

Eager to create ambitious distribution points, the cartels are successfully
targeting communities like Cheyenne and Casper in Wyoming and other
cities in Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa and are bringing with them the drugs
that long have plagued larger urban centers across the country.

Some years back, Los Angeles gangs brought driveby shootings and drug
dealing to the American heartland. But ``our greatest problem today is
illegal aliens and drugs,'' said Tom Pagel, director of the state
Department of Criminal Investigation in Cheyenne. ``The vast majority of
this is being transported up from Mexico, and we're getting our butts
kicked over it.''

Smuggling vast quantities of methamphetamines and hustling their standard
cocaine shipments, the Mexican drug criminals are aggressively trying to
outmarket the old Colombia cartels they have replaced.

In October, the U.S. government reported that more than 40 percent of the
illegal immigrants who were deported to Mexico last year had first been
convicted of drug charges in U.S. courts. Those numbers fit an overall
pattern of an increase in crimes committed by illegal immigrants.

The offenses are often occurring in cities and towns where, in the past,
the worst crime was likely to be transporting stolen cattle. The situation
has fueled a sharp increase in teenage narcotics use, and the courts and
drug treatment centers are seeing more kids more strung out than ever before.

Kathleen Sloan, an antidrug treatment specialist in Cheyenne, is surprised
at the number of kids and how young they are, some just 14 who pass
through her doors these days.

``It began about two years ago,'' she said. ``What was really noticeable
was that it wasn't experimental drug use any more. In the last eight months
it's gotten to where it seems out of control.''

The upsurge in drugs also has prompted a keen awareness in places like
Cheyenne that law enforcement must act decisively to reverse the trend.
Already, police here are taking Spanishlanguage training, and federal
prosecutors have recently put away a Mexican national working as a major
drug ``primo'' in Wyoming.

In Washington, officials have been saying for some months that the center
of America is no longer an outpost garrisoned off from the drug menace.
They warn that as long as there is a demand, even in places as small and
distant as Cheyenne, there someday will come a supplier.

White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey said recently, ``Colorado, Utah and
Wyoming, the Rocky Mountain heartland of America, are increasingly becoming
populated with Mexican drug trafficking organizations and violent gangs
using this major transportation crossroads as a transshipment center.''

Federal drug enforcement officials say Interstate 25 is a historic
smuggling route north out of El Paso, Texas, and that Interstates 70 and
80, the nation's main eastwest corridors, are increasingly becoming drug
pipelines.

Judge Carol Egly of Des Moines, Iowa, has noticed in the past four years an
increase in the number of drug users.

``We're getting many that are totally whacked out and crazy,'' she said.

She also has seen a growing number of Mexican nationals appearing on
drugpushing charges in her courtroom, unable to speak English or
understand the charges against them. And yet, she said, they realize that
even if they go to prison and then are deported to Mexico, it will not keep
them from returning.

``Why Des Moines? Why Iowa?'' Egly asks herself. ``I still don't know the
answer.''