Source: Houston Chronicle, page 22A, world news section
(http://www.chron.com/cgibin/auth/story/content/chronicle/
world/97/09/05/mexicodrugs.20.html)
Contact: viewpoints@chron.com

Drug smugglers learned radar in U.S., paper says

By ANDREW DOWNIE, Copyright 1997 Special to the Chronicle

MEXICO CITY Eighteen Mexican pilots caught redhanded
smuggling nearly 165 pounds of cocaine in a governmentowned
plane were trained in the United States, a leading newspaper here
said Thursday.

The pilots were trained in the United States to read
sophisticated radar used to track planes bringing drug shipments
into Mexico from South and Central America, the Reforma newspaper
said.

The training was part of a program under which the U.S.
government gave its Mexican counterpart $8 million to help in
antidrug efforts, the newspaper added.

A spokesman for the Mexican attorney general's office said the
institution, under whose auspices the men worked, could not shed
any light on the reports, and a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman did not
return telephone calls Thursday.

The 18 pilots were arrested Monday at the capital's airport
getting off a plane from Chiapas state, the attorney general's
office said in a statement released Tuesday.

The men were returning from a tour of duty in the southern state
when an anonymous caller tipped off officials about the presence
of drugs on the aircraft, according to reports.

Agents searched the plane, a GIGrumman, and found 164.5 pounds
of cocaine on board, the onepage statement added. But while the
statement named the agents and described the plane they were
traveling in, it did not say the agents had been using a
governmentowned aircraft.

Only on Wednesday did a senior justice official acknowledge that
the plane belonged to the attorney general's office.

A spokesperson for the office said the information was not
omitted deliberately. "We thought it was understood," said the
spokesperson, who asked not to be identified.

The arrest of the pilots comes just days after Attorney General
Jorgé Madrazo Cuellar declared there was "not one iota of
corruption" at the highest levels of his office.

Earlier this year, Mexico's drug czar was arrested after it was
discovered he was taking money, cars, property and other goodies
from the country's most powerful drug cartel.

This year alone, 161 agents and detectives with the attorney
general's office have been charged with crimes, most of them
bribery or drugrelated. Another 39 are under investigation.

Andrew Downie is a freelance journalist based in Mexico City.