Control of Mexican border inadequate, drug czar says
U.S. official begins tour, seeks overhaul

By Douglas Holt / The Dallas Morning News

EL PASO To illustrate what he thinks is wrong with
the way the United States patrols its border with
Mexico, U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey points to
tractortrailer trucks.

About 3.5 million big rigs enter the United States
from Mexico yearly, and authorities think they are a
prime conveyance for drug traffickers. The U.S.
Customs Service inspected 911,000 of them last year.

But out of those hundreds of thousands of trucks,
only 56 were found to contain illegal drugs.

Slapping a table sharply, Mr. McCaffrey, a retired
fourstar Army general and combat veteran of the
Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, said, "That tells me
we've got the wrong system."

Accompanied by more than 40 top officials from
dozens of federal agencies, Mr. McCaffrey began a
sixday border tour Sunday.

The goal of the trip is to gather information for
what aides describe as a major proposal to
reorganize U.S. antidrug efforts on the border, the
entry point of an estimated 50 percent to 70 percent
of illegal drugs in a $49 billionayear black
market.

"We told the president we're going to pull together
a new concept to organize the federal effort on the
Southwest border," Mr. McCaffrey, 54, told The
Dallas Morning News. "Nobody would argue the way
we're doing it makes sense."

The new plan to fight drug trafficking, which will
be completed this fall, is expected to advocate an
end to armed military troops operating on the
border. The Pentagon temporarily shut down that
mission after a U.S. Marine shot a Redford, Texas,
teenager to death.

The plan probably will reflect Mr. McCaffrey's
belief in the need for a greatly expanded Border
Patrol perhaps tripling in size to 20,000 agents
along with greater use of hightech gizmos such as
Xray machines for semitrucks. Eight of the
devices, originally developed for nuclear arms
control needs, have been deployed at international
bridges.

In addition, Mr. McCaffrey is using the trip to
underscore what he argues is a need for greater
cooperation between the United States and Mexico in
the drug war.

He has maintained that stance despite the arrest
earlier this year of General Jesus Gutierrez
Rebollo, Mexico's former top drug fighter, who is
accused of aiding the country's biggest drug
trafficker at the time.

On Sunday, Mr. McCaffrey and his group made one of
their first stops on the border tour at the El Paso
Intelligence Center, a clearinghouse for
drugtrafficking information worldwide.

Mr. McCaffrey's schedule also includes stops across
the border in Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana, where he
plans to deliver prepared statements in Spanish.

In Juarez, six people were gunned down in a
restaurant earlier this month, and four bodies
showing signs of torture turned up near the U.S.
border Saturday.

Observers say the killings appear to indicate a
power struggle among the followers and rivals of
Amado Carrillo Fuentes, a Mexican drug lord who died
in July.

"I think the criminal organizations are devouring
themselves over succession to the death of Amado
Carrillo Fuentes and the Gulf cartel's partial
destruction," Mr. McCaffrey said.

Twelve law enforcement officials were gunned down
last year in Tijuana, and most of the city's 200
killings are blamed on warring drug traffickers.

"We're determined to demonstrate that we are not
going to back off confronting drug criminals who
prey on the population of both sides of the border,"
Mr. McCaffrey said about the stops on his border
tour.

On a countrytocountry basis, Mr. McCaffrey said,
the United States has no choice but to work with
Mexican authorities to fight drugs. He urged
improved U.S. training, technology transfers and
intelligencesharing with Mexican law enforcement.

"Mexico is our secondbiggest trading partner
today," he said. "If Mexico doesn't make it, if they
go down the tubes, then we ought to assume we're
going to have 20 million Mexicans in the United
States."

Two former Drug Enforcement Administration officials
said they agree that cooperation with Mexico is key
to pursuing major traffickers, but they urged
caution.

Mexico should be required to build a professional
law enforcement system and an "authentic judiciary"
before it gets more technological help, said Donald
Ferrarone, former special agent in charge of the
DEA's Houston office, which oversees the Texas
border.

"The last thing you want to do is, for example, give
them advanced electronic surveillance capabilities,"
he said.

In the last 20 years, U.S. officials have watched
with dismay as technology shared with Mexican police
is handed over by corrupt officials to traffickers,
he said.

Phil Jordan, a former head of the DEA's El Paso
Intelligence Center, said Mexico too often has
failed to fulfill promises, such as to extradite
drug suspects.

"In many instances in my career, their promises have
been empty," Mr. Jordan said. "Cooperation should be
a twoway street."

Despite unprecedented federal antidrug spending
from $1.5 billion in 1981 to $15 billion this year
the government has little evidence that it has
succeeded in making illegal drugs scarcer on
American streets.

For example, the purity of cocaine available in the
United States has remained stable since 1988, and
its price fell from 1993 to 1995. Meanwhile, the use
of illicit drugs among eighthgraders has risen 150
percent in the last five years, according to the
Office of National Drug Control Policy, which Mr.
McCaffrey directs.

Although the revised Southwest border plan is a work
in progress, Mr. McCaffrey said a clear message
emerged from a federal antidrug meeting last year
in El Paso that the drug war is fragmented,
uncoordinated and inefficient.

At international bridges, for example, he said, "nobody is in
charge." Duties are split among customs, the Immigration and
Naturalization Service and other agencies that use separate
intelligencegathering and communications systems.

And to improve drug seizure rates from semitrucks,
Mr. McCaffrey said, customs agents should have
better intelligence and more hightech tools.

Although five federal departments share major
responsibility for the 2,000mile Mexican border,
only the Defense Department has a unit that looks at
the frontier as a whole.

To further complicate matters, Mr. McCaffrey said,
the federal agencies on the border maintain distinct
boundaries that do not correspond to other
agencies'.

In a jarring sidelight to a series of cordial
briefings, U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, a former El
Paso Border Patrol sector chief, said Sunday that he
was not happy to have been excluded from closeddoor
briefings with Mr. McCaffrey.

A spokesman for Mr. McCaffrey said that there had
been a misunderstanding and that no elected
officials had been included in the meetings.

© 1997 The Dallas Morning News