Source: Houston Chronicle, page 1D
(http://www.chron.com/cgibin/auth/story/content/
chronicle/metropolitan/97/08/24/drugs.20.html)
Contact: viewpoints@chron.com

Partnership is the best weapon, drug czar says

By THADDEUS HERRICK, Houston Chronicle San Antonio Bureau

LAREDO The 1993 Freightliner tractortrailer heading north
from here last month looked no different than most of the
commercial trucks that ply Interstate 35 from the Mexican border
to the northern reaches of Minnesota.

Not, that is, until authorities at a Border Patrol checkpoint
north of town took a look at the 38 cardboard boxes inside. They
found 3,300 pounds of cocaine worth $106 million and proclaimed
it the second largest bust of its kind in the history of this
NAFTA boomtown.

Locals cheered. But to many the news only emphasized the ease
with which narcotics are flowing into the United States as the
country opens its borders to free trade.

Last year, 2.8 million trucks crossed the Mexican border into the
United States. Only 900,000 were inspected. In all, the U.S.
Customs Service had the manpower to check only about 5 percent of
all vehicles coming across the nation's 2,000mile international
boundary.

"You can put anything in the back of your car, and there's a 95
percent chance it won't be inspected," said Travis Kuykendall, a
former head of Drug Enforcement Administration operations in El
Paso and now an administrator of the West Texas High Intensity
Drug Trafficking Area, which distributes federal money to anti
narcotics agencies.

It is that armsintheair assessment from the front lines that
the nation's drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, is almost certain
to hear when he visits El Paso Monday and Laredo Tuesday as part
of a weeklong visit to the U.SMexico border.

With its 890 miles of international boundary, Texas may present
McCaffrey with his greatest challenge in the war on drugs. El
Paso and neighboring Juarez, Mexico, which make up the most
heavily populated metropolitan area on any international border
in the world, has for almost a decade been the preferred corridor
of the socalled Mexican federation, which works with Colombian
traffickers to help satisfy America's $49billionayear appetite
for illegal drugs.

U.S. officials got a glimpse of that route this month, when they
broke up three drug cells allegedly run by Amado Carrillo
Fuentes' Juarez cartel. The bust led from warehouses in El Paso
where cocaine was stored to the affluent New York suburbs.

Downriver on the Rio Grande, Mexican traffickers are muscling
aside Maverick County ranchers, in some cases issuing threats,
ransacking property and tearing down fences.

Now some federal agents believe that South Texas will soon
eclipse El Paso in smuggling activity. The reason is twofold.
Laredo handles the bulk of trade with Mexico, making it arguably
a better transshipment point than El Paso. And Carrillo, who
favored the El Paso corridor, with its access to Interstates 10
and 25, died last month.

Whatever unfolds, McCaffrey has vowed to respond to the
marijuana, cocaine and heroin pouring into Texas with technology,
manpower and a closer working relationship with Mexican
authorities. Shared intelligence, he said in an interview last
week, is the best way to thwart smugglers.

"Most of us believe this can't be done unilaterally," McCaffrey
said. "We can't do it unless we have a partnership."

The trouble may be finding Mexican authorities who aren't
corrupt. Indeed, Mexico made a near mockery of its antinarcotics
efforts this year when its drug czar, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez
Rebollo, was linked to Carrillo, Mexico's most powerful drug
trafficker, who headed the Juarez cartel before his death during
plastic surgery.

Though a successor to Carrillo is not yet apparent, U.S.
officials say Juarez traffickers continue to operate with
impunity. Such was the case under Carrillo, when DEA
informants and many more suspected of being informants were
routinely found dead. Among those murdered were a former Mexican
police commander and his two sons, whose bodies were dumped at a
crossing in 1994.

"As long as Mexico allows the world's most significant
traffickers to conduct their business, nothing can really
change," said Phil Jordan, a former DEA agent and onetime head
of the El Paso Intelligence center, a worldwide drug monitoring
post.

Even a senior official under McCaffrey at the White House Office
of National Drug Control Policy acknowledged that "any DEA agent
will tell you, `Look, there's just not a lot of people we can
trust over there.' "

But corruption also plagues the U.S. side. The problem was
underscored two years ago in El Paso when two Customs inspectors
tried to shake down an informer posing as a drug smuggler, one of
them demanding more than $1 million to look the other way when
vehicles hauling cocaine crossed from Juarez.

At the other end of the Texas border, in Zapata County, most of
the county's leaders were convicted or pleaded guilty in federal
court of charges to aiding the international drug trade.

"We'd be crazy not to acknowledge there are billions of dollars
involved this, and that the capability to corrupt on both sides
of the border is enormous," said McCaffrey. "The question is not
whether corruption exists, but what we can do about it."

McCaffrey said that a detailed antidrug strategy drawn up with
Mexico includes the creation of three reliable binational
counternarcotics task forces on the border. But even as the drug
czar touted this plan, he was busy downplaying a Texas lawmaker's
comments that Mexican traffickers are paying former U.S. soldiers
for their knowhow.

Silvestre Reyes, an El Paso congressman who served as Border
Patrol chief there earlier, said former American
counterintelligence soldiers and Green Berets are being paid
handsomely to subvert U.S. antidrug operations.

McCaffrey said such a scenario concerns him. But he said reports
on the matter from the DEA, FBI, Border Patrol, CIA and Defense
Intelligence Agency have yielded nothing.

"The bottom line is that, categorically, I've never heard of
anything like that." said McCaffrey. "I think if we had gringos
walking around doing this I would have heard about it."

Still, McCaffrey proposed more federal agents along the entire
border in addition to fencing, lowlight television equipment and
other surveillance tools. Traffickers, he said, are operating
with technology that often gives them the edge in the war on
drugs.

"We have got to have the ability to create law and order and
respect for human rights on the border," McCaffrey said.

That has long been lacking in many forsaken communities between
Brownsville and San Diego, Calif. But these days the problem
seems particularly acute.

Since Carrillo died in a Mexico City hospital July 24, at least
18 people have been murdered in Juarez. Near Eagle Pass, where a
Border Patrol agent was shot and killed by traffickers early last
year, skittish ranchers on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande refuse
to leave their homes without weapons.

"You take a gun with you to go water a horse," said Sandra Wipff,
the wife of rancher Karl Wipff. "It's that bad."

And in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, three men were killed
Thursday in a gunbattle that U.S. officials described as a fight
for the turf of Juan Garcia Abrego, a convicted drug trafficker
and former head of the gulf cartel.

Controlling the lawlessness spawned by the drug trade is a
daunting problem. McCaffrey himself has been working on the Eagle
Pass problem for more than a year, bolstering the federal
presence, but ranchers say they are no better off.

Nor has the controversial use of the military for reconnaissance
along the border currently suspended after a mixup led
Marines to shoot and kill a U.S. citizen in Redford provided a
solution.

U.S. officials concede they could address the drug problem more
efficiently under a centralized system, one that doesn't rely on
various agencies. But few predict consolidation or the creation
of a new antidrug agency.

About all that U.S. officials along the border predict is more
international traffic, which they see as more drugs being waved
through unknowingly by understaffed U.S. inspectors up and down
the border.

"This is a nightmare," said Kuykendall. "It's overwhelming It's
almost unresolvable."