A MISUNDERSTANDING IN THE U.S.MEXICAN DRUG WAR By Tim Golden; New
York Times Service Copyright (c) 1997, International Herald Tribune

When U.S. officials learned recently that a suspected
Mexican drug trafficker had managed to hold onto tens of
millions of dollars that had been ordered frozen in a
moneylaundering investigation, they wasted no time
denouncing what they saw as new evidence of corruption
south of the border. Less than a month later, however, the
evidence that Mexican investigators tipped off the suspect
is evaporating almost as quickly as his millions had
supposedly disappeared.

Huge sums of money may well have moved in and out of
the accounts, but some officials in both countries now
acknowledge that what most clearly went awry was the
communication between Washington and Mexico City.

Initially, the deputy treasury secretary, Lawrence
Summers, assured Congress that the Clinton administration
had delivered a ''strong protest'' to the government of
President Ernesto Zedillo. Justice Department officials
said they, too, had confronted the Mexicans over the
affair, demanding that the incident be investigated fully.

Mexican officials have insisted from the start that the
uproar over the moneylaundering case was a
misunderstanding on the part of the United States.

In interviews over the last week, the Mexican officials
provided some evidence suggesting that if the
drugtrafficking suspect, Rigoberto Gaxiola Medina, got
wind of the plan to seize his money, it happened after
Mexican authorities moved against his bank accounts.
According to Mexican officials, money did not flow out of
Mr. Gaxiola's accounts in the days after the Mexican
government moved to freeze them. Instead, more than $15
million was deposited.

''We can see that there was no flight of money,'' said
a senior finance official in the Mexican government, who
spoke on the condition that he not be identified. ''There
was more money in the accounts when they were seized than
there was when we presented the complaint to seize them.''

Clinton administration officials said they originally
concluded that Mr. Gaxiola had probably been tipped off to
the money laundering investigation because officials of the
Mexican Finance Ministry had notified the Mexican Treasury
Department on Jan. 8 that they were filing a seizure order
that cited 15 of Mr. Gaxiola's accounts and involved more
than $183 million

According to two confidential chronologies of the
affair produced by U.S. officials, agents of the Mexican
National Institute for Combating Drugs did not act on the
order until Jan. 20. Moreover, U.S. officials noted, the
Mexican official in charge of confiscating the money,
Colonel Jose Felix Name, the institute's chief of
investigations, was himself charged with allowing one of
Mexico's most important alleged money launderers to escape.
When the Mexican authorities reported back to the U.S.
Customs Service on the Gaxiola case, they said first that
the accounts in question had been ''depleted,'' and then
that only about $16.7 million had been seized

In later interviews, Mexican officials said that the
Americans had got it wrong from the start. The seizure
order was for $183 million, the officials said, because
that was all the money that Mr. Gaxiola was suspected of
having laundered, the total he had deposited in all of the
accounts over 30 months. The $183 million figure took no
account of the frequent withdrawals, they said.

The episode is unlikely to change any minds in the
United States about the depth of corruption in Mexican law
enforcement. But it has opened a small window on the
Clinton administration's recent struggle to be tougher with
Mexico on Capitol Hill while remaining conciliatory with
the Mexican government on its own turf.

''We can't just beat them up every time something like
this comes to light, '' a U.S. official involved in the
case said of his Mexican counterparts. ''Stuff like this
happens all the time. We still have to work with these
people.''