MEXICAN CONSUL RESPONDS TO REESE

by Martin Torres, Special to the Sentinel

From the very first sentence of a recent column about
Mexico's certification on drugfighting cooperation by
President Clinton, Charley Reese advanced a conclusion from
a false premise: If the U.S. government had conducted World
War II as it is conducting the war on drugs, Americans
would be speaking German and Japanese.

Based upon value judgments, Reese also described
Clinton's decision to grant full certification to Mexico as
"absurd." Then he stated another value judgment as a fact:
Corruption in Mexico "is as common as tortillas."

In fairness to Mexico, I would like to provide the
following facts for the Sentinel's readers.

During 1996, Mexico seized 1,006 tons of marijuana, an
increase of more than 16 percent from the year before;
seizures of cocaine totaled 23,571 kilograms, a 6.3 percent
increase from that seized in 1995; lawenforcement agencies
in Mexico captured 383 kilograms of heroin, an almost 90
percent increase from 1995; our government seized 3,948
firearms used by criminals either for drug trafficking or
in the smuggling and illegal use of arms, a 25 percent
increase from arms seizures in 1995.

Mexico has the mosteffective croperadication program
in the world, an effort that contributes substantially to a
reduction in the supply of illegal drugs arriving into the
United States. In 1996, my country destroyed 56,242 acres
of marijuana (4.5 percent more than in 1995) and about
37,065 acres of opium poppy; last year, Mexican authorities
arrested and charged 11,245 people with crimes against
public health; 28 of those individuals arrested are
considered top drug lords. And, yes, indeed, as Reese
states, Mexico's former drug czar was removed from his post
and arrested on charges of being linked to drug traffickers
as soon as the wrongdoing was discovered.

All of this is clear proof of my country's full
commitment to combatting the cancer of drugtrafficking and
to the rule of law.

Reese declared cooperation as nonexistent between our
two countries. In fact, international cooperation is one of
the guiding principles in Mexico's Constitution for the
conduct of its foreign affairs. This principle especially
applies in the case of the fight against drug trafficking
because the problem is global. We cooperate with the U.S.
government as well as with many other governments in the
world because this is a struggle that no one can pursue
alone. But first and foremost, we fight drugs not to get
certification from anybody but because it is in our own
national interest to fight them. In so doing, we abide by
other sacred principles, with sovereignty the most
important of all.

The denial of permission for the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration agents to carry firearms in Mexico is not
new: Their activities in my country are fully regulated
because they are there to cooperate technically in a
mutual effort, not under an extraterritorial police
capacity. Sovereignty and other principles impose limits to
what others would like to understand as "full" cooperation.
Finally, more than 100 Mexican federal agents and army
personnel have been killed in narcoticrelated, violent
deaths in the past two years. Their loved ones would deeply
resent Reese's comments about the cheap price in lives he
believes that Mexico has paid fighting drug trafficking.